The Obama Moment

Obama: The Audacity of Hope

From a virtual unknown outside his home state of Illinois to the most powerful man on earth, Barack Obama has come a long way in less than two years with his historic election as the first African American US president.

But even before the youthful Democratic senator vanquished Republican John McCain, a Vietnam War veteran and a national hero, Obama signalled momentous change in America's political scene as the first black person to become the presidential candidate of a major US party.

What Obama presidency means for India

With Democrat Barack Obama winning the White House, India is hopeful that its multi-faceted ties with the US, revolutionised by a landmark nuclear deal during the Bush tenure, will acquire new force.

Read it all here

In Conversation

Writing gives me another world

“Exile is the saddest thing that can happen to an individual,” says the diplomat-turned author Navtej Sarna. Exile, with its emotional undertow of loss and homelessness, is not a state of mind one associates with the suave decorous man who served as the spokesperson of India’s Foreign Office for six long years. But having consorted with Maharaja Duleep Singh, Punjab’s last monarch, in the privacy of his imagination for nine long years, Sarna knows intimately “the loss of something left behind forever,” in Edward Said’s words. more

India Rising

Indian author has a tryst with Booker glory

Aravind Adiga, the 33-year-old Indian-born author, has shot to the Booker literary stardom with his debut novel The White Tiger that shines an ironic light on the dark underbelly of India’s much-trumpeted growth story. With the 50,000-pounds Man Booker Prize under his belt, Adiga has become the fifth Indian to win the Anglophone literary world’s most coveted trophy after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and the legendary V.S. Naipaul, who has also won the Nobel Prize. more

New York Diary

Manhattan Magic, Educating Sarah, Cross-border Talk

NEW YORK: With over 100 world leaders and thousands of diplomats and media men from just about every country under the sun parked in New York for the 63rd session of the UN General Assembly, the swanky Manhattan has morphed into a high-security fortress and a polyglot global village disporting an eclectic array of manners and morals.

Zardari hugs Manmohan

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari is the latest addition to the global fan club of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, also a former finance minister who opened India's economy in the 1990s and has now struck a landmark nuclear deal with the US that has brought India back into the global nuclear fold after decades of denial.

Zardari high on Sarah, Manmohan opts for India tutorial

Nothing revealed the personality contrast between the leaders of India and Pakistan more than the way they responded to the glamorous Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s desire to be educated into the finer points of foreign policy.

Hindi-Chinni 'aam admi'

Barely a fortnight after reports of China’s dubious attitude in the NSG created much heartburns in India, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao were on backslapping terms and were trying to give a literary finesse to their friendship.

Read it all here

India and the World

NSG boost: India has arrived as a power

India had always strongly supported the nuclear nonproliferation regime. In 1965, India with Ireland and other nations sponsored Resolution 2025 which laid down the balance of obligations between the five nuclear weapon powers and the rest of the international community. The nuclear weapon powers were to enter into negotiations in good faith to stop the arms race and reduce their nuclear arsenals. more

Book Review

How to revive Brand America

Don't write an obituary of the American superpower yet. It's not that America is declining, but everyone else is rising - this is the "great story of our times" Fareed Zakaria tells in his new book that goes to the heart of tectonic power shifts to the non-Western world in the 21st century.

Take a few random examples, Zakaria says, to explain this "great transformation taking place around the world." The tallest building in the world is now in Taipei, the world's richest man is Mexican, its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese, the biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is under construction in India, and its largest factories are all in China. more

Poetry

When an argumentative Indian turns poetical

From the “triumph and trauma” of T20 cricket and the quibbles of the 123 India-US nuclear deal to nano fantasies and seeing the “turning point” in a lover’s eyes, the argumentative Indian, says lawyer and politician Kapil Sibal, witnesses it all and turns poetical, scribbling verses frenziedly on his cellphone.

Having a mobile in this perennially distracted and driven existence certainly helps; and if words take time to form and epiphanies are itching to get out, SMS will do. more

Will 'Singh is Kinng' net NRIs?

Will some NRIs head back to India after watching the latest box office hit, "Singh is Kinng?" After watching the conscience pricking scenes during which the hero Akshay Kumar urges his friend to return from Australia to care for his old and ailing parents back home in Punjab, many NRIs will have to answer their consciences as to why they should not return. more

India and the World

Nuclear deal and politics of multipolar world

US President George W. Bush reportedly intends to write individually to heads of governments of 44 other member nations of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), urging that India be given a clean waiver from the present NSG guidelines which do not permit nuclear commerce with any non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which has not placed all its nuclear facilities under the full scope safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). more

India and the World

China’s Olympic Moment and New Soft Power Game

China’s Olympic moment is finally here, signaling to the world its arrival on the world stage. It’s a moment China has been waiting for decades: as the 29 Olympic Games opened in Beijing at precisely eight minutes past the eighth hour of the evening on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eight year of the millennium, billions around the world watched this stunning blend of pageantry and high-tech wizardry in which 15,000 people Chinese performers showcased 5000 years of their country’s history in a breathtaking four-hour ceremony. The message was clear for all to read: China’s rise is inexorable and China wishes to carry others along, and not merely awe them into accepting the inevitable. more

India and the World

A Profile of Modern Olympic Spirit

The Beijing Olympics are almost here, but not many remember Pierre de Coubertin, the French baron who restored the Olympic Games in 1896.

The spirit with which the ancient Games were revived and Coubertin's objectives seem to belong to a bygone era, though remembering the first steps of Olympism is inspiring. Coubertin was a man of exceptional talent; he was not only an organiser, a pedagogue, a historian, a sportsman, a writer, an aesthete, but also a visionary, a great humanist and a man of action. Olympism was for him nothing else than the 'religion of mankind'.

