Late night, sometime in the hours before dawn, Rajen Lama* of Kurseong, a town in the West Bengal’s mountainous Darjeeling district, drives down to Siliguri, about 35 km away in the foothills. The first thing he buys when the shops open is formula milk. Next, he picks up some vegetables and rations for his family…
Read more Food shortages intensify in Darjeeling hills but the statehood movement remains strong
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
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…
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
The Bharatiya Janata Party has had to reevaluate its position on a number of issues since coming to power, from rail ticket prices to classified documents dealing with wars in India’s history. One little discussed instance is the party’s changed stance on the Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh, signed in 1974. The LBA – also…
Read more Why Sushma Swaraj’s little-noticed change of tune in Dhaka is a good sign
Anuradha Sharma 