Mulk Raj Anand, one of the most highly regarded Indian novelists writing in English is best known for the impassioned social critique contained in his writings. His main concern has always been for “the creatures in the lower depths of Indian society who once were men and women: the rejected, who had no way to articulate their anguish against the oppressors.” His novels of humanism have been translated into several world languages.
Here we find 7 quotes from two of his popular works, Coolie and Untouchable that show the life for the underprivileged during pre-partition India.
Meet Private Detective; Arjun Arora
Ankush Saikia’s new read, More Bodies Will Fall is a tense and gripping thriller with an unforgettable detective –Arjun Arora – at its heart.
In the book, a girl from north-east India is murdered in Delhi. The main suspect is her ‘Indian’ boyfriend, but there isn’t enough evidence to prove his guilt. Amid a growing outcry about police neglect and racial injustice, detective Arjun Arora reluctantly takes on the case.
The search for answers embroils him in the dangerous new realities of the North-east – riven with strife and suffering – and also brings him face-to-face with an old enemy, culminating in an unexpected climax.
Let’s meet the detective, Arjun Arora:
6 Things we learned about Career Growth from Chandramouli Venkatesan's Catalyst
One of the most celebrated corporate leaders, Chandramouli Venkatesan has a commendable track record of over 25 years in the corporate business. A XLRI Jamshedpur alumnus, he began his career with Asian Paints in 1991 and worked in sales and marketing sectors , completing a successful decade. Following a brief stint in GE Capital, he joined Cadbury in 2005 where he worked until 2016, ensuring that the company becomes a household name in India. Currently, Venkatesan is the CEO for Pidilite Industries, responsible for creating and developing new business ventures for the company.
The corporate veteran penned down the book, Catalyst that identifies various kinds of stimuli that will enable you to win at your work place and everyday life.
Here are 6 things we learned about Career Growth from the Catalyst:
Your career will grow only as much as you are able to grow as an individual and professional.
Time spent at work does not equate to experience
Maximise learning cycles
Improve personal productivity
The impact of your bosses
A single poor decision on when to quit can have a very high impact on your long term success
Ha Ha Hu Hu: A Horse-headed God in Trafalgar Square – Excerpt
Ha Ha Hu Hu tells the delightful tale of an extraordinary horse-headed creature that mysteriously appears in London one fine morning, causing considerable excitement and consternation among the city’s denizens. Dressed in silks and jewels, it has the head of a horse but the body of a human and speaks in an unknown tongue. What is it? And more importantly, why is it here?
Let’s us read an excerpt from the book.
The animal gestured that the floor was all muddy and there was nowhere to sit down. People understood the gesture. They brought a big stool and handed it to the animal. The animal sat on the stool in the lotus position, closed its nostrils and began to meditate. Nobody understood what it was doing. After about an hour, it opened its eyes and stood up, tied the now dry cloth around its body and put the cloth it was wearing out to dry. It pointed towards the fruits, gesturing for more. The Lord Mayor sent his men and had a large basket of fruits brought in. The animal then gestured asking for a chƟmbu. Where could you find chƟmbus in England! So they gave it a glass instead. The animal took the glass, sprinkled a few drops of water on the fruits, muttered something, waved its hand around the fruits and then ate all the fruits. It gestured for more water. They gave it more water from the hose. The animal drank the water.
Sitting on the stool, the animal looked quietly around at everybody. It laughed again. Now the people understood that that was how the animal laughed. The animal pointed towards the cage and gestured asking why it was there. Everyone was amazed.
Someone in the crowd said, ‘No, this isn’t an animal. This is a human being. The head is a horse’s head but this surely is a human being. We have discovered new continents, but we haven’t yet discovered the continent where people like this live. Let’s find out what his language is and which country he comes from. Looks like he comes from a very civilized culture. Why put him in a cage? Get him out.’
The police officers didn’t agree. ‘We can’t free him from the cage,’ they said. ‘How can we be sure that it’s not an animal? What if it pounces on the crowd and eats people alive?’
So the cage stayed.
The officers talked about many things to the animal in English. It was clear the animal did not understand. Then they spoke in French, German, Italian and Russian, one after the other. Still the animal did not understand. They brought a black man and had him speak his language to the animal. Listening to all these languages, the animal began to laugh as if it were ridiculing them. The police didn’t know what else to do. After a little while the animal neighed, which sounded to people at a distance like ‘Kim ma e sudam? Kim edam?’ By now everyone knew that the animal was talking. But it did not know any of their languages, so they did not know how to communicate with it.
However, they noticed something interesting: The animal was totally calm and looked uninterested in the people around it.