The Olympics journey: from 776B.C. to Beijing 2008

In ancient times, sports originated as peacetime rivalries between warriors. Running, boxing, wrestling, chariots racing were all elements of their military training and the best of them demonstrated their skills in competitive games... read it all here

Mind, Body and Spirit

Catch up with yoga chic

They are getting tips on luxury liners in the open seas, refining techniques in austere huts in the hills, getting fit in air-conditioned gyms or just in the comfort of the neighbourhood park - yoga, the ancient healing and fitness art from India, is being practised by millions of people the world over to handle the stresses of modern-day living. more

Art

Blending art and high living

The old stereotype of an artist starving in the proverbial garret is passe. Art is no longer the affliction of those assailed by dreams and visions and forced by fate to live in dire penury. As the art market in India booms with the mushrooming of art galleries and middle-class art collectors become more adventurous with taste as well as purse, the artist can now unfurl his creative visions while living in great luxury and style. more

India and the World

The Making of the Big Deal

After a thousand visions and revisions, India’s ruling coalition has finally put the intensely debated India-US nuclear deal on fast track. The July 22 trust vote in parliament swung the balance in favour of the big deal. But, sadly, even as India marches ahead to join the brave world of global nuclear commerce (although the NSG passport has yet to be acquired), the dramatic manner in which three MPs of chief opposition party BJP flashed wads of currency notes in parliament and charged they had been bribed to abstain from voting has exposed the insidious machinery of wheeling-dealing that went into shoring up support for the government and the deal.more

India and the World

Why Afghanistan matters to India

The vehicle-borne suicide bomb attack at the entrance of the Indian embassy in Kabul and the resultant casualties have created a furore in the Indian national security establishment and the diplomatic community. Afghan President Hamid Karzai immediately blamed the "enemies of Afghanistan-India friendship" for the bombing - an obvious reference to Pakistan. more

Book Talk

'Midnight's Children' wins ‘Best of Bookers’

Two decades after death threats forced him into hiding, India-born writer Sir Salman Rushdie, who has delighted readers with his singular concoction of history, myth and fable, has been crowned with the prestigious Best of Bookers award for his novel "Midnight's Children".

Quest for the Divine

Karan Singh, scholar extraordinaire and thinker, who heads Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), has come out with a book that illuminates a multi-dimensional quest for the divine.

Usha K.R's novel wins award

A “Girl and a River”, a novel by Usha K.R, bagged the best English language fiction award at the Vodafone-Crossword Award 2007, while “The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857,” by William Dalrymple won the best literary non-fiction award.

Goa such a literary place

One of the pleasures of being in Goa is that it is "such a literary place", says Amitav Ghosh, one of the biggest names in Indian writing in English today.

"One of the real pleasures of being in Goa - and one of the aspects of Goa that is very neglected - is that Goa is such a literary place," said the 52-year-old Indian writer while on a trip to the sun-sea-and-surf touristy town of Goa. "Dom Moraes, though not resident in Goa, is one of the writers completely formative in my childhood and college years," said the writer.

Britney Spears up close

Writer Ian Halperin says his book will reveal more shocking details of pop star Britney Spears' personal life and her friends' circle.

Contactmusic.com reports Halperin spent 18 months conducting an undercover investigation by getting close to Spears and her close friends and he will now release a book based on his findings. He revealed that Spears attempted suicide twice and now says that her problems were caused by drugs and her friends' circle.

Chess champ Anand harks back to ancient India

Russia, or the Soviet Union as it was once called, may have produced the most world chess champions but the fact of the matter is that the current world champion and World No.1 player is an Indian, Viswanathan Anand. What's more, the world's No. 2 player among women, too, is an Indian, Koneru Humpy.

read it all here

Zia's murder mystery comes in new mango flavour

Who killed General Zia ul-Haq, the redoubtable Pakistani dictator who mysteriously died in an air crash 20 summers ago? Conspiracy theories, ranging from the bizarre to purely farcical, have never ceased since. Mohammed Hanif thickens this stew further and spices it up with a dash of dark wit to spin a page-turning thriller and an exuberant satire of the triple clichés of Allah, America and Army that colour popular perception of Pakistan. more

India and the World

Nuclear deal re-born on fourth of July!

Defying pundits and critics itching to write its obituary, the much maligned India-US nuclear deal looked set for a re-birth on the fourth of July, the American independence day, hinting at a larger providential stake in the success of the deal.

Nuke this nonsense: Hindu deal or Muslim deal?

The nuclear deal controversy seems to have brought out some of the worst aspects of Indian politics. As much is evident from the cynical manner in which several parties are trying to communalise the issue by suggesting, without a shred of factual evidence, that Muslims will be antagonised by the pact with the US.

read it all here

India's Dream Machine Goes Global

It's a story that began 71 years ago, involving a 13-year-old mahout from Mysore in southern India. Sabu Dastagir, who rode an elephant belonging to the Maharaja of Mysore, was spotted by Hollywood director Robert Flaherty looking for an Indian face to play the lead in his movie "Elephant Boy". more

India's national interest and smaller parties

The current political turbulence and the calculations about the way in which the smaller political parties will vote on a major issue involving India's changing foreign policy paradigm have highlighted the need for smaller parties taking interest in foreign policy and international relations. more

India's 'Obama moment'

Barack Obama's emergence as the front-runner in the US presidential election confirmed that the much-hyped "American dream" is not a myth after all. It is possible for a person with talent and charisma to break through the glass barrier. No walls of prejudice separate him from the rest. more

Book Review

Revisiting myths of migration

The 1800s were a time of enormous social disruption and displacement in large parts of India. Poverty and loss of land holdings forced people to move to distant places. In his latest book "Sea of Poppies", best-selling author Amitav Ghosh draws a connection between large-scale opium cultivation in India for the Chinese market and the beginnings of the indenture system, which took over a million Indians through a span of 90 years to work on plantations in new colonies of the imperial powers. more

Literary Quiz

Amitav Ghosh is one of India’s finest novelists and essayists. His new novel Sea of Poppies – a probing exploration into the murky world of opium trade and dark spaces of the 19th century colonialism – has charmed critics and readers alike. IndiaWrites (www.indiawrites.org) is flagging off a quiz on the life and works of Amitav Ghosh.

