Meera beautifully weighs in with an open letter to Aravind Adiga. It proves one my pet-peeve theories that the biggest intellectual celebrity is also the one with zero commonsense.
I have read much about how you came to write this book. You have been quoted as saying,” So, where’s this Shining India everyone’s talking about? It [...]
In the beginning of an essay on contemporary literary criticism, S.L. Bhyrappa dissects a Kannada short story, entitled Rotti (a dish made of rice flour) and cites numerous similar stories written in that vein. He observes that the story, like U.R. Anantha Murthy’s novel, Bharatipura is merely a filler of a pre-set pattern, a template. [...]
The old suspect, A.K. Ramanujan emerges out of the woodwork on Outlook’s pages. The magazine’s leader to this article says:
…in a pocket of the Delhi University, right-wing student activists have taken exception to this essay by the celebrated scholar A.K. Ramanujan, on the many Ramayanas living across languages and narrative genres, each different but no [...]
Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.
It’s pretty easy, but I’ll still ask: who said this? No Googling.
This post is partly a response to several comments I received on my posts related to the Ram Sethu project. The greater part, however, is my education, an attempt to trace the Rama (and Ramayana) consciousness in Tamil Nadu.
This was waiting to happen.
Prof U R Ananthamurthy has declared he will not take part in literary functions in future.
The decision came in the wake of strong criticism for his reaction on S L Bhyrappa’s controversial novel Aavarana that appeared in a section of the media. Prof Ananthamurthy said he was “misquoted” and in the [...]
My literary tastes have turned more classical nowadays. That hasn’t however, dimmed my fascination for Byron. For some reason, he’s like a powerful spell not in the least because Don Juan was one of the poems that has influenced my growing-up years.
Anyway, here’s a superb review of Byron’s biography. The biography be damned, I loved [...]
To me, the chief value of reading the Upanishads is simply the amazing stories that I find buried beneath layers of terse philosophical expositions. This is one of the several reasons why I hold the self-affirmed conviction that the Upanishads has something for everyone.
One such story is–for want of a better title–the story [...]
Blogger Amardeep Singh was featured earlier on this blog. His prose is interesting and I have only the deepest respect for his erudition in literature.
But I do certainly have issues when I read a post approving Pankaj Mishra. I’d have ignored him if he was just another blogger, the likes of I-have-a-PC-and-Internet-access-so-I-blog. But Amardeep Singh [...]
I haven’t followed any Girish Karnad plays after the horrendous Agni Mattu Male (The Fire and the Rain). But it is nice to learn that his plays still enjoy enormous fan following in the circles that matter.
To my knowledge, Karnad has written at least three plays after Agni Mattu Male. All three have expectedly received [...]
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