Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: Beyond the Boulevards by Aditi Sriram

Beyond the Boulevards, Aleph Books. A monograph on Pondicherry by Aditi Sriram, this was a nice enough read but all through, it had the reader…well, this reader at least …forever searching between the words for something more, je ne sais quoi. For the ardent Pondyphile, and there are so many of us, it`s all there:…

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Book review: The Town That Laughed by Manu Bhattathiri

THE TOWN THAT LAUGHED, ALEPH BOOK COMPANY. Manu Bhattathiri`s debut novel is so steeped in a kind of malayalitvam, that if you are from God`s Own….,  you start to substitute Malayalam words for English ones, as you read! People remembered the times when unemployment was quite a pleasure. The times when young men woke up…

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Book review: This Unquiet Land by Barkha Dutt

          This Unquiet Land by Barkha Dutt (Aleph Books). The title line says `Stories from India’s fault lines,` and indeed this autobiography from arguably one of the country`s best TV news-journalists,  is just that: a klieg light shone on the disquieting things we would rather not dwell too much upon. Dutt…

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Book review: A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces

 Briefly, but with feeling First, the good news. They are all here: Tagore, Premchand, Manto, Chughtai. R K Narayan, Amrita Pritam, Ruskin Bond, Gulzar, Anita Desai. Thakazhi, Basheer, Paul Zacharia, Mahasweta Devi, Ambai, U R Ananthamurthy. Vikram Seth, Irwin Allan Sealy, Cyrus Mistry, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Chandra. And the cherry on the icing? This compilation…

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