The very first edition of the Dalit Literature Festival was held in Delhi from December 6 to 8. […]
Delhi
By Neeti Singh
For the Love of Pork, 2016, by Goirick Brahmachari comes through as a collection of brilliant and ambitious verse that is intensely contemporary, thickly layered and imagistic, and reads like beat poetry as it interrogates on one hand the presence and forms of borders in daily life; and celebrates on the other hand the excesses of modern living with its new-found freedoms that thrill in the flouting of social taboos. Brahmachari, who belongs to a younger line of Indian poets writing in English, draws profusely from his readings and understanding of literature, history, cultural theory, culture and politics. His writing explores the matrix of socio-political and existential issues, as it negotiates at the same time, the paradox of acceptance and irreverence in the lives of the middle class. In terms of poetic style and content, Brahmachari’s is a strong and impressive voice, equipped with both the conviction and the courage that a poet needs to explore new pathways in poetic craft, experience, and creative expression.
Goirick Brahmachari, who is an economics research consultant settled in Delhi, hails from Silchar, Assam. This fact is amply reflected in For the Love of Pork, his first book of poems, which is a collection of forty-five poems that map the poet’s years at home, the pain of borders in the hilly terrain of Assam, and that strange sense of being away from home – free, footloose and available to cosmopolitan lifestyle issues far away in dynamic Delhi. As happens with most cities, the Silchar of his growing up years has decayed and is reduced now, to –
Stinking gutters
of hypocrisy and mediocrity.
Broken roads, of hope once,
of disgust now, ignored
through years of slumber
and laziness, and an age
of rage-less youth.
Your universities
do not speak. (18)
The Seduction of Delhi by Abhay K., Bloomsbury India, 2014. Pg 92, Rs. 299.
Reviewed by K. K. Srivastava
David Mason’s acute observation in The Hudson Review that “The poetry industry fuels itself on shallow rewards, lines on a resume, praise in a workshop, none of which has anything to do with the solitary effort to write real poems” reflects poorly on the state of poets and the kind of stuff being oozed out in the name of poetry. But there are honourable exceptions like the two poetry collections I read recently—Vita Nova by Louise Gluck and The Seduction of Delhi by Abhay K. The latter is a collection of forty-seven poems. Abhay K. is an Indian Foreign Service Officer and a winner of the SAARC Literary Award. He is the author of two memoirs and five poetry collections. In a unique way in itself, the poet presents his thoughts and emotions in measures exquisite. The well-known Italian artist Tarshito has created the artwork for this book.
Abhay K. has indeed adopted a novel method of narration of his poetic thoughts—instead of expressing his musings about his subjects in the first person, the poet allows his subjects to tell their stories themselves to the listeners. That is the reason George Szirtes, winner, T.S.Eliot Prize for Poetry, perceives Abhay K’s poems as poems where “transformations are gentle and humane: the history is deep and lightly worn. This is the beautiful way to be introduced to a great city”.
By Elen Turner
Necropolis by Avtar Singh, New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2014. 268 pages.
Avtar Singh’s Necropolis is very different from a lot of English-language fiction currently emerging from India, a major strength of the novel. Part detective fiction, part literary, and incorporating much history and vampire imagery, Necropolis straddles various literary worlds.
Taking it as a mystery/crime thriller, it would be best not to give away too much of the plot in this review, as it is this that pulls the reader along. It opens with a murder—one in a string of murders—suspected to have been carried out by Delhi’s youth gangs. DCP Dayal and officers Kapoor and Smita Dhingra are on the case, and the novel follows their search for the killers. Further crimes occur, parallel or connected to the opening murder, including the killing of an African immigrant, the rape of a woman from the north-east of India and the kidnapping of a young boy from a wealthy family.
The festival, has lined up acclaimed writers and poets from across borders and generations, and is spread over […]
A new book by writer Aatish Taseer has Sanskrit as the central metaphor and touches several issues like Ayodhya, 1984 riots and the Emergency.
The Way Things Were is a family saga set in Delhi amid the commotion of the last 40 years of Indian history.
Skanda’s father Toby, the Maharaja of Kalasuryaketu who is a master of Sanskrit, has died, estranged from Toby’s mother and from the India he loved. Skanda is tasked with fulfilling Toby’s final wish and returning his ashes to his birthplace.
Nakul Krishna in The Caravan
Count on Urdu to have a word for it: shahr-i-ashob, lament for a city. Here is Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda, a poet from the eighteenth century:
How can I describe the desolation of Delhi? There is no house from which the jackal’s cry cannot be heard. … In the once-beautiful gardens where the nightingale sang his love songs to the rose, the grass grows waist-high around the fallen pillars and ruined arches. … Jahanabad, you never deserved this terrible fate, you who were once vibrant with life and hope, like the heart of a young lover.
We are answerable for having let our religious identities drive us to killing each other. Khushwant Singh has shown us some of our handiwork in Delhi, says Amitabh Bagchi in The Outlook
Khushwant Singh’s monumental work, Delhi: A novel, is, in the sense of the passage above, a novel about ghosts: of those who lie buried in beautiful stone mausoleums, of those who were thrown into unmarked graves, of those who were burnt on the ghats of the Yamuna and of those who became carrion for the city’s vultures. It is a novel about all the blood that has been shed in the triangular region of the North Indian plain demarcated by the ridge in the West and the South and the river in the East. It is a lament for an endless sequence of murders of brother by brother and for betrayals of lovers and fathers. It is a celebration of the seasons and the trees and the flowers, and of the life led in this city by the river through the generations. It is an old man’s admonition to the young, a free spirit’s “up yours” to blinkered puritans, and a writer’s querulous and occasionally exuberant attempt to speak truth not just to the powers of the time when the book was written, but to power across time.
The death of one of Delhi’s most cherished bookshop owners marks the end of an era: LiveMint
Kanwarjit Singh Dhingra, founder-owner of The Book Shop in the Capital, popularly known as KD, died of cancer on Wednesday. Singh was 73. He ran the book store with his wife Nini and doorman Sohan Singh. He is also survived by his three daughters, Rachna, Pia and Mallika.
Essentialism feeds specious arguments in Capital. Perpetual City breathes a time of grace and preferment: The Outlook
Books on Delhi clearly suffer in comparison with those that embrace Mumbai, such as Maximum City or Shantaram. Only Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, written with an obvious fondness for the city’s monuments but an irreverent disdain for its inhabitants, and Sam Miller’s Megacity, with its idiosyncratic approach, come to mind. Neither, though, seeks to be representative of a city, not in the sense Rana Dasgupta’s Capital claims to be ‘A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi’.
