Books

Manto Saheb: Friends and Enemies of the Great Maverick (Speaking Tiger, Rs 499) translated by Vibha S. Chauhan and Khalid Alvi presents 15 distinct portraits of Saadat Hasan Manto, painted by a wide r...

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it cannot measure up to the power of the humble chalk. Wielding this seemingly innocuous weapon are educators who have ignited many a spark in young minds w...

The Cold War period was marked by intense rivalry between two superpowers, and in an environment of alliance politics, the newly independent India pursued the policy of non-alignment in order to maint...

“The idea of a peace-loving, nonviolent India exists, persists, as part of a selectively constructed and assiduously cultivated national self-image in the midst of a society pervaded by social and p...

Ayon Maharaj calls Sri Ramakrishna a glutton for spiritual experience — he had an insatiable desire to experience God in every religion and sect. Sri Ramakrishna concluded that no one who has experi...

The political, colonial, imperial debate around the peoples and the map of India that are the constant surroundings and backdrop to the lives of the British individuals described in The British in Ind...

What promises to be a cyclonic storm turns out to be a thunder shower at best. Arif Anwar’s audacious debut novel has a wide — too wide? — scope: from 1942 in Burma to 2004 in Bangladesh. It cov...

Personal correspondences can, at times, capture myriad facets of writers’ personalities which could have otherwise been lost to the world. Rainer Maria Rilke, born this month 143 winters ago, was an...

Bugs Bunny got me thinking about mortality. At the end of each episode, while munching on a piece of juicy carrot, the adorable Bugs would say, “That’s all folks”. These words — can there be a...

Ever since the 2014 general elections, especially after the 2019 victory of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party, there is a perception that India is shifting rather swiftly towards the Right ...