The first five winners will get a copy of Sea of Poppies or any of his earlier books. Send your answers to editor@indiawrites.org by July 15.

1. Name the first novel by Amitav Ghosh. Who published his first novel?
2. Which novel has a central character called Alu?
3. ...

more

Book Review

Demystifying the Spirit of India

In the Indian experience the author finds hope even for the world that is probably more familiar to him, that is, Iran. At a time when any assertion on the role that India has played in shaping world civilisation or even the most innocuous statement expressing pride in anything Indian is dismissed as 'jingoism' and 'dangerous nationalism' by our liberals and intellectuals, Ramin Jahanbegloo's offering titled The Spirit of India can be called not only patronising but even provocative. more

India and the World

Postcards from Pakistan

Rawalpindi: They light lamps, chant prayers and sprinkle flowers. Some even slash their wrists and scatter blood at a makeshift memorial of charismatic Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated here nearly five months ago.

read it all here

India and the World

Games India’s bomb makers played in Pokhran

Ten years ago, India's bomb makers played a little game of deception in the scorching deserts of Pokhran in Rajasthan. 'Colonel Prithviraj,' called K. Santhanam, the director of the test site for India's second nuclear test and a pointsman for weaponisation prgoramme. His voice quivered in the desert air.

From Pokhran-II to India-US nuclear deal

'I have an announcement to make: today at 3.45 p.m. India conducted three underground nuclear tests at the Pokhran range,' said Atal Bihari Vajpayee in his soft undertone on the sleepy afternoon of May 11, 1998.

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India and the World

Ahmadinejad: A radical dreamer

A firebrand orator, soccer fan, America-baiter, populist leader playing with nuclear dreams, the little-known mayor of Tehran until he became president of Iran 30 months ago. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is unlike any Iranian leader India or the West has known.

India intensifies global energy game (Commentary)

Iranian President Mohammad Ahmadinejad's brief but significant visit to India and his cautious criticism against the 'bullying' policies of the 'rulers of the world' (read the US and its European allies) make one point clear - New Delhi has finally come out of its strategic confusion. read it all here

India and the World

South Asia's tryst with democracy set to stay

Our understandable preoccupation with the political events unfolding in Pakistan, we may be doing an injustice to an equally compelling process that is taking place across much of South Asia. While we focus our attention on the struggle of democracy to emerge in Pakistan, on India's western frontier, very little notice has been taken of a comparable democratic process that is struggling to be born in Nepal, on India's northern frontier. more

Book Review

The Fiction of Arrival

Jhumpa Lahiri has an uncanny gift for turning ‘unaccustomed earth’ into her familiar habitat of fiction where she consorts with upwardly mobile immigrant Bengalis enacting their exquisite little dramas of belonging and un-belonging, of losing and finding themselves all over again, only to know the same place for the first time. more

Book Review

Goodbye US hegemony, welcome the Big Three

America’s momnent of unbridled uni-polar dominance is over as “a multi-polar and multi-civilisational world of three-distinct superpowers” – the US, China and European Union – use and manipulate “swing countries” like India and Japan and “second world” to expand their influence, argues a new book by Parag Khanna, the 30-year-old India-born foreign policy whizkid. more

India and the World

Cricket-ainment fever grips Indians

Cricket-loving Indians across the globe are ecstatic about the latest and greatest tournament under the Indian Premier League (IPL). This humongous extravaganza combines the glamour of Bollywood with the fanatic following of cricket among Indians across the world. The Twenty20 matches are as long as a Bollywood film and - hopefully - just as exciting. No wonder it has been dubbed as "Cricketainment". more

India and the World

India, China go their own way in Africa

China was a looming shadow at India’s first summit with 14 African countries held in New Delhi recently that not only revealed the depth and diversity of their relationship, but also provided clues to what could give New Delhi a competitive edge in the resource-rich continent. But more than the summit per se that was high on deliverables as well as symbolism, what attracted attention, bordering on obsession, was the presumed competition between Asia’s two emerging giants in the race for Africa’s resources, specially oil. more

India and the World

Olympic flame: Keeping torch of conscience burning?

The Indian national football team captain, Bhaichung Bhutia, barely squeezed in 11 minutes of the mandatory 15 minutes of fame for his principled decision not to carry the Beijing bound Olympic torch in Delhi on April 17. Reason: somewhere between the 10th and the 11th minute his thunder was stolen by actor/director Aamir Khan who stated that he had a different way of wearing his conscience on his sleeve. He would carry the torch but with a prayer in his heart for the people of Tibet; the Games did not belong to China but to the human race.

Colonialism in new robes

The old colonial scene of a restive people opposing a repressive regime is again being enacted in Tibet. There are other similarities as well. For instance, there is a charismatic figure symbolising the 'struggle'.The emphasis on non-violence also recalls Mahatma Gandhi. Like the Mahatma, the Dalai Lama does not bear any ill will towards the putative oppressors. The Tibetan spiritual leader only wants China to grant full autonomy to his country.

read it all here

Don't Just Invest, Collect Art

There really is no such thing as art, there are only artists, said Gombrich in his seminal work, "The Story of Art". Artists "are favoured with the wonderful gift of balancing shapes and colours till they are 'right', and rarer still, who possess that integrity of character which never rests content with half-solutions but is ready to forgo all easy effects, all superficial success for the toil and agony of sincere work," he wrote. more

Tibetan unrest and China's Olympic anxieties

The unrest in Tibet, particularly the spontaneity and the scale of rioting, has made the worst Chinese fears come true. The scale of protests and violence in Lhasa and other predominant Tibetan settlements has unnerved the Chinese leadership. This is discernable by the stridency in the remarks of Premier Wen Jia Bao, who heaped fulsome abuse on the "Dalai Lama clique" for what he called were orchestrated events. He did so while holding an olive branch with the Dalai Lama provided he accepts unconditionally Chinese sovereignty over Tibet and calls for a halt to the ongoing protests. more

Book Talk

Trading in secrets

Playwright, screenwriter, novelist and film-maker Hanif Kureishi is a connoissieur of inner secrets and an astute excavator of people’s hidden desires and their deepest fears. “Something to Tell You,” (published by Faber) – Kureishi’s new novel about a Freudian analyst struggling with a guilty secret – illuminates his talent for deciphering inner speech, of bringing the unsaid into the open.

