Author: Editor_Kitaab

Book Excerpt: The Alphabets of Latin America- A Carnival of Poems by Abhay K.

A preview from The Alphabets of Latin America: A Carnival of Poems by Abhay K. (Bloomsbury, 138 pages, ISBN 9789389867909, Paperback)

The Alphabets of Latin America is collection of poems by poet-diplomat Abhay K. written during his travels across Latin America between 2016-2019. Organized alphabetically from A-Z,it takes you on a roller coaster ride to one of the most culturally and geographically fascinating continents known for its legendary Maya and Inca civilizations, sizzling Samba and Tango, the world’s biggest carnivals, labyrinths of Borges, magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, great poetry of Ruben Dario, Pablo Neruda , Gabriela Mistral, Cesare Vallejo, Octavio Paz, fascinating art of Frida Kahlo and Fernando Botero, among others.

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Narratives on Nazism and Nationalism with Rahman Abbas

Critically acclaimed, award winning author Rahman Abbas needs no introduction. A Mumbai based fiction writer whose book Rohzin won the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 2018, Abbas is known to captivate the readers with unique storylines and unforgettable characters. Since his debut in 2004 with Nakhalistan ki Talaash ( The Search of an Oasis), he has penned one masterpiece after another. From winning awards to having his books translated into various foreign languages, he has done it all. Rohzin was not only the first Urdu novel to be discussed in Germany, it was also adopted as a part of Urdu curriculum in INALCO. Sometime last year, he won a research grant for his next novel and travelled to Europe. 

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Quarantined Times of Hope and Despair – Readings by Shabana Azmi

Noted actress Shabana Azmi, reads a short-story ‘River of No Return‘ written by Tabish Khair.

In words of the author,

“The story she reads out here is a story of violence and despair, but the fact that she found the time to make this brilliant recording is also illustrative of the other side of our human crisis: we are not just prisoners in the cells of our devastation. Not during the pandemic, and not afterward. There are ways to connect. There are ways to organize. There are ways to hope.“

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Short Story: Tawakkul – A Story of Faith by Eman Khalid

It is not until we lose something, do we realize the true significance of it. It is not until we make mistakes do we realize where we went wrong. Human nature is such, we can’t help but make mistakes. And some people are fortunate enough to discipline those mistakes and better themselves. However, some people are arrogant enough to acknowledge their mistakes. They think of themselves as superior to the rest. And these are the kinds of people who never learn anything in life. Because if we believe that we are right all the time, what do we learn? We are just mere human beings in this journey of life. Along the way, we might get distracted by the beauty of this world. Us human beings, we are uncanny, aren’t we?

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New Releases from Asia : May 2020

FinTech Future: The Digital DNA of Finance by Sanjay Phadke

Publisher: SAGE Publications India / SAGE Response

Year of publication: 2020 / March

Pages: 232

Price: INR 450

Buy your copy

Book Blurb:

Fintech is challenging banks and squeezing all our financial transactions onto a mobile screen! Should we be worried? 

We make payments via PayPal or Paytm, shop on Amazon or Flipkart, book accommodation on Airbnb or Oyo and call a cab using Uber or Ola apps. The big tech companies are taking care of all our finances virtually while new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), blockchain, big data, 5G and quantum computing promise to raise a new storm in the future of finance. Fintech Future is the story of technology disrupting finance—from coin to bitcoin, banknote to cloud and stodgy old banks to AI—viewed from the perspective of whether it helps make the world a better place.

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One Drop of Blood : Mourning and martyrdom

Namrata reviews One Drop of Blood by Ismat Chugtai based on the battle of Karbala.

Published by Women Unlimited (An Associate of Kali for Women), 2020

Featured in Hindustan Times as one of the interesting books early this year, One Drop of Blood by Ismat Chugtai is a unique book in many ways. Firstly, it is the last work of Ismat Chugtai and secondly, it so different from her usual line of work.

One drop of Blood is based on the battle of Karbala fought in 680 A.D. in present-day Iraq between Yazid, the reigning Caliph and his mighty soldiers and Imam Husain, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad with his small army. According to the Islamic calendar Muharram is the first month of the year and the second holiest month, after the month of Ramzan. Muharram is also a period of mourning the martyrdom of Imam Husain and his family (including his infant grandchild) in the battle of Karbala.

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Book Excerpt: 2062 – The World That AI Made by Toby Walsh

Witness the fascinating world of AI, with Toby Walsh, one of the world’s leading researchers in Artificial Intelligence, in his latest book, 2062 – The World that AI made. (Published by Speaking Tiger, 2020)

THE MACHINE ADVANTAGE 

To understand why Homo sapiens is set to be replaced, you need to understand the many advantages computers have over humans and that the digital world has over the analog. Co- learning is one important advantage, but let’s look at some others. 

The first is that computers can have a much more expansive memory capacity than humans. Everything we remember has to be stored in our bony craniums. Indeed, we already pay a significant price for having heads as big as they are. Until recently, childbirth was one of the major causes of death for women. And the size of the birth canal limits us from having bigger heads still. 

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Into Tunku Halim’s World of Haunted Mansions and Supernatural Powers

Tan Kaiyi in conversation with Tunku Halim: The Dark Lord of Malaysian Horror

In Tunku Halim’s illustrious career in horror writing, his beginning could be the strangest story of all in the history of the genre.

His first ever published work was Everything the condominium developer should have told you, but didn’t, containing his musings on buying condominiums during the Klang Valley real estate boom in the ‘90s. He followed that up with a sequel, Condominiums: Purchase Investment & Habitat, before publishing his first ever horror novel, Dark Demon Rising, in 1997. The hero of the story is Shazral, a city lawyer, who returns to his home kampong to attend his father’s funeral. It is there that he realises that he has been given a supernatural inheritance, in the form of a Hantu Penanggal, a Malay nocturnal vampiric entity.

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