A short review by Manjula Narayan in the Hindustan Times today (the third entry on the page):
‘Some of the scenes, especially those that deal with the depravity of school boys and their savagery are at once shocking and absorbing. Roll of Honour places much of its action in a particularly bloody time in the nation’s recent history – one that’s been largely ignored in Indian English fiction until now. This novel is doubly powerful as a result.’
For more read.
Tags: 1984, military school, Mrs. Gandhi assasination, Operation Bluestar, riots, sodomy
I have been a technical writer for 13 years. The technical writing life has helped support my life as a fiction writer. An interview, read on.
Tags: 1984, military school, Mrs. Gandhi assasination, Operation Bluestar, riots, sodomy
The Businwssworld interview. The first answer covers something I missed in the reading and discussion on Friday, Sept 21, 2012 at IIC Annexe, New Delhi. Read on.
Tags: 1984, military school, Mrs. Gandhi assasination, Operation Bluestar, riots, sodomy
Sanjitha at Businessworld read the book and decided to carry an extract. Read here.
Tags: 1984, military school, Mrs. Gandhi assasination, Operation Bluestar, riots, sodomy
Promila got the book very quickly and read it and reviewed it. Here is the review. Please read.
Tags: 1984, military school, Mrs. Gandhi assasination, Operation Bluestar, riots, sodomy
Am pleased that JAM the nation’s top Young Adult magazine interviewed me on Roll of Honour. Read on:
Tags: 1984, military school, Mrs. Gandhi assasination, Operation Bluestar, riots, sodomy
Honoured that kafila.org carried an extract from Roll of Honour. Please read here.
Tags: 1984, military school, Mrs. Gandhi assasination, Operation Bluestar, riots, sodomy
Roll of Honour is going to break new ground for English-language fiction from India. It is a combination of YA, cross-over, a bildungsroman and a very disturbing account of adolescence. If I may say so, you have achieved something that I have only seen in Chinese, Japanese and French literature. I am as yet to see it in Indian fiction. You said you wanted to attempt the grittiness to show, and it does. It is very readable and flows well. …
You have created Appu as a trapped teenager, who is confused by his school, the choices he has to make, the social changes etc. For a teenager, the raging hormones are a nightmare. To top it, the horror of the school, witnessing the crumbling of society as you know it and more importantly, the very foundations on which you have been brought up being challenged … the dissonance in what is taught to what is expected of you. … (With this book) you are doing something very original.
Read the full review.
Tags: 1984, military school, Mrs. Gandhi assasination, Operation Bluestar, riots, sodomy
Dear friends, sharing my pleasure on the review of the novel Roll of Honour by Alok Bhalla, Professor at Ambedkar University and English Chair Central Sahitya Academy.
You have written a book which must have been painful to write. It takes more than a certain amount of real courage to write a life-story which is so evidently a confessional and to persuade a reader to carry on reading. It also takes more than a normal amount of novelist skill to stare into into the abyss of the self, and succeed at the end to turn away from the brink with not only your sanity intact but also with the knowledge that now at last you have achieved a kind of peace — signaled by the rather Keatsian line with which the novel ends.
Roll of Honour is also a bold novel, not only about the self, but also about institutions for which people in India have a sentimental regard and rarely ever subjected to a cold critical analyisis.Roll of Honour is, as far as I can judge, a novel which tries to understand all the multiple ways in which social institutions, families and traditions in India create structures in which people can only live either as bullies or as victims (often as both in different circumstances). Indian institutions are dysfunctional.
What saves the novel from being maudlin and sell-indulgent is the structural decision you make to inter-cut recollections with present meditations on how they may have been the cause of present anxieties and discontents and also by your ability to see that your own self’s journey may not after all have been different from that of countless other growing up in a time and a society in which people are rarely ever trained to think about the sufferings and the sorrows of others.
I like the way in which you recognize this at the end by talking quietly about the meeting with an old friend. Or if they ever think about school, family or the army they cast over them a haze of nostalgia. The only vocabulary they have is the one adopted without any thought or personal investment from the scriptures, resulting, of course, in ersatz morals and sentiments which are almost always available to the cynical and the corrupt.
So, let me congratulate you for a fine work which will, I am sure be discussed in the immediate future.
Best wishes,
Tags: anti-Sikh riots, Operation Bluestar, Roll of Honour, school