Opinion

DALIT VOICE: LITERATURE AND REVOLT By Sharankumar Limbale and Jaydeep Sarangi, Authorspress, Rs 1,200

Samina Mishra, Sherna Dastur and the children of Okhla are the contributors - is an engaging attempt to portray the children's perception of the space that they inhabit.

Failure has no place in the land of opportunities. How then does one explain the success of America's first literary hero, Rip Van Winkle? For Rip is certainly a failure from the moment he appeared on the scene 199 years ago tomorrow. He is a shiftless alcoholic who shirks all responsibilities. And it is all his failures that make it easy to lose sight of Rip's success - Rip Van Winkle might just have been literature's first time traveller. Well, if one does not take into account Sleeping Beauty, that is.

INTERROGATING MY CHANDAL LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A DALIT (Sage/Samya, Rs 550) by Manoranjan Byapari begins its exploration of identities from the title itself. The book follows Byapari's journey from the Partition that forced his family to relocate to Calcutta, through the tumults of the Naxal movement and the Bastar revolution headed by Shankar Guha Neogi - both of which Byapari was part of - to his rise as an established author. Sipra Mukherjee has done a commendable job of translating the original.

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Sometimes the news cycle makes you feel like you were living under a rock. I had never heard of Anthony Bourdain till he died. I felt ambushed by the avalanche of praise and lamentation that his suicide set in motion. I thought to myself, for heaven's sake, the man wrote about restaurant food. I read a blurb that claimed reading him was like reading Elizabeth David channelled by Quentin Tarantino which made me feel even more hostile because everyone knows (or should) that David on food (like Pauline Kael on film) stands alone on Everest.

The most complex problem in international relations today is Syria. What in 2011 began as a peaceful manifestation of grievances stimulated by the Arab spring against the regime dominated by a minority Alawite elite led by the president, Bashar al-Assad, was transformed by an excessive show of government force into a bitter civil conflict that attracted the interventions of regional and international powers.

There is no doubting the Bharatiya Janata Party's fleet-footedness. What else can explain its decision to jump ship - the metaphorical vessel, in this case, being restive Kashmir? Many things were, of course, uncommon between the Peoples Democratic Party and the BJP that had come together to rule Jammu and Kashmir with a commitment to honour the 'common minimum programme'. 

The government of West Bengal has legislated a separate West Bengal Housing Industry Regulation Act, distinct from the Central Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, which protects homebuyers from the pressures exerted by promoters and developers. Three distinct clauses in the West Bengal act have caused concern among buyers in the sense that there might be a dilution of the provisions of the Central act.

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