Tag Archives: Pavan K Varma

New Release: Suspected Poems by Gulzar

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gulzar“He had the blue cow tattooed on his right shoulder

He would have been killed in the riots yesterday

But they were good people—

Seeing a cow, they let him go!”

Written in Gulzar’s inimitable style, the poems in his newest volume of poetry reflect and comment, sometimes elliptically through a visual image, sometimes with breathtaking immediacy and directness, on the political reality in the country today. Powerful, poignant and impossible to ignore or gloss over, the fifty-two threads that make up Suspected Poems unfold across the entire political spectrum—from the disturbed climate in the country and the culture of intolerance to the plight of the aam aadmi, from the continued oppression of Dalits and minority communities to fluctuating Indo–Pak relations.

Published by Penguin, Suspected Poems has been translated into English by Pavan K. Varma. Suspected Poems will be available in a special keepsake bilingual edition.

About the Author:

Gulzar is one of India’s leading poets; he has published several volumes of poetry and short stories (many of which are available in translation) and is also regarded as one of the country’s finest writers for children. A greatly respected scriptwriter and film director, he is one of the most popular lyricists in mainstream Hindi cinema. He gained international fame when he won an Oscar and a Grammy for the song ‘Jai ho’. Gulzar received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2002 and the Padma Bhushan in 2004. In 2014 he was awarded the prestigious Dadasaheb Phalke Award. He lives and works in Mumbai.

About the Translator:

Pavan K. Varma is the author of The Great Indian Middle Class, Being Indian, Becoming Indian and several other books. After a long and distinguished diplomatic career, he served as cultural adviser to the chief minister of Bihar, and was a member of the Rajya Sabha from 2014 to 2016

 

The next big thing: Books to look forward to in 2017

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What will be in, what will be out, what’s going to be hot and what’s not, experts tell us about books that threaten to stir a storm in 2017

R. Sivapriya, Executive Editor, Juggernaut Books

2017 looks like it will be the year of women writers. At Juggernaut, we are publishing impressive debuts by three young women — Anita Sivakumaran, Tashan Mehta and Devi Yesodharan. And the new novels of two of the most promising voices in the Indian literary landscape — Meena Kandasamy and Parvati Sharma.

And of course, 2017 will be the year of Arundhati Roy. I am hugely curious to read the new novel. It is certainly going to be the most talked about book of the year. Seriously, women writers are all set to own the year.

I am also looking forward to Ali Akbar Natiq’s first novel (in English from Urdu) and Aniruddan Vasudevan’s debut short story collection (in Tamil). I know they are both in work in progress and should be in print later this year. And I also can’t wait for the new China Mieville – The Last Days Of New Paris to reach India.

Kapish Mehra, Managing Director, Rupa

It’s hard to be crystal ball gazing, but I think 2017 will be an interesting year for Indian publishing. Among genres, I see that non-fiction will further consolidate in the market, as it has for the past few years even as fiction — both literary and commercial — continue to.

Children’s fiction too looks like it’s going to be a promising space in the coming year. We at Rupa are coming out with a series of Mighty Raju pictorial books, combining educational content with entertainment. Read more

Source: DNA India

Book Release: I Swallowed the Moon: The poetry of Gulzar

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Gulzar-DelhiA book on Gulzar’s poetry was released in the presence of the famous poet and Hindi film lyricist himself at Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi on October 24, 2013.
The book, I Swallowed The Moon: The Poetry of Gulzar (HarperCollins India), is written by Saba Mahmood Bashir, who teaches at Jamia Millia Islamia as a guest faculty.
The book was first launched at the Bangalore Literary Festival on September 28, 2013 by Gulzar and lyricist Prasoon Joshi. It was followed by a panel discussion on October 24 at Jamia Millia Islamia on the theme, ‘The Poetry of Gulzar’ where the panel consisted of Gulzar, Pavan K Varma, Sukrita Paul Kumar, Prof Asaduddin and Saba Bashir.  
“This book is culled out of my PhD thesis from IIT, Delhi,” Saba told Kitaab. “The book focuses on the poetry of Gulzar, placing him as a Progressive Poet in Popular Culture.”

Review: Chanakya’s New Manifesto

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chanakyaThis is not, alas, the greatest time to be an Indian: never has the potential future looked so bright, yet never has the present looked so depressing. A few months ago, Gurcharan Das presented India Grows at Night, his thesis on what needs to be done to resolve our national crisis. Chanakya’s New Manifesto can perhaps be seen as a companion volume to that. While the former is a cerebral, idealistic approach to the problem, the latter—written by a former bureaucrat with political aspirations—gets down to the nitty-gritty and offers a comprehensive 354-point action plan on how to proceed in five key areas of national priority: governance, democracy, elimination of corruption, security and the creation of an inclusive society. Thus, if Gurcharan Das’s book was the ‘What’, Pavan Varma’s book is a ‘How’.

Varma notes that the basic problem regarding governance is that our Constitution could not foresee today’s era of fractured multi-party coalitions, which result in governments that must focus their energies on simply surviving, rather than on the business of governing the country. The first thing we need to do, obviously, is to fix this absurd situation. Varma touches on alternative democratic systems, such as the American and German systems, but suggests that it would be more pragmatic to, instead, refine our own current system and set down tough—and strictly enforced—rules for coalitions. These would include, among other things, the announcing of coalition groupings, such as the UPA or NDA, before (not after) elections; a mandatory three-year lock-in period for all coalition partners; stinging penalties for anyone who breaks the rules of conduct; and the announcement of explicit common governance agendas for coalition groupings (as, indeed, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats worked out in the UK in 2010).

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