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 …
Tags: antiserious, garbage, sanitation, sewerage, Swachh Bharat, town planning
The Punjabi translation of ‘Roll of Honour’ by Daljit Ami is now available online. It is reaching book shops across Punjab by the weekend and other e-commerce sites by early next week.
The Punjabi title is spelt as ‘Gwah De Fanah Hon Ton Pahilan’. The publisher is Lokgeet Prakashan/Unistar Books.
Please buy. Please gift. Please bless!
Link here …
Tags: 1984, Amandeep Sandhu, anti-Sikh, Daljit Ami, Gwah de Fanah hon to Pehlan, Roll of Honour
Kulpreet Yadav is an ex-Army man. He writes and promotes new talent through his magazine Open Road Review.
He liked Roll of Honour and sought to pursue the genesis of the book to the location in which it is based – Sainik School Kapurthala. Having visited the school, he wrote to me asking why I hadn’t visited the school after passing out from there in 1990. That and Lakshmi’s desire to witness/acknowledge the site led me to school last week.
This interview was done a few days before the visit but talks about how I was already making peace with the idea. Thank you Kulpreet.
Please read …
Tags: 1984, anti-Sikh, pedagogy, public schools, Roll of Honour, Sainik School Kapurthala
In this country, where societies have crumbled, systems have eroded, ideologies have been bartered, I still believe in individuals who have risen above sectarianism to uphold what is the idea of a nation.
Of everything I have heard about Roll of Honour, one of the most precious is this by Nandita Haksar, the human rights lawyer. Though I met her only recently she has been my hero for decades.
Read the piece, one of the finest testimonial account of the 1984 violence. Here …
Tags: 1984, Amandeep Sandhu, anti-Sikh, Nandita Haksar, PUDR, Roll of Honour
Aparna Banerji is based in Jalandhar. When we went there to participate in the Gadri Babeian da Mela, she caught up with Daljit Ami. It was covered the next day in The Tribune. Aparna is a second generation Punjabi. She was born in Jalandhar, speaks the language fluently, and example of what it means to find assimilation.
Please read …
Tags: 1984, Amandeep Sandhu, anti-Sikh, Daljit Ami, Gwah de Fanah hon to Pehlan, Roll of Honour
Gwah de Fana hon to Pehlan was released by Rahul Singh, Rajesh Sharma, and Rajeev Kumar at the Chandigarh Literature Festival on October 31. The release marked the 30th anniversary of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination and seeks to bridge the gap between English and Punjabi, how the previous generation views the anti-Sikh pogrom and how the next generation is dealing with it. Ms Nirupama Dutt also put the book to discussion with Daljit Ami and me.
Hindustan Times covered the event. Please read here …
Tags: 1984, Amandeep Sandhu, anti-Sikh, Daljit Ami, Gwah de Fanah hon to Pehlan, Roll of Honour
It is with great pleasure I wish to let you know that ‘Roll of Honour’ has found home in Punjabi. The book is truly grateful to have Daljit Ami as our translator. I have had the honour of working with him through the translation. We are thankful to Harish Jain of Lokgeet Prakashan to have agreed to publish the book. Thanks are due to Rupa Publications.
The cover picture we used is the one which hung in my study as I wrote the book. It is by Sarika Gulati. The cover design is by Natasha Taraporevala.
The Punjabi text ‘Gwah de Fana hon to Pehlan’ will be released on October 31, 2014 at 10 AM at the Chandigarh Club. This event is part of the Chandigarh Literature Festival. After the release well-known author and critic Nirupama Dutt will be in discussion with Daljit Ami and me.
Here is the cover. We seek your blessings.
Punjabi Book Cover
Tags: Chandigarh Literature Festival, Daljit Ami, Gwah de Fana hon to Pehlan, Lokgeet Prakashan, Nirupama Dutt, Roll of Honour
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 …
Tags: disappearances, Kashmir, Shahnaz Bashir, The Half Mother
We are now entering an era where the fourth generation is dealing with the memory of Partition. My piece in The Hindu a compilation of how the advancement of digital technology is helping ordinary people archive their memories of Partition and create a larger South Asian identity. The new technologies in film-making have aided the work and a list of documentaries is appended to the story.
Thank you Daljit Ami, Kalathmika Natarajan, Anusha Yadav, Chintan Girish Modi, Ajay Bhardwaj, Shiraz Hassan, Sachi G. Dastidar, Muhammad Owais Rana, Guneeta Singh Bhalla, Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, The 1947 Partition Archive, Indian Memory Project, Friendships Across Borders: Aao Dosti Karein, The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, Punjab Digital Library.
See here …
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