nilanjana s roy

Month: October 2015

  • How India’s writers are fighting intolerance

    How India’s writers are fighting intolerance

    In the BBC, 13th October 2015: “A month-and-a-half later, the murder of this scholar has set off an unusual movement with little precedent. Writers from across the country are standing up in protest against the Sahitya Akademi, a literary body that represents 22 of India’s languages, and the state. ‘Suppression and violence’ On 12 September, […]

  • Murder, and a revolt in the Akademi

    Murder, and a revolt in the Akademi

    (On the morning of August 30, 2015, the scholar and former Karnataka University vice-chancellor MM Kalburgi was murdered in his home in Dharwad; he had opened the door to his assailants; his family heard gunshots and found him dead. He had received death threats in 2014 and 2015 over comments he had made at a […]

  • Oliver Sacks: The mind’s most faithful explorer

    Oliver Sacks: The mind’s most faithful explorer

    It was no surprise, by the end, that Oliver Sacks was as good at walking his readers through the mysteries of dying as he had been at analysing the many astonishments of living. He died at 82 this week of cancer, after a lifetime of inquiry into the oddities and miracles of the human brain. […]

  • Lost and Found Girls

    Lost and Found Girls

    The Island of Lost Girls Manjula Padmanabhan Hachette, 376 pages The first home is in the flesh; the first place where most humans feel at home is embedded in their mother’s body, slowly growing aware of their own flesh and blood within hers. It follows that the most terrifying displacement, the most savage experience of […]

  • Translations: Ila Arab Mehta, Ismat Chughtai, Arupa Patangia Kalita

    Translations: Ila Arab Mehta, Ismat Chughtai, Arupa Patangia Kalita

    (Translations is now a regular monthly column in the Business Standard, covering works by Indian writers.) Fence, Ila Arab Mehta, Translated from Gujarati by Rita Kothari Zubaan Books Rs 350, 200 pages In March 2003, a brief news item, a few paragraphs long, came out in The Telegraph. “Muslims in Gujarat face blatant discrimination”, the […]