It was my pleasure to review Kiran Doshi’s novel Jinnah Often Came To Our House for The Hindu. The novel went on to win The Hindu Best Fiction Prize 2016.
Archive for the ‘Other’ Category
Friends, it was lovely to meet Mrs & Mr Kiran Doshi at The Hindu Lit for Life. The charming and gracious couple make one feel absolutely at home. The morning after Kiran Doshi won The Hindu Best Fiction Prize 2016, we have breakfast together. My report.
The Hindu features its speakers at the Lit for Life in different ways as a run up to the program. This time they featured me.
Friends, Mini Anthikad-Chhibber from The Hindu covered the White Swan event last month on Literature and Mental Illness. She quotes my controversial remark:
Amandeep, on the other hand, said there is no such thing as non-fiction, as everything one writes is coloured by what one chooses to highlight and what one ignores. “We should open stereotypes instead of perpetuating them, literature should be used to build bridges rather than exclude.”
Thank you for the event White Swan Foundation for Mental Health, Pavitra Jayaraman, Manoj Das, C K Meena, Dr Ajit Bhide, Subrato Bagchi, Dr Prabha Chandran and others.
Friends, my interview with Kiran Doshi whose wonderful and insightful historical fiction Jinnah Often Came To Our House is short-listed for The Hindu Prize 2016.
Friends, on November 8, 2016, the Indian Prime Minister made 1.3 billion of us citizens of the nation foreigners in our own country. Our high denomination currency notes were declared no longer legal tender. I was to travel to Taipei for a talk and could not get Dollars in the banks.
My quote on Facebook was picked by Your Story and Anil Lulla interviewed me. Please read …
Friends, it is a pleasure that Akademie Schloss Solitude invited me to write for another edition. This time a digital Atlas. The questions were:
Q: Would you say that your (artistic) practice is political?
A: Yes, it is. For me, the unspoken personal is political. I write to give voice to subjects our society likes to brush under the carpet – give voice to the marginalized. My intention is to find ways to restore human dignity through language.
Q: If so, how would you describe its political dimension?
A: I believe writing is a space where it is possible to honestly dissect the self and the violence of the society around us. My books are coming-of-age testimonial fiction.
Then they carried an excerpt from my current writing. Please read here …
Friends, over the last decade Punjab has been much maligned over the drugs issue. The issue has become a huge plank for political campaigns, police bullying, addicts being marginalised, and the system collapsing.
Yet, it needed a good doctor to pin-point the issue and suggest a course of treatment which is stupendous in its simplicity. That is exactly what Dr Dharamvira Dv Gandhi is suggesting: change the way we look at drugs, amend the draconian NDPS Act, 1985, to lay out which are ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ drugs, decriminalise the addict.
He is proposing the amendment in the Winter Session of the Parliament, starting November 17. I really hope the Bill goes through. This is a much needed change on our own ‘war of drugs’ and stands to make political parties accountable for their rhetoric.
I understand, given our mindsets, this could cause a furore but let us discuss, debate, make informed choices, instead of staying apathetic and suddenly turning around and blaming the system. The incidence of drugs is a symptom of systemic collapse. We are the system.
Friends, my review of Ranbir Singh Sidhu’s novel ‘Deep Singh Blue’. What struck me immensely about the writing was that it is without crutches, the writer creates and inhabits a world within language alone yet it is deeply rooted in the human experience. Kudos! Thank you Omair Ahmad for the opportunity.
‘DSB is a dark bildungsroman – a coming of age novel – about different types of unbelonging: in cultures, in the community, in the family, in relationships, in place and in time. The protagonist is lonely, immensely lonely, but the novel is not about loneliness or about an emotional or cultural pain. Instead, DSB explores the deep angst of being and a human’s relationship with the world.’