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Posts from the ‘Author’ category

A decade of reading Latin America – II

By Bhupinder Singh
While I was still under the spell of the writers of the Boom era, a new generation of Latin American writers were ready with more contemporary and evocative works. Beginning in the 1970s, many novels confirm the view that post-Boom Latin American literature has moved beyond ‘magical realism’ and is being enriched by a galaxy of writers with very distinctive styles.

A decade of reading Latin America – I

By Bhupinder Singh
Latin American literature is like the Amazon River, massive in its expanse and meandering across many thematic streams. The most well-known of these is its association with magical realism and what has come to be called the “dictatorship novels.”

Family Matters: Telling True Stories

By Lopa Banerjee
During a trip back home, a visit to an old pond/creek in the old neighborhood where I had stayed as a child triggered memories in an unexpected way. The pond brought back memories of one of the first, formative experiences of rain in my childhood. While roaming by the pond on a rainy day, some snippets of my grandfather’s death came to me in a flash, and I remembered the downpour that had occurred then, the rainy holiday I was enjoying in my mother’s maternal home, and how that day brought about my first brush with death.

In Conversation with the Tamil Author, Salma

By Safia Begum
If I wanted to write at night, I would go to the toilet, stand there, write, and come back. In the toilet, we had a small box for sanitary napkins; I used to hide my pen and papers there. And, again, in the morning I would take it out from there and send my poems to the magazines.

Thwarted Escape

By Lopa Banerjee
All these years I have worked to make Omaha my home with its long, tiring winter days of endless snowfall and mist, its sunlit days of solitude, its dark clouded summer evenings breaking out into violent storms and tornadoes. It is nowhere near the grandeur of experience of friends, who have been lured by the luxury and ambiance of big American cities and the dreams fostered there.

The Tanpura

By Lopa Banerjee
The summer I turned ten, I knew my mother, too, craved to sing these songs and wanted to teach me, so I could sing in the choir. Her voice ached to traverse the vast terrain of sounds between the high and low notes of the harmonium. I could not see then the atoms of the dozens of glittering particles inside her neck that toiled to spell the musical notes.

Book Review: Aman Sethi’s A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi

By Mosarrap H. Khan
Aman Sethi’s A Free Man:A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi, focused on the life of Mohammed Ashraf, is by no means a sociological work. It is a journalistic work that explores the life of one of those thousands of nameless workers who, while contributing significantly to India’s growth story, are often rendered faceless and seen as having no individual subjectivity.