I only remember snatches of the conversation. “Bora ma baandheko” – Tied inside a sack – our neighbour relayed what she had heard from somewhere else. I remember the expression of fear and disgust on her face and her hand gestures as she showed how the victim’s breasts had been sliced off. That was all I…
Read more A wave of bold new books on the Gorkhaland agitation
If many people were taken aback – and then voiced their unhappiness – at the Nobel Prize for Literature going to a songwriter, others were quick to argue that Bob Dylan was not the first: that India’s own Rabindranath Tagore had beaten him to it 103 years ago, in 1913. But did Tagore actually win…
Read more Sorry, people, but it was for poetry and not lyrics that Tagore won the Nobel
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’
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
He promises to give me “something extra” as we begin the interview in the lobby of a hotel on Kolkata’s Park Street. In the city for the Kolkata Literary Festival (8-13 January), he’s been giving several interviews. Two stacks of his just-released novel, Land Where I Flee, and the 2012 collection of short stories, The Gurkha’s Daughter,…
Is it time people stopped seeing Tasher Desh (The Land of Cards) as a children’s play? “Oh yes,” chuckles Q. “We’ve f****d it!” The pride in the ‘achievement’ is unmistakable. It is no different from that of a child who has just broken the glass panes in his classroom to protest being thrown out for not getting…
Anuradha Sharma 