All this time, the soldiers stood with loaded guns. Coming close to the bars, the animal looked at one of their guns. A soldier standing behind the animal was frightened and walked four paces back and held the gun close to him. The animal turned around and saw his frightened face. It realized that the man’s hands held some kind of an instrument for killing. It looked at the gun with some interest and asked the policeman to see the gun. The policeman refused.
Everyone looked on in amazement.
The sun was setting. People were leaving for their homes. For fun, the eight-year-old son of a police inspector poked at the animal from behind with his badminton racket. The animal turned around as the boy ran away and stretched its hands through the bars to catch him. The boy escaped but the animal did get hold of a soldier, pulling the gun from his hands into the cage. People were frightened and ran away. Even the police and the soldiers were fleeing when the Lord Mayor commanded them to stop.
The animal began to look closely at the gun.
The Beatles and their Time in India
“The Beatles arrived in Rishikesh in February 1968 and settled down in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ashram to learn Transcendental Meditation.” Ajoy Bose, in his book, Across the Universe traces the path the Beatles took to India and the dramatic denouement of their sojourn at the Himalayan ashram. From the book, we extract quotes from the four Beatles and the author about the Beatles’ time meditating in Rishikesh.
The Maharishi (Mahesh Yogi) had effectively cocooned them from the hysteria and hype of their fans and the media. This was the first real opportunity the four had to escape their identity as the most famous rock band in the world. They grabbed the prospect of just enjoying themselves as ordinary folk in a remote, obscure location, far from the relentless daily rush and the fame and fortune that had overwhelmed them.
Of them all, George had the best time from his stay in India. Within a few days in the ashram, George said he was already feeling fabulous.
His great experience was linked to the breakthrough he had in his practice of transcendental meditation.
Paul, who was not all that enthusiastic about Transcendental Meditation when he came to India, was pleasantly surprised at what it could do with his mind. He recalled one particular session that he described as the best he had:
Even Ringo, who had faced a series of harrowing experiences after landing in India, from a pain in his arm to his driver losing his way and from having trouble with an officious doctor at the hospital to his car heating up on the road. To his credit, he did try to take them in his stride and, in the beginning, was actually starting to enjoy the laid-back atmosphere at the ashram.
He and his wife, Maureen however, had been the least enthusiastic about coming to Rishikesh leaving their two young children back in London. And despite him finding his “spiritual home” here, after nine days at the ashram, Ringo and his wife called it quits.
John’s experience was a breakthrough in terms of his song-writing without using drugs or other substances albeit only momentary. John would later recall with some amusement,
The songs did reflect the mess inside John’s mind at that time. They underlined the conflict between his lack of enthusiasm to continue as a Beatle and his fears of not knowing what to do if he wasn’t one.
His song ‘I’m So Tired’, for instance, is a lament over not being able to sleep for three weeks since he came to the ashram, tossing and turning in his bed, smoking like a chimney, as his inner demons tormented him. It revealed his tired mental frame and he would later praise it as one of his better songs from Rishikesh.
True, the boys may have snapped old personal bonds and sown the seeds of the unravelling of the and itself, yet Rishikesh only provided the breathing space for the Beatles to realize their own selves and move on from their past lives and identity as a band. With the Himalayas looming above and the Ganga flowing below, they had gained paradise and then lost it as the modern fairy tale of the four lads from Liverpool reached its closing stages.
7 Things To Know About K.R. Meera
K.R. Meera is a multi-award-winning writer and columnist who has published more than a dozen books including short stories, novels, and essays, winning some of the most prestigious literary prizes.
Her latest book, The Unseeing Idol of Light, is a haunting tale that explores love and loss, blindness and sight, obsession and suffering-and the poignant interconnections between them.
Here are 7 things you didn’t know about the esteemed author:
Choices by Shivshankar Menon – An Excerpt
Shivshankar Menon served as national security adviser to the prime minister of India from 2010–14 and as India’s foreign secretary from 2006–09. A career diplomat, he has served as India’s envoy to Israel (1995–97), Sri Lanka (1997–2000), China (2000–03) and Pakistan (2003 06). In 2010, Menon was chosen by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the world’s top 100 global thinkers. Menon in his book, Choices, gives an insider’s account of the negotiations, discussions and assessments that went into the making of India’s foreign policy.
Let’s read an excerpt from the book- Choices.
———–
I am often asked why India committed itself to not using its nuclear weapons first. The center-right National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government adopted the no-first-use doctrine when India first publicly tested nuclear weapons at Pokhran in 1998, and all subsequent governments of India have reiterated this pledge.1 The doctrine states that:
The fundamental purpose of Indian nuclear weapons is to
deter the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons by any
State or entity against India and its forces. India will not be
the first to initiate a nuclear strike, but will respond with
punitive retaliation should deterrence fail.
India will not resort to the use or threat of use of nuclear
weapons against States which do not possess nuclear
weapons, or are not aligned with nuclear weapon powers.
