In her essay on ‘The Crafty Feeling’, Zadie Smith describes the craft of writing. It is a love-hate relationship that an author has with her work. A work desultorily begun can become something altogether different once the ‘middle’ stage is reached.
Kalpana Swaminathan is a surgeon writer, and the influence of her profession is evident in the choice of her themes in Venus Crossing: Twelve Stories in Transit.
What a delightful collection of stories—all about women who take lovers, cuckold their husbands, have a great time and mostly, live to tell the tale. Or rather, in this case, have their tale told.
Examination of the rural women of India implicates lot of things the foremost among which is that we are covering an overwhelming majority of women in the country.
The two authors undertook the study with a research grant awarded by the Achuta Menon Foundation and claim that theirs is a ‘disinterested’ (un-biased) perspective.
The book under review seeks to address an issue which has ever remained an area of great concern, how to improve the governance structure of the elementary education system in India.