Akbar’s Jodha merely a fantasy? Ask Rushdie

Only Salman Raushdie, the maestro of magic realism, can conjure up such fantasies that effortlessly merge and collide with history. In his exquisitely ambivalent short story The Shelter of the World, published in The New Yorker, Rushdie plays with the idea that Emperor Akbar's Hindu wife Jodhabai was merely a figment of the imagination. She was a dream of the all-powerful emperor, prone to visionary levitations that one rarely sees in potentates, Rushdie suggests in his story. more

India and the World

India, the new superpower of cricket

When Kerry Packer launched his "circus" in 1977, Indian cricketers were so much in the doghouse that not one of them was chosen to play. The omission was all the more galling for Indians because several Pakistanis, led by the dashing Imran Khan, were included. more

India and the World

India and the Nuclear Domain

Ever since India and the United States declared their intention to resume bilateral cooperation in civilian uses of nuclear energy on July 18, 2005, there has been a national debate on India's place in the nuclear domain, both civilian and strategic. This debate is welcome. It enables public opinion to be educated on what has hitherto remained a relatively esoteric field. In this connection, may I commend the IIC for sustaining this initiative in the public domain. Attention has been focused on the significance of nuclear energy to our achieving energy security. There has also been a scrutiny of our strategic weapons programme and how that relates to our national security. These are important issues and need sober and objective reflection based on reliable information. more

India and the World

Comparing civil society in Pakistan and India

Much has been said and written about the contrasting state of civil society in Pakistan and India. Essentially civil society took root in India in the post-war era while in Pakistan it did not. It succeeded in India because the political leadership that emerged following independence was deeply committed to secularism and parliamentary democracy, and because, unlike most newly independent states, that leadership was determined to keep the military out of politics, subordinated to civilian authority. more

Baba Amte: The man who lit up all our lives

I have two images of Baba Amte in my mind. The first is a ramrod-straight, weather-beaten Roman gladiator, perennially clad in a sleeveless, open-necked white vest and matching white shorts, ready to take on all odds - physical pain as much as social and environmental wrong-doings. The second is of him bed-bound, keeping an eagle eye on the 'dharna' that is milling around his cot, out in the open, in a dusty, tribal village in the heartland of India. more

Russian Tales ready to cast spell in India

The ghosts of Gogol, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky will consort with the new icons of Russian literature for the next nine days at the 18th World Book Fair in New Delhi, re-kindling an old literary romance between India and Russia.

Sitting in the rarefied ambience of Petrovich Club, a stylish restaurant symbolising post-Soviet retro chic, Eduard Uspensky, a celebrity Russian writer and best-selling author of children's books, can barely conceal his excitement. more

Travel/Memoirs

Mudumalai: Tangled in elephantine mysteries

I woke up to a very wet morning - a heavy downpour and then a drip, drip, drip kind of rain. The living room in our guesthouse in Ooty felt cold and damp; it felt colder, damper, and depressing as I watched the rain from inside. There was no fire to cheer things up so I stepped out into the garden and walked in the rain. I was wet but felt revived. I walked towards a covered archway with a rose creeper. Pink and white cosmos grew wild and swirled around it in small smiling waves. Narrow stone steps lead from the garden to a clearing below. It would be a pleasant retreat in summer for reading and dreaming. more

Bookpost

Who is an Indian Writer?

For that matter, who is an Indian? Being an Indian who has always lived in India, I used to think I know. But over the past few years the Diaspora in conjunction with ‘international’ Indians has challenged all the familiar parameters – appearance, language, location – of Indianness and introduced new ones. Assessed on new parameters Indian Indians seem distinctly un-Indian. In a crossover but still Bollywood-enough film called ‘Loins of Punjab’ (2007) there is a Desi Idol contest in Jersey promising an award of  $ 25,000. A bunch of contestants – mostly NRIs of various hues - congregate. One particular ABCD (American born confused desi) does not understand the words of the song she sings or the film-dialogue she mouths, as she does not have any Indian language. She is disqualified by the machinations of a wicked socialite who had set her heart on winning. The twist in the tale comes when the only white contestant, an American Jew, soulfully renders the Indian national anthem and walks off with the prize and a lissome Indian lass. more

India, China headed for Trade Tango

By all accounts the recent visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Beijing is considered to be successful in expanding bilateral trade issues. With an impressive $ 38.6 billion in bilateral trade, investments contemplated in each other’s markets and physical connectivity explored between the two countries, bilateral engagement in these fields is poised to expand in the short-to-medium terms. When compared to the relative stagnation or even a stalemate on other issues such as border dispute, economic issues promise to b broaden the bilateral interaction between India and China. more

Book News

All set for Jaipur Literary Fest

Literati, illuminati, glitterati and chatterati are bracing to preen and strut at the third edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival (Jan 21-27) in the colourful capital of India’s eastern state Rajasthan, known mostly for magnificent palaces and an unquenchable nostalgia for the Indian royalty.

Rushdie’s new novel

The long wait appears to be over. Salman Rushdie’s new novel, 'The Enchantress of Florence', a historical novel that flits back and forth between Renaissance Florence and the 16th century Mughal Empire in India, will be published this summer.

Writers defy bombs to rendezvous in Sri Lanka

Ignoring the bombs going off in the vicinity, leading lights of English literature from across the globe are meeting in the quaint Dutch-built city of Galle in south Sri Lanka for a four-day bonanza of lectures, readings, panel discussions and book launches.