There is still some residual anxiety in India about the wisdom of this commitment, particularly in military minds. Why have a weapon and forswear its use? India could have followed the United States and Pakistan in retaining the option of using its most powerful weapon first should the nation’s defense require it.
The answer to that question lies in India’s nuclear doctrine, which is itself a product of the unique circumstances in which India finds itself. Those circumstances also explain why India chose to test nuclear weapons and become a declared nuclear weapon state (NWS) in 1998.
By the late 1990s, India was in a situation where two of its neighbors with whom India had fought wars after independence, Pakistan and China, were already armed with nuclear weapons and were working together to build their capabilities and proliferate them in Asia. The international nonproliferation regime was not in any position to address this problem. India therefore chose to become a declared NWS in 1998. The Indian government made that decision in the face of opposition by all the major powers, despite misgivings within Indian society, and after twenty-four years of international nuclear sanctions resulting from India’s first nuclear test, Pokhran-I, in 1974. (India described the 1974 test as a “peaceful nuclear explosion,” adopting a term from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, whereas the 1988 test was described by the government of India as a nuclear weapon test.) Those sanctions had been designed to “cap, cease and roll back” India’s civil nuclear program and potential to make atomic weapons. They had failed to do so. Since 1974, India had also been threatened with nuclear weapons at least three times: twice by Pakistan and once, implicitly, by the entry of the nuclear-armed U.S. aircraft carrier USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal during the 1971 war with Pakistan. (The Enterprise had also entered the Indian Ocean in 1962 when India and China fought their brief border war, but that move was intended to support, not threaten, India.)
When India decided to test nuclear weapons publicly, in 1998, it was evident that nuclear weapons, because of the scale and duration of the destruction they cause, are primarily political weapons, the currency of power in the nuclear age, rather than effective warfighting weapons. The government of India therefore declared after the 1998 tests that these weapons were to prevent nuclear threat and blackmail, and that India would not be the first to use nuclear weapons against other states. If, however, anyone dared use nuclear weapons against us, we would assuredly retaliate and inflict unacceptable damage on the adversary.
————
4 Difficulties We All Face While Using Public Toilets
Neha Singh is a Mumbai- based theatre practitioner, author and activist. She directs, produces, writes and acts in plays for children and grown-ups. She has authored three children’s books- Bela Misses Her Train, The Wednesday Bazaar and Moongphali. Singh’s latest book- I Need To Pee highlights the ever-relevant worry of having a safe and clean toilet experience.
The protagonist of I Need to Pee-Rahi loves slurping refreshing drinks, and so she always needs to pee. But boy, does she hate public loos!
Here are some difficulties Rahi faces when using public toilets:
An Unsuitable Boy by Karan Johar – An Excerpt
Karan Johar is synonymous with success, panache, quick wit, and outspokenness, which sometimes inadvertently creates controversy and makes headlines. KJo, as he is popularly called, has been a much-loved Bollywood film director, producer, actor, and discoverer of new talent. Baring all for the first time in his autobiography, An Unsuitable Boy, is both the story of the life of an exceptional film-maker at the peak of his powers and of an equally extraordinary human being who shows you how to survive and succeed in life.
Let’s read an excerpt from his best selling book, An Unsuitable Boy–
—————————————————————————————————————————————————–
My first proper meeting with Shah Rukh Khan was on the sets of Karan Arjun with my dad. Then I met him on the sets of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge where I told him that many years ago, I had sat across him in Anand Mahendroo’s office. He said he remembered being there but didn’t remember seeing me. Now when I look back, it was a really weird first meeting. Who knew what life had in store for both of us?
My father had taken me along to the sets of Karan Arjun. I knew Kajol was going to be there; she was somebody I had known as a child (she was one of the few people who lived in South Bombay, on Carmichael Road). I was a bit nervous because my father had started taking me around a little (he said I should go out there and meet people). He wanted to sign Shah Rukh for Duplicate. This was before I started to assist Adi (Aditya Chopra) in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. So I called Kajol and said, ‘I’m coming for the shooting of your film. Will you be there?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I’m doing a song sequence, “Jaati Hoon Main” [which went on to become quite popular].’
Karan Johar has detailed his long friendship with Shah Rukh Khan in his autobiography, ‘An Unsuitable Boy’. Karan writes that after the duo went through a slightly distant patch, they reconciled at a party for Deepika Padukone’s ‘Piku’ success.
I had this preconceived notion about Shah Rukh. I thought he was this young brat, borderline arrogant. But within five minutes of that meeting in Film City, my opinion of him changed. He was warm and chatty.
I remember my father got out of the red car we had and Shah Rukh came up to the car and opened the door for him. It was meant to be a ten-minute meeting, but they had broken for lunch or something and Shah Rukh spoke non-stop for two hours! He was so accessible, friendly and respectful of my father that he won me over in those two hours. I was very sensitive about how people treated my father because I knew what he had gone through. He said, ‘I’ve heard so much about you, sir, and such wonderful things about you as a human being.’
