Friends, here is my piece on the partition of India and Pakistan in which I look at what happened to the Sikh psyche since then and suggest a radical retelling of our stories because though the trauma still haunts us …
‘… All we have for one generation are wisps of memory and for the next, family stories buried in silences. It is the third generation now which is trying to engage with Partition. Our generation has heard these stories in whispers and created many online projects where we are turning family histories into oral histories. Yet, pick up any newspaper, recollect the history of riots and genocides in independent India, and we will realise that we are still caught up in the same mess of communalism that created Partition.’
The piece appears in the recent issue of Muse India excellently curated by Charanjeet Kaur. Thank you! Thank you Asiimwe Deborah GKashugi, Ajay Bhardwaj, Prof Alok Bhalla for allowing me to use your quotes. Please read …
Friends, here is a piece on the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship in which I make an argument for more such Fellowships. Hope the article can initiate discussion and action towards more Residencies on the Indian Ocean rim and mainland. Thank you Mr Jean-Baptiste Joly and The Hindu.
Reead here …
A short candid film by Lakshmi and me on our interaction with ‘A Boatman in Benaras’ who holds forth on birth, life and death. Hope you like viewing it. (7 minutes).
Please see here …
The Solitude Atlas is the current publication project of Akademie Schloss Solitude, which will be published in 2015 on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. The 143 participating authors, all former or current fellows at the Akademie since 1990, were invited to hand in a subjective text about the cities they are living in. I extended the definition a bit to etch in words a connection between the town I was born in and Germany – a realization which hit me strongly in the recent days.
A big thanks to Srikant Kuanar who allowed me the use of his gorgeous panoramic picture of the Rourkela Steel Plant. This piece posits a historical way of looking at identities that goes beyond the narrow ways in which we are sometimes forced to define them in recent days.
See here …
Happy, humbled, and proud to announce the publication of an anthology on different kinds of writing around young boys – ‘Being Boys’ by Tulika Books. The idea of the collection is to overturn popular stereotypes about boys – the usual dominant male image that is enforced from all sides as they grow up, and pressures conformity. Thank you Deeya Nayar.
Happy because given all the gender related changes our society is experiencing and the horror of atrocities against women, I feel there is a crying need to talk about boys, to shape narratives around how boys grow up, could grow up. Humbled because the other authors are really first class and I wonder how I am there. Proud that my story ‘Rinku’s Hair’ is part of the anthology.
Bless, buy, read more here …
India’s drive to drum up support for ancient science has attracted a lot of international support: England, Germany, Czech Republic.
Illustration by Lakshmi Karunakaran, please read here …
Sumana Roy and Manjiri Indurkar remain kind to me on their satire and humour website Antiserious. They published a new piece on something that affects most of us while we take care of the piles and piles of documents in bureaucratic India.
Read on …
When I was asked to review V S Naipaul’s seminal book An Area of Darkness, on the occasion of 50 years of its being banned, I approached the text with a mixture of feelings: respect for the craft of the writer but also a bit of apprehension about how he has talked about India in his articles, books, etc. I made sure I read him closely and question my own assumptions about Naipaul’s India. Unfortunately, he did not give me a chance to vindicate himself. It is sad, but it must be said that through his career Naipaul has played to a western gallery, a stereotype.
‘Thank you for your supercilious attitude, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. We could really have done without your writing. Yet, while I was reading the book on a plane, a foreigner in the seat next to mine quickly took down the name of the book and told me she would read it. It is, after all, by a Nobel laureate. ’
Read full review on the book that is freely available now. …
Friends, Sumana Roy often bullies me into going to places in my writing where I have never been before. Thank you Sumana. So, on her prompt. here is a play without dialogs – a pantomime. It is my first public attempt at writing for theatre.
The piece is a reaction to the Swachh Bharat campaign. The real issues of garbage removal and sanitation are much deeper and lie in structural amendments to public systems, not in photo opportunities. For me the Swachh Bharat campaign ends – at my doorstep.
Please read …
Just before the recent floods in Kashmir I reviewed Shahnaz Bashir’s ‘The Half Mother’ a novel on forced disappearances in The Hindu Literary Review. It is a harrowing story set in Kashmir and structured on the famous Aristotelian five acts.
More here …