Nawaid Anjum
Shadows of darkness
Nadeem Aslam, the 46-year-old British-Pakistani writer, makes sense of the world through exploring many lives, one book at a time. If Season of the Rainbirds (1993), his debut, was an exploration into the tensions between two ways of life — the traditional Islamic way of life and the modern, secular way — in Pakistan, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) burrowed into honour killing.
‘Ayurveda may lead beauty industry in the next decade’
It has been a long journey for India’s beauty industry’s best-known impresario Shahnaz Husain. For over 40 decades, the cosmetics czarina has been at the forefront of Ayurvedic “care and cure” that has inevitably made her a household name.
On a journey to find routes to collide with reality
After his Masters in mathematics from Yale University, Anjan Sundaram “broke” with America. Having made up his mind in favour of journalism, he landed in the Democratic Republic of Congo that “consumed” him. Mathematics, he writes in the book, “was pristine, but it offered no stimulus to the senses”.
Many shades of the mountains
Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947), the venerable Russian master of landscapes, has inspired a legion of artists. His paintings — Tibetan, Chinese, Indian, Russian and Japanese — are steeped in divergent cultures and stand out for their blend of Eastern and Western aesthetics.
Literary Kumbh
Even before the curtain rose on the 6th edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), its watchers had a moment of déja vu. The ghost of Salman Rushdie, who couldn’t show up last year, began to haunt the festival all over again.
“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what,” writes Rushdie in The Satanic Verses.
Exploring the long evenings of winter
Diplomat-author Navtej Sarna evokes Gogol, “To write, all you need to do is look around your room.” It may have been “enough” for Gogol, but not for Sarna who is “open” to experience and dips into the
A tale of game and government with dose of wit and humour
Sidin Sunny Vadukut’s middle name should have been “Funny”.
In the Twitterverse, where he has 46,909 (last counted on November 20), followers, it already is: On the microblogging site @sidin goes by “5idin 5unny 5adukut” and in 140 characters (mostly even in just one or four characters) he keeps the funny side up with his random observations and ruminations on anything and everything — current affairs, media, politics, life, culture, travel.
Babycare bible gets its first India adaptation
Baby and childcare is not a child’s play: it necessitates deeper understanding of the child’s various needs and the wider dynamics of family.
In memory of cinema of two glorious decades
Every nation needs its memories. Memories hold in check the possibility of history being relegated to oblivion,” writes filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt in the Foreword to Housefull: The Golden Age of Hindi Cinema, edited by Ziya Us Salam, which was released in New Delhi on October 30.
Chronicle of a life well lived
No man’s life can be fully known or his tale entirely told, argues the narrator of Yasmeen Premji’s (Wipro chairman Azim Premji’s wife) enchantingly evocative debut novel, Days of Gold & Sepia, “for a man’s secrets pass on with him”.