Panchatantra inspires Virgin Comics series

Move over Archies, Vishnu Sharma is here. Virgin Comics was launched in North America recently with a new comic book series inspired by India's ancient Panchatantra fables.

Read it all here

India and the World

China gets real, engages India to counter US

The Chinese, as Henry Kissinger pointed out in 1971, are eminently pragmatic people. They became communists when they felt that it would help to accelerate their development. They gave up communism and allied themselves with US capitalism when they concluded that it was a better strategy for their purpose. They treated India with contempt when it was economically, militarily and technologically weak. more

India and the World

An Indian American president in 2020?

An Indian American president of the USA in 2020? It may sound fantastic now, but Jay Goyal, a 27-year-old legislator from Ohio, is confident that an Indian American will be in the race for the US presidency in another 10 years or so. more

Book Review

The lively adventures of an Indian diplomat

These days, when the Indian government is in the midst of exacting negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to draft a new safeguards agreement with the country, it is worthwhile to recall that an eminent Indian played a major role in shaping the nuclear watchdog at the time of its establishment. more

Travel/Culture

Hinduism a throbbing everyday reality in Bali

Bali: Sukendra places fresh flowers on a small banana leaf platter, lights incense sticks and sticks them to the edge, prays for a few minutes, and keeps the platter on the pavement outside his home in this tourist paradise in southeastern Indonesia. He does this thrice a day, every day.

Falling snow and storytelling in Kashmir

Chanduna (Jammu and Kashmir): As a pristine white blanket of snow covers the countryside, Kashmir's rich tradition of folklore comes to life in this village.

Junagadh braces for mountain climbing contest

Junagadh (Gujarat): The Girnar hill, home to several shrines held sacred by Hindus and Jains, will host an annual competition next month that will see school and college students scurry up and down 2,200 steps on its slopes. read it all here

India and the World

The art of philanthropy & the Indian diaspora

Indians have a long tradition of charitable giving that flows from the concept of 'daan' as a religious obligation, and many Indians who have gone abroad to make their fortune also want to do something for their homeland. IIT alumni associations have set up foundations that have collected substantial funds, which have been used to upgrade facilities, add to the infrastructure and set up new schools in the alma mater. more

Decoding Modi's Victory & Secular Politics

Narendra Modi's repeat landslide victory in Gujarat against the spectacular odds stacked against him - anti-incumbency, the odious hangover of the 2002 riots, an unforgiving Muslim minority, BJP spoilers and a hostile media - has exposed the fragility and speciousness of secular politics practised in the country by those who are quick to seize on the secularism mantra as the sole rallying point. more

In Conversation: Anuradha Marwah

Novelist Anuradha Marwah is no stranger to desire and its daemons. If Idol Love, her second novel, was about the suicidal sadness of unrequited love in an India that was becoming vulnerable to seductions of religious zealots, her latest novel Dirty Picture is an unflinching look at soul sickness that underlies sexual exploitation in an increasingly promiscuous society.

Q) Your latest novel Dirty Picture is based on a real-life sex scandal in Ajmer? How did you grapple with the creative challenges of transmuting real life incidents into fiction?

As it was a sex scandal that I was writing about the foremost challenge was to de-sensationalise. I knew I had to write in a way that would leave no room for titillation - otherwise the ‘real’ story, or at least the one I was attempting to tell, would get obfuscated.

I decided on a very simple and direct style – aiming at the heart of violence. more

Fiction: Bharti

Bharti sat in class helpless as though surrounded by landmines.

“Bitch! You were snoring away with all those guys watching and not a stitch on you,” Sarosh had yelled at her on the phone.

She had tried to tell him what happened but the words wouldn’t come out, “Anees and Mukesh…”

“Man-crazy! The whole fucking family is man-crazy. They couldn’t have done anything if you hadn’t allowed them to! What the hell are you weeping for now?” more

Taslima: Portrait of a writer in exile

Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen has willy-nilly turned into an itinerant minstrel, hounded by commissars and fanatics alike, intoning her outcast song of angst against the lies of religion and the state. Kolkata, the famously liberal cosmopolitan city hospitable to the muse and its patrons, looked on as the apparatchiks decided to send the beleaguered writer to Rajasthan after violent protests by Muslim fundamentalists. more

In Conversation

Portrait of an Islamist radical

KHARTOUM: A conversation with Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi, derided by the West as the “Black Pope of Terrorism,” is like descending into the dark heart of Islamist radicalism that flaunts its hatred of the “evil” America and takes refuge in the fantasies of a morally pure world founded on certainties of faith. Sitting in the elegant drawing room of his house in a posh neighbourhood in Khartoum, Turabi does not look the satanic mind that the West has conjured up. Dressed impeccably in the Sudanese ghealbiya, and looking fit and sprightly for a 75-year-old man, Sheikh, as locals call him, is in his element as he begins talking. more

Book Review

In Good Faith

By Aditi Bhaduri

Asra Q. Nomani's Standing Alone in Mecca is at once compelling and predictable, clichéd and refreshing. Its moments of startling frankness and honesty prevent it from descending into another exercise in presenting the 'positive' side of Islam, of which there has been a regular barrage since the attacks of 11 September 2001. While Nomani's work (which was first published in 2005, but has recently been released in India) does throw up more questions than it answers, the questions posed are piquant enough. Perhaps most importantly, Nomani does not attempt to gloss over uncomfortable facts. more

Letter from Darfur

Lost in a maze of fact and fiction

Flying from the Sudanese capital Khartoum to the mineral-rich western province of Darfur, the seat of an unfolding humanitarian crisis, is like travelling into another country and time zone. A vast sprawling desert glints in the merciless sun and, blurring the thin dividing line between fact and fiction.

