Oftentimes the hard thing about being a writer or pursuing any art is that creations can languish for years in your various storage devices and the beauty is that they can suddenly be discovered by great editors. This is what happened with this travel piece. Thank you to Sumana Roy and Aruni Kashyap for sniffing this out and giving it a home it truly deserves – the Northeast Review. This piece is from 2005 when I had quit my job to travel in the North East to get a sense of what was this place which was often in the news but no one really knew about. This is a piece on one of the most dangerous roads anywhere in the world, it is a bit long.
‘A friend said, “Go to a far corner. Tawang.” I had liked the sound of the place. Any travel is about seeing a place with our own eyes but often we let our ears shape our itinerary.’
More here …
Tags: Arunachal Pradesh, Asssam, Bomdila, Guwahati, North East, Tawang, Tezpur
My joint review of the two translations of perhaps one of the most censored Urdu text of the previous century – Angarey. In their time, the writers had refused to be cowed down by the ban and had created the Progressive Writers Association, one of the post influential literary associations ever in history from our sub-continent.
So few people have read the original text that one would expect the publishers and translators to collaborate to create a book which will give us an insight into the politics of the times. Alas, that is not the case: ‘when put together the two versions do not multiply the original text but subtract from it’.
Do read the review, even the translations, but do not miss the sub-text: how politics of publishing robs the reader of the spirit of the original. Read here …
Tags: Angaaray, Angarey, Khalid Alvi, Penguin, Rupa, Snehal Shingavi, Vibha S. Chauhan