The Other Country brings together a wide-ranging selection of essays by Mrinal Pande; one of India’s most respected journalists. Through chronicle; anecdote and hard-hitting reportage; Mrinal traces the many; ever-widening fault lines between Bharat and shining India; the small town and the metropolis.
Mrinal describes the Great Language Divide between Hindi and English; traces its origin; the role globalization has had in its spread; and the effect of this divide on contemporary literature and media. She vividly describes the anti-outsider movement in Mumbai and analyses the role that inequitable development; and the lack of opportunities in villages and small towns; has played in it. Mrinal tells the story of Prabha Devi of Tehri; Uttarakhand; who picked up scissors and comb to become village barber in the face of opposition and thus came to represent the enormous change in attitudes and stances that are now sweeping Indian society everywhere. And through a hilarious profile of the Mineral Water Baba of Faridabad; who can heal any ailment with a sealed bottle of mineral water; she analyses one of the big issues facing India’s villages and metropolises: its water-management systems.
Gulzar is regarded as one of India’s foremost Urdu poets today, renowned for his unusual perspectives on life, his keen understanding of the complexities of human relationships, and his striking imagery. After Selected Poems, a collection of some of his best poetry translated by Pavan K. Varma was extremely well received, Gulzar has chosen to present his next sixty poems in an inimitable way: labelling them Neglected Poems.
‘Neglected’ only in name, these poems represent Gulzar at his creative and imaginative best, as he meditates on nature (the mountains, the monsoon, a sparrow), delves into human psychology (when a relationship ends one is amazed to notice that ‘everything goes on exactly as it used to’), explores great cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and New York (‘In your town, my friend, how is it that there are no homes for ants?’), and confronts the most telling moments of everyday life.
In this unflinchingly candid memoir, Zareer Masani draws on the letters and diaries of his parents, charismatic politician Minoo Masani and his gifted wife Shakuntala, to paint an intimate portrait of two remarkable individuals and their prominent but very different families-the Masanis, Bombay Parsis, and the Srivastavas, UP Kayasths-united by marriage but divided by temperament, lifestyle and political affiliation. Minoo’s father Sir Rustom Masani was an ascetic scholar who scorned wealth and all the comforts it could buy. Shakuntala’s father, Sir J.P. Srivastava, arch-loyalist of the British Raj and viceregal councillor, made a fortune as a mill owner and brought up his daughter in the lap of hedonistic luxury. When the two fell in love and eloped, Minoo was a twice-divorced, left-wing Congress activist. Later, he became a founder of the pro-free-market Swatantra Party-a figure whom Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described as his ideological inspiration-leader of the Opposition in Parliament and a tireless campaigner against global Communism.
The author writes of his turbulent upbringing as an only child torn between the rival influences and attractions of his parents and grandparents; of the struggle to express his own sexuality in 1960s India; and of the stormy and agonizing breakdown of his parents’ marriage, which was closely interwoven with the political drama of Indira Gandhi’s rise to power and the Emergency she imposed.
From ‘Mora gora ang lai le’, his first film lyric written for Bimal Roy’s Bandini in 1963, to the Oscar-winning ‘Jai ho’ from Slumdog Millionaire, Gulzar has brought a rare poetic sensibility to popular Hindi film music over a five-decade-long career. His sophisticated insights into psychological complexities, his ability to capture the essence of nature’s sounds and spoken dialects in written words, and above all his inimitable-and often surprising-imagery have entertained his legions of fans over successive generations. It represents Gulzar’s most memorable compositions of all time, and feature anecdotes about the composition of the lyrics as well as sketches by Gulzar.
Described by Rabindranath Tagore as ‘revelations of my true self’, the poems and songs of Gitanjali established the writer’s literary talent worldwide. They include eloquent sonnets such as the famous ‘Where the mind is without fear’, intense explorations of love, faith and nature (‘Light, oh where is the light?’) and tender evocations of childhood (‘When my play was with thee’).
In this new translation to mark Tagore’s one-hundred-and-fiftieth birth anniversary, William Radice renders with beauty and precision the poetic rhythm and intensity of the Bengali originals. In his arrangement of Tagore’s original sequence of poems alongside his translations, Radice restores to Gitanjali the structure, style and conception that were hidden by W. B. Yeats’s edition of 1912, making this book a magnificent addition to the Tagore library.