All the noise and bustle of a burgeoning metropolis recedes. An eerie silence envelops your senses, begetting questions that no one has straight answers to. more

Book Review

The Endangered Solitude

The Solitude of Emperors, David Davidar’s second novel, is an ambitious essay at delineating the daemons of communalism that stalk the essentially secular soul of India in many seductive disguises. Madness and hysteria of communal violence that blighted India’s brightest and most cosmopolitan metropolis in 1993-1994 following the demolition of a Muslim mosque in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya, which Hindus claim as the birthplace of the divine king Ram, shadows this narrative of uses and abuses of religion. History is an insatiable tyrant, as the author tells us in the opening paragraph of the novel. more

In Conversation

‘Writing purifies my blood’

M.G. Vassanji’s new novel The Assassin’s Song is a homecoming of sorts for the Canada-based author as he etches a finely poised dialectic between faith and tradition on the one hand and the pressures of modernity and contemporary history on the other. Set against the backdrop of the horrific riots in India’s western state of Gujarat in 2002, Vassanji’s new novel delves deep into the past as he weaves his story around a 13th century sufi saint to illuminate some home truths about the conflicted modern existence.

In a conversation with Manish Chand, Vassanji speaks probingly about his inspiration for crafting this novel around a scarring event in recent Indian history that pitted the Hindus against the Muslims in an orgy of bloodshed and destruction that still touches a raw nerve in the country.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q) This is your first novel set in India. What inspired your new novel The Assassin’s Song?

A) I have written about a mystic who lived eight centuries ago. I know intimately Gujarat where I come from. more

Celebrating 60 years of India's freedom

Secular India defy holy warriors

The date of India’s Independence is etched upon the soul of every Indian. As India marks the 60th anniversary of its Independence, it commemorates a landmark which will resonate from the villages that Nehru described as the “real India”, to the refined salons of India’s urban elite, and beyond, to cities across the world which are home to an influential Indian Diaspora that spans from New York and London to Singapore and Dubai. more

That blissful dawn, those ringing headlines

Birth of India's Freedom", "Freedom Era Begins", "India Awakes to Life and Freedom", "Free India is Born", "India Independent"... These were the ringing headlines in top Indian newspapers capturing that history-making moment on the morning of Aug 15, 1947.

As midnight revelry and frenzied rejoicing gripped the country, editors and reporters toiled well into the wee hours to record a newly born nation's "tryst with destiny". more

Milestones in 60 years of Free India

1947: India becomes independent, with Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister.

In the largest forced migration in history, around 15 million people are displaced and an estimated 500,000 killed in Hindu-Muslim violence sparked by partition.

The first war between India and Pakistan breaks out in Kashmir. It ends in 1948, with Kashmir divided along the line of control after an UN-brokered ceasefire.

1948: Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated.

Chakravarti Rajagopalachari succeeds Louis Mountbatten as Governor General.

Hyderabad joins Indian Union after military operation. more

'Dear NRI Son', writes Mother India, aged 60

By Kul Bhushan

On August 15, a 60-year old 'Mother India' writes this letter to her NRI son:

My dear NRI son,

They say, 'Life begins at 60!' Yes, a whole new game starts at 60 when you enjoy the fruits of all that you have sacrificed and worked for. It seems that I have 'arrived' after all those years of toiling, denying and watching others enjoying 'the good life'.

Celebrating my 60th birthday today, I have a thousand big and small things to be thankful for. First, the big ones...

I am living in an independent country where every vote counts. More importantly, it still remains united through all crises. I can seek justice from independent courts even though they move slowly. I can make my voice heard without fear in the public. A powerful media keeps everyone on his/her toes. Perhaps, it can be said that the Supreme Court and the media run my country.

Last but not the least, despite the one billion plus people, Indian economy is the fastest growing free economy in the world, at a galloping rate of over nine percent. Now I am a member of the exclusive Trillion Dollar Club - the value my GDP - that has only 13 members. more

In Conversation

Retracing roots, creating identity

Neera Kapur-Dromson, a fourth-generation Kenyan of Indian origin, has wrestled with kindred issues of identity, roots, cultural clashes and self-creation as long as she can remember.

In this conversation with Manish Chand, Kapur-Dromson speaks about the mingling of Indian and Kenyan cultures and languages, the contribution of the Indian diaspora in awakening political consciousness among Africans and the need for Kenyans to move beyond Bollywood and clichés to understand Indians and their culture better. “It is important for people to know where and what backgrounds they come from,” she says in this interview. more

Book Review

America, Oh America!

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an incisive portrait of the transformation of a Princeton-educated Pakistani youth with a cushy job in the Big Apple and an American girlfriend into an America-baiting radical with a sneaking sympathy for the 9/11 attackers. The novel astutely dramatises simultaneous schizophrenia and romance with the American dream many educated Muslim youths experience as they go about making existential choices in a world caught in the treacherous currents of East-West encounters. more

Are Indian Muslims turning into radicals?

The suspected links of three Indians to last month's UK terror plots has stirred fears of creeping radicalisation of a section of Indian Muslims, but such apprehensions don't square with the moderate, eclectic and assimilating nature of Indian Islam.

The bungled bombings in London and Glasgow nevertheless shattered a myth that Muslims in India had nothing to do with global jehad. more

Decoding Rushdie knighthood

Awake, it's no Satan, it's just Salman

Bigots baying for the blood of celebrity novelist and freshly knighted Sir Salman Rushdie, from Iran to Pakistan to Malaysia to Srinagar, are back in business, albeit with a slightly farcical hiss. However, this time round their rage has turned not such much on the "apostate" novelist but the not-so-great Britain they have come to see as the blood brother of the almighty America in stigmatising and attacking Muslims.

