Tag: Book Review

Those were wonderful wonderful times. The middle of the 18th century. Calcutta, the second city of the British Empire, was an extension of the first city in many ways — in its riches, its arrogance and its excess. Except that in Calcutta these great imperial values included even the despondent native elite who, flushed with wealth, invented the most absurd and obnoxious ways to get rid of it. Sarnath Banerjee’s second graphic novel, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers has many…

There is a famous Laurel-Hardy strip where the two are soldiers stationed somewhere on the India-China border. They are worried about their dwindling resources till one day they chance upon the fact that the war had ended long ago and nobody had informed them. One cannot but sense a certain degree of sadness in what is an example of comic unreason. Beasts of No Nation, a ghastly tale of civil war somewhere in Africa, carries a tragic intensity that is…

The immediate reason for the publication of this book is the suggested amendment to criminal law in Britain, seeking to prevent any work from inciting religious hatred. Under this law, no work of art and imagination will be considered fit for public display or consumption if it makes comments deemed derogatory to any religion or faith. The resonance with similar issues in India is strong, but the comparison is not quite valid. Noises that violate free speech, part…

Reading Orhan Pamuk is no more a literary activity. Given the range of controversies that he’s surrounded by, Pamuk is almost a political figurehead, perhaps much to his dislike. He has found mention in the long list of the world’s foremost public intellectuals; his name allegedly caused the delay in the announcement of the Nobel Prize for literature; and most importantly, he has been booked under a controversial Turkish law for ‘revealing’ that his country was responsible for…