… That was my first meeting with him. I remember coming back and telling my father what a nice guy Shah Rukh was. He was so different from what I thought movie people were like. I had seen my father dejected and disappointed with so many of his fraternity people. I was not cynical but I was apprehensive about them. But Shah Rukh was an outsider and he was new. His syntax as a human being was very different from others in the film zone. I remember being completely enamoured by how he connected as a human being. He was so charming. He was not my favourite actor; I was a big Aamir Khan fan. But somehow in that two-hour meeting, my entire perception of him changed. I felt he was magnetic, charming, funny and sensitive. All these qualities came jumping out at me.
There’s so much that’s been said about Shah Rukh and me. Yes, there was definitely a distance between us in recent years but that was because we were not working with each other. There’s no other reason. And there were a lot of people who broadened this gap. There were people who said things to him, and who said things to me.
I sent him a message to come on Koffee with Karan in the last season, for the New Year episode, to which he didn’t reply. But he replied to every other message I sent him, about everything else. Maybe, he didn’t want to come for the show. I understood he didn’t want to come, and he expected me to understand. I didn’t ask him after that. It’s not that I called him and said, ‘Why are you not replying?’ But I called him when there was a problem or a situation I needed his advice on. Or I would go and have a drink with him in his house.
When two people are so close, when they’ve done six feature films together and then haven’t worked together on the set for a while, there’s bound to be a gap. That’s the way the industry is. The fault is mine because I went on record to say I would never make a film without Shah Rukh Khan. I should not have said that because I put that seed in his and everybody else’s head. I don’t blame people for saying things because I went on record and then didn’t live up to my promise. So it’s my fault. I don’t blame him. Also, you get attached to somebody, and Shah Rukh is a very possessive person. He’s a possessive friend. I think I may have hurt him when I made a film without him. And I think I got hurt because when I did, I felt he didn’t give me that paternal or fraternal feeling that I had from him otherwise. I think we were two hurt friends for no reason.
Shah Rukh and I have the most awesome chemistry at work. When we work together, it’s magic. And when the right film is to be made, it’ll be made. But it has to be something that we both love. Even when there was this minor or mild distance between us, on many levels, he was still my first go-to person in a situation of distress, or to seek help or advice. When I had a falling out with Kajol, the first call I made was to Shah Rukh. He came to meet me, spoke about it to me. Then I called Adi, and we discussed it. But my instinct was to call Shah Rukh first.
He had nothing to do with the problem. But I still called him because somewhere Shah Rukh, Kajol and I have been so close. We’ve built a very solid part of each other’s careers together. I called him to discuss the situation, to know whether what I was saying was valid and right. And he was very helpful. He called me right through every day that week to check whether I was okay.
When Gori Tere Pyaar Mein bombed — and I was not used to having that kind of a big failure — he called me to ask, ‘Are you okay?’ I said, ‘Yeah, things happen, shit happens. Once in a while you have to deal with a film that doesn’t work.’ So while admittedly there was a distance between us, it did not take away from the largeness of our relationship.
I think Shah Rukh and I are aware of the fact that people are envious of our relationship, which is why we’ve never had a blowout with each other. There was a simmering, silent, respectable distance between us. But there’s also an equal amount of love and affection we have for each other. That’s never going to go. I have a huge amount of respect for him. He can ask anything of me and I will do it. And I know that if I were in dire straits, and if he could do something to change that situation, if it was in his power, he would do everything to help me. There’s a big layer of love and respect still, and no one can come in the way of that.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Eleven Different Ways to Love
People have been telling their love stories for thousands of years. It is the greatest common human experience. And yet, love stories coach us to believe that love is selective, somehow, that it can be boxed in and easily defined. Eleven Ways to Love, is a collection of eleven remarkable essays that widen the frame of reference: transgender romance; body image issues; race relations; disability; polyamory; class differences; queer love; long distance; caste; loneliness; the single life; the bad boy syndrome . . . and so much more.
Let’s have a look at 11 different ways to love from this book.
A Letter to My Lover(s) by Dhrubo Jyoti
The Shade of You by Anushree Majumdar
Size Matters by Sangeeta
A Cross-Section of My Bad Boyfriends by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
When New York Was Cold and I Was Lonely by Maroosha Muzaffar
The One but Not the Only by D
The Aristoprats by Shrayana Bhattacharya
Where Are My Lesbians? by Sreshtha
The Other Side of Loneliness by Preeti Vangani
I Am Blind, so Is Love! by Nidhi Goyal
The Smartphone Freed Me: Dating as a Trans Woman by Nadika Nadja
