If you have visited Sikkim and taxied in the “cushioned unity” of a crowded jeep , with Nepali music backdropping a boisterous gang of local strangers, you’ve lived a story by Chetan Raj Shrestha. If you have read his published fiction – The King’s Harvest, a suite of novellas, and The Light of His Clan,…
Read more ‘Because Sikkim is small, and its realities are graspable, it can behave like a character’
SILIGURI, Darjeeling, India — Two years ago, when Niraj Lama began stocking an unknown tea from Nepal at Happy Earth Tea, his family’s tea importing company in New York, it was with some trepidation. Jun Chiyabari Himalayan Autumn Bouquet, a light tea with notes of hay, honey and apples, came from a tiny Nepalese tea-growing…
Want a Chetan Bhagat? Stay away from Rachna Books, the independent bookstore in Gangtok. Raman Shresta, the idealistic 40-year-old bookseller, still has to borrow money from his parents “well, almost every year” but refuses to stock some of the bestselling authors because of their “dubious literary merit”. In fact, he waits in ambush for unsuspecting…
Read more Sikkim’s own independent bookstore is a hotspot for culture
The packed plenary chamber of the World Conference Centre resonated in a thundering applause as Rafida Bonya Ahmed received the Deutsche Welle Bobs-Best of Online Activism award for the blog, “Mukto-Mona” (Free thinker), in Bonn last Tuesday. The blog was founded by her husband Avijit Roy, who was hacked to death on the streets of Dhaka in…
On 6 June, Bangladesh and India signed the historic Land Boundary Agreement. Originally conceived in 1974, it was aimed at settling long-standing territorial issues between the two countries. The deal includes swapping 200 enclaves – patches of island territories surrounded on all sides by another nation. The residents now have the right to stay where they…
Naseem Bergau-Khan’s earliest recollection of watching a Hindi film goes back to his days in Germany’s Oberhausen, his childhood home. He was about six, and he saw Ganga Jamuna, starring Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala, on television. All he remembers from that experience are his own tears. “I [had] cried a lot,” says the 35-year-old…
About the same time that Germany invaded Belgium, French violinist and conductor Phillipe Sandré was working up a different tune in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Armed with his violin, he raised a squad of pupils and in the autumn of 1915, when World War I was into its second year, set up The Calcutta School of…
China pledged investments worth $20 billion to India and the two neighbors signed more than a dozen agreements and committed to settling their contentious border disputes during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s maiden official visit to India, which began Wednesday and ends today.Over the next five years, China promised to help India upgrade its rail system and…
Read more Modi, Xi Put India-China Economic Ties Ahead of Border Tensions
Just keep his words and cut the rest. Show it to me when you are done.This is not an editor but a dreaded gangster, barking orders at investigative journalist Abhishek Dutta in the 2013 novel The Price You Pay by Somnath Batabyal. The novel tells the story of a cub reporter from a small town learning the…
Read more As the public perception of journalists has plummeted, Bollywood has followed suit
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Nepal earlier this week, the first by an Indian prime minister in 17 years, ushered in a new chapter in relations between the two neighbors. The two-day visit on Aug. 3-4 has been described by media in both countries as a success and reflects Modi’s interest in…
Read more After Successful Visit, Modi Must Deliver on India-Nepal Relations
Anuradha Sharma 