New Delhi, Sept. 14 -- In his lifetime, Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906) was an avid traveller, who ventured beyond the boundaries of his home state Kerala to observe his subjects from close quarters, and ... Read More
New Delhi, Sept. 7 -- At 688 pages, Kiran Desai's new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, demands serious commitment from the reader-and it's not difficult to give it. Almost 20 years in the mak... Read More
New Delhi, Sept. 5 -- As far as opening lines of novels are concerned, The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta by writer and scholar Anuradha Marwah makes a lasting first impression. "It was morn... Read More
New Delhi, Sept. 5 -- On 27 August, former US President Barack Obama released his annual summer reading list, featuring the usual medley of fiction and non-fiction books (including Anita Desai's lates... Read More
New Delhi, Aug. 28 -- Arundhati Roy makes a striking confession early on in her luminous new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Explaining her reason for running away at the age of 16 from her home in K... Read More
New Delhi, Aug. 24 -- Fauzia Rafique's slim novel Keeru, elegantly translated from the Punjabi by Haider Shahbaz, contains multitudes in less than 200 pages. As a work of fiction, it trains its gaze o... Read More
New Delhi, Aug. 23 -- Amrita Mahale's debut novel, Milk Teeth, was set in Bombay (now Mumbai) of the 1990s. It followed the ups and downs of a close-knit Goud Saraswat Brahmin community in Matunga, a ... Read More
New Delhi, Aug. 19 -- In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes optimistically predicted that humans of the future would need to work only 15 hours a week because, in the next 100 years, technology would... Read More
New Delhi, Aug. 17 -- Ask any writer and it's likely they will admit that it takes a village to put a book out in the world. Starting with the author, the process usually unfolds through a widening ci... Read More
New Delhi, Aug. 9 -- Urdu scholar and translator Rakshanda Jalil's new collection Whose Urdu is it Anyway? is linked by one theme: to challenge the notion that Urdu is the language of Muslim writers a... Read More