British queen's knighting of the Booker-winning novelist and author of "The Satanic Verses", accused by some Muslim clerics of blaspheming Prophet Muhammad, has kindled anew bigots' fantasies of persecution by the arrogant and smug West that has come to equate Islam with terrorism and hatred, especially since the infamous 9/11 attacks on the very heart of the American empire. more

Ramu Gandhi: A Tribute

A solitary thinker in smug, noisy times

Not many get to choose the place they die in, but knowing Ramachandra Gandhi, one gets an eerie feeling that this peripatetic thinker would have wanted to breathe his last moments in a place that was his home and yet not his home for so many years, symbolising the eternal homelessness of the modern intellectual. Ramu Gandhi, as he was affectionately called by friends and admirers, was a deeply solitary man and a compulsive arguer at the same time who loved the unique blend of privacy and gregarious intellectual chatter that a place like the India International Centre encouraged and nurtured.

But he was not the kind whose relentlessly questing mind and athirst spirit could be confined to one place for long or belong to a particular institution. As the news of Ramu Gandhi's death flashed on TV Wednesday and almost vanished into the deluge of babel that poses as profundity, my mind raced back to those hallowed meetings of Philosophy Society (Philo-Soc, to the initiates) of St. Stephen's College at the residence of R.K. Gupta, the then head of the philosophy department, in the early nineties. Occasionally, one had a glimpse of Ramu Gandhi in his trademark kurta-pyjama at the free-ranging play of ideas that cut through all categories and hierarchies in the pursuit of the secrets of the text under discussion, be it Plato's "Symposium" or Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time". more

In Conversation

Globalisation a threat to poor countries

Wangari Muta Maathai, the iconic Kenyan environmentalist who became the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2004, speaks in simple, direct sentences that brim with inner fire and conviction that comes from long years of solitary struggle. Maathai’s burning faith in a green world has borne rich fruits: the Green Belt Movement she founded in the mid-seventies has enriched the earth with 31 million trees.

In this conversation with Manish Chand, Maathai speaks about her unquenchable passion for the green cause, the emerging breed of new leaders in Africa, her impression of India and what India and Africa can do together to create a more equitable, clean and harmonious world.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q) Your passion for environment and your lifelong commitment to the green cause has earned accolades all over the world. How did it all start?

A) I grew up in the Kenyan countryside. That experience in the countryside when the environment was pristine has stayed with me since then. In those days, there were no cash crops, no coffee, no tea. I grew up seeing shorgum, palm trees, sweet potatoes which were all very economical food crops. The rivers were so clean that we could drink water straight from them. There were no agro-chemicals. That’s the background I knew as a child and that’s what influenced me a lot. Later on, I saw the land degrading. We could no longer drink water straight from the rivers. The rivers were full of silt because forests upstream were cleared. That’s the time I thought I must do something about it. If we really understand the role environment plays in our life and environmental education becomes part of school curricula, then a lot of people would be concerned about environment and would encourage others to do something about it. more

Indians are erotic people, but sexually repressed

Psychoanalyst and novelist Sudhir Kakar has a genius for digging deep into the depths of the human psyche and diving back with rare gems of insights into the complex grammar of motivations that mark human behaviour and culture. Described by Le Nouvel Observateur as one of 25 major thinkers of the world, Kakar’s oeuvre is varied and includes incisive and pioneering books on the roots of aggression, mysticism, religion and sexuality like Analyst and the Mystic, Culture and Psyche, The Colors of Violence and Intimate Relations.

In his new book, The Indians: Portrait of a People, co-authored with his wife Katharina (published by Penguin), Kakar essays a big picture or a grand narrative of what it means to be an Indian and what constitutes “Indianness.”

In this interview with Manish Chand, Kakar explains how the land of the Kamasutra that flaunts erotic sculptures in temples of Konarak and Khajuraho slipped into sexual repression centuries ago that India is still recovering from.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q) What about the Indian attitude to sexuality? Don’t you think there is an element of schizophrenia towards sex and sexuality?

A) We are a sexually repressed people who are also a very erotic people. Eros and ascesis (asceticism) have been two dominant strands of the India mind and way of life over centuries. Both have struggled for domination of the Indian spirit. On the one hand, there are temples of Konarak and Khajuraho that show the pleasures of oral sex and on another hand you have that hypocritical attitude towards kissing in Hindi films, which is only insinuated and rarely shown. more

News

Why South Asia matters

NEW DELHI: It's the season of South Asia here with hundreds of people from neighbouring countries, speaking diverse languages and professing different faiths, descending on the Indian capital in a celebration of shared cultural identity and interlinked destiny of the region that accounts for a fourth of humanity.

The 14th South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit that began here Tuesday (April 3) has brought together leaders, officials and common people from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives, to be joined by its newest and eighth member Afghanistan. more

Travel

River of Faith

In Mysore, we had rented a car with a driver and driven to Madikeri, situated at an altitude of 3781 ft above sea level in the Coorg district. As we had reached close to dinnertime, we decided to go to the nearest vegetarian restaurant suggested by our guesthouse manager. The next morning we decided to head for Talakaveri, the place where the river Kaveri originates in the Brahmagiri hills at a height of about 4,500 ft above sea level. more

Sham Lal (1912-2007) : Reading, Writing, Thinking

A Portrait of a Writer as a Reader

An evening with Sham Lal, if you were lucky to have met this frail, benign bibliophile, will always burn bright in your memory. Not because he had a charismatic personality or that he had dramatic things to say. But because of his sheer pleasure in who he was: a rare solitude-loving creature who lived for books and the bliss of reading.

Life was one bright book, full of hidden meanings and revelations, for the nonagenarian writer and critic - he died here this week at the age of 94 - who imparted a new resonance to the post-modernist notion of the reader as the writer and creator of texts. more

Travel: Chidambaram Temple

Riding on God’s Chariot

Priti Aisola evokes divine frenzy and fervour she saw on her recent visit to Nataraja Temple in the ancient pilgrim town of Chidambaram in South India – the home to the Dancing Shiva.

Chidambaram literally means the sky permeated by an atmosphere of intelligence and wisdom. According to legend, Chidambaram was once a forest of tillai, a mangrove species of trees. Chidambaram is an important pilgrim centre, specially for worshippers of Shiva, and is located 58 km south of Pondicherry in Cuddalore, the east-central part of the Tamil Nadu state of southeastern India. more

India: Emerging as Eastern or Western Power?

