Tag: Uncategorized
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Murder She Wrote: PD James
“Remember these four things. First, the body must be discovered by an innocent, a child or an unsuspecting citizen. That increases the shock value for the reader, who sees through innocent eyes. Second, the body should appear early, preferably in line one of chapter one, but no later than chapter two. …”
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Speaking Volumes: The History House
The Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh is situated in a quiet lane, away from Dhaka’s background traffic-jam roar, in a graceful two-storied whitewashed bungalow. It is a peaceful setting in which to try to understand history and the horrors of 1971. The museum started only in 1996, with a few hand-curated exhibits. Over time, Mofidul…
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Speaking Volumes: “It was Delhi, you know.”
Mr Faruqi’s love for the city – and for other cultural centres in north India – is as evident as his scholarship. Basant (spring) unites “Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain or Nanak Panthi”; all have a taste for the Basant, its mustard flowers and marigolds, when the whole city is “drenched in yellows, saffrons, ochres”. Nor…
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Book review: The slaughterhouses of the world
Mr Flanagan is no horror tourist; if you take this journey with him, he will guide you through these circles of hell with pity and compassion. His approach is very distinct from the safely distant frisson of shock that accompanies the ritualised viewings of today’s news pictures of dead infants or beheadings, and Mr Flanagan…
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“Novels are life, or they are nothing”: Richard Flanagan
(Published in the Business Standard, October 15; a quick introduction to this year’s Booker winner, Richard Flanagan.) Out of the many stories that Richard Flanagan tells so well about himself and Australia’s past, there’s the unforgettable one about the time he met the Lizard. He was researching The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the…
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Speaking Volumes: Where They Burn Books
Speaking Volumes: Where They Burn Books “You know it’s winter in Delhi when the breeze is scented with the smell of woodsmoke and burning leaves, and when the talk turns, as it does these days, to the question of which books are ripe for burning.”
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Speaking Volumes: Librarians at the barricades
(Published in the Business Standard, September 2014) Keep your Arab Springs and popular uprisings: if you’re going to “vive” any “les revolutions“, please think of the unsung heroism of librarians. This particular group of adults has an undeserved reputation for mildness. But rouse a librarian (or several), and you unleash hell, as Canada discovered some…
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Speaking Volumes: UR Ananthamurthy and the Quiet Majority
(Published in the Business Standard, August 26, 2014) The education of UR Ananthamurthy, the redoubtable Kannada writer who died at the age of 81, was as distinctively Indian as his writings would be. In an interview with All India Radio, he spoke of growing up in Kerekoppa–“Ours was the only home in the forest”—and going…
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Booklove: “Being here” — on Nadine Gordimer’s life
"Her life as a writer had begun with the refusal to look only at what was safe to look at: when she saw Johannesburg, she saw (with greater clarity over the decades) how her country was split into black and white, how the schools were different, how a black child like her might not grow…
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Speaking Volumes: A Perfect Time For Babelfish
"the world might be changing faster than we realise. It is hard to estimate actual language use on the internet – social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, are "deep" sites, hard to search, and Web spiders are not very good at estimating the reach of local-language blog platforms and sites. It seems, though,…
nilanjana s roy 