In the preface to Don’t Slap Your Wife But Don’t Get Slapped Either, author Sunil Vaid says that although he agrees that it’s mostly women who are “suppressed, manipulated and tortured” by th

In the recent past a senior administrator and many times vice-chancellor in Punjab, as well as the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee have banned anyone other than a Sikh from writing on the reli

The ancient civilisation Sindhu/Indus/Hindu/India — steeped in arts, culture, administration and most of all science and a great reserve of natural resources — became a lucrative target for marauders who converted or killed and either way, plundered, pillaged and ruled for a thousand years.

Once upon a time life in Afghanistan had all the semblance of normalcy. And then as its fate got embroiled in war and violence, the country’s beautiful landscape was tragically mired in the colour of blood. Yet amidst the fear and struggle, the pain and loss, Afghans learned the art of living.

The somewhat precipitate decline of India’s economic growth during the last couple of years has obvious national security implications.

A new edition of Shiv K. Kumar’s novel, Nude Before God, has been released by Random House India, and so this is a good occasion to revisit this satirical work on death by the eminent litterateur. First published 30 years ago, in 1983, it nevertheless represents a contemporary take on a debate that has been of interest to humankind for centuries, central to which are questions like: What happens when we die? Do we come back in another form? How do our actions in this life affect the afterlife?

Meghna Pant’s short stories stick like burrs. They are small, dramatic pieces that hook into the skin with urgent claims that are not easy to resolve or brush off. In Dented and Painted Women, a dying, repentant widower offers a live-in prostitute a chance at redemption.

The book, Folk Theatre, Pandwani, based on the epic Mahabharat, documents evolution of a tribal ballad into a flourishing folk theatre form of central India and through the journey, how the narratives of tribal mystics and myths of the performing art gave way to epic Mahabharat as the theme of its present form of “Pandwani”.

A long-forgotten childhood encounter with a half-eaten corpse of a woman lying in the Hooghly led Indian-born writer and arts aficionado Glen Peters to create an Anglo-Indian female detective living in the 1960s.

Roll of Honour is an important work for it sets out to explore dark spaces in time and place and forbidden recesses of the mind. Set in the Eighties, when Punjab was traumatised by militancy and counter-militancy, it is the story of a schoolboy struggling to understand himself and his world.