Pundits agree: India will be the third great Asian power to emerge, after Japan and China. Japan emerged self-consciously as a Western power. China has made no pretensions in that direction. What will be India’s path?

Figuring India’s direction is not easy. What is the nature of era we are living in, Eastern or Western? Also what is the nature of Indian civilization itself? more

Short Story

For a few queer smiles

Dear Amber, Vishal, Maanuj,

It has been such a while since we've talked. You know, it's almost blurred in my memories - instances of our togetherness. St. Martin's was a blast. But a few years have passed. I've changed. I'm not the same as I was in school. It's not the college which has changed me. That would be a cliché. It's different. But more about me later. I am writing this letter and such a feeling it gives me. It's like poetry. Bad poetry which only the poet can like. more

Fiction

St. Gervais

Restless and unable to calm her jangled nerves, Sadhavi decided to revisit the Church of St. Gervais. She hoped that this sacred spot would communicate something to her; she also hoped to relive the moments she had spent there with Kanav. As she could not find her Plan de Paris par Arrondisement, she decided to venture out without it. After all she had been there twice before and had walked in that area. What she didn't take into account was the state of mind that had accompanied those previous visits. The first one had been nothing but an anguished trance and the second one was a chance happening, nothing less than a miracle. There was no guarantee that she would find the place today. She wasn't even sure whether it was near Hotel de Ville or near Notre Dame. If latter, she would have to cross the river. more

Interview

Put poverty in museums

More than three months after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Muhammad Yunus, known popularly as the “poor man's banker,” has only one overarching dream: to create a world in which not a single human being is poor and where poverty is not to be seen anywhere except in museums.

In this interview with Manish Chand, the Nobel-winning Bangladeshi economist speaks about his first reaction of disbelief when he heard the exhilarating news about winning the $1.35-million prize, his idolisation by the people of Bangladesh and his unflinching belief that eradicating poverty is not some utopian oddball idea, but something “doable and achievable” that can be achieved in a not-too-distant future.

Q) What was your first reaction when you heard that you have won the Nobel Peace Prize?

A) When I got the news of winning the Nobel Prize, I didn't know how to react to it. First, there was complete disbelief. I thought maybe somebody was joking. And within five minutes, my phone started ringing and kept ringing for what seemed like hours with people from every corner of country and the world calling to congratulate me. more

In Conversation

I would go insane if I didn’t write

Indian-American author Abha Dawesar is a driven writer. Writing is a mental necessity for her, a constant wrestle with words and meanings to keep her daemons from running away with her sanity. “If I didn’t write, I would go insane,” says Dawesar, the author of That Summer in Paris and Babyji.

In this conversation with www.indiawrites.org, the young petite author speaks about her thematic obsessions with love and death; her experience as an Indian in New York and the new eyes with which the Americans see India; her love of philosophy; and her radiant faith in the future of the novel in a world cluttered with multi-media distractions.

Q) What’s your next novel about?

A) It’s about child; it’s not about grown-ups. It’s about the world through the eyes of this boy who is less than ten. He is exposed to everything around him, say in a big city like Delhi. more

Salman’s Magic, Desai’s Inheritance…

Rushdie travels to 16th century India, Italy

Salman Rushdie loves taking long walks into history’s corridors and gardens of myths that often intersect the past. His new novel will be set in the 16th century India and Renaissance Italy – a strange intertwining of two distant countries and civilizations that is sure to baffle his devoted readers. His new offering, which will hit the bookstores next year, is bound to excite much curiosity in India that now has an Italian-born Sonia Gandhi as the head of the ruling coalition. more

Kiran Desai misses solitude, writing

Basking in the glow of the Booker success, the 35-year-old Indian author Kiran Desai reconnected with her inheritance in Jaipur last week - her first trip to India after her tryst with literary glory last year. Although she confessed that she was not equipped to write about the “new India” that is now being feted just about everywhere in the West, she qualified this by saying that the emotional depth and resonance of her writing came from the country she left for the US as a teenager. more

Rising India

India ready to be global power

By Pranab Mukherjee

The international landscape today is significantly different from what existed even 15 years ago. How do we look at India's vision for the future? Our foreign policy since the time of independence has essentially been to expand India's strategic space. Our policy of non-alignment is our ability to judge and to act on our own judgment on the basis of enlightened self-interest. We do not wish to be passive observers and recipients of the actions of others, but would like to be one of the powers contributing to the shape of a global order which emerges and which allows us to pursue our vital interests. It also encompasses the policy of nurturing and increasing our activism in traditional constituencies in the developing world. more

Reviews

Love triangle in Stalinist gulag

House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Martin Amis's new novella is an audacious attempt to compress the past 60 years of Russian history with all its hidden squalor and unspoken dread through the triangular love story of two half-brothers and the Jewish woman they love. A "love story, gothic in timbre and triangular in shape," Amis' 11th novel revisits Stalin's labour camps and dramatises the nature of masculinity, power, violence and loveless sex.

The Road to Nowhere

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy's new masterpiece is a road trip, albeit a scary and nightmarish one, by a father and his young son as they trudge from the mountains to the coast in a post-apocalyptic world reduced to ashes and ruins. It’s an unremittingly bleak landscape evoked in stripped-down prose so characteristic of the author’s style in which darkness and grotesqueness are the norm, a world peopled by “men who would eat your children in front of your eyes” and looters who look like “shoppers in the commissaries of hell.”

Demystifying exotic Africa

My Mother's Lovers by Christopher Hope

My Mother's Lovers is the story of Alex who reminisces about his glamorous multi-faceted mother and the adventurous life she lived in Africa. Kathleen, a tall white woman, a woman of many talents, is a hunter, a woman with many lovers, one of them being the legendary novelist Ernest Hemingway and is an aviator who flew over South Africa.

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