India has been painfully experimenting with a market based approach since 1990. Gurcharan Das in his second book on the question of Artha (wealth), titled India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age, (2000) describes economic reform as a process of inducing “pain in a slow incremental manner” (p. […]
Ever since the lockdown began, friends have time and again asked me the same question. How am I managing my life in the lockdown? Well, for a writer like me, mid-afternoon solitude is nothing new. Solitude has become my second nature. Moreover writing and reading are essentially solitary affairs. Even in the past, I used […]
In India, elections are around the corner. This is when voters take stock of the things done in their names and elect a government. Modi’s performance in the last five years has been far from satisfactory. Today it would be fair to say that, with few exceptions, hardly anyone is buying what the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is selling.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was one of the most prescient philosophers, whose influence is felt even today. It could be said about him that he is read wherever printed literature or optical fiber has reached. But what does Marx mean to us today? How do we interpret Marx for our changed times? I remember that by 2005-2006, most people would mockingly remind me that Marx had become outdated and therefore his proper place was his London cemetery. But then, out of the blue came the 2008-2012 economic meltdown.
These days, even if you don’t read online journals, or thick books not asssigned by universities, Google is enough to tell you how messy the Indian economic and social situation is. Earnings are low. Unemployment has reached new heights especially among the young and, with the adoption of automation and privatization, this will only worsen.
One should not dismiss the odious statements from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its Sangh Parivar, and say that they are spewing venom.
Last year, just a few days before the dreaded November 8, the day on which Modi’s decree on demonetization came into effect, I was so tired and exhausted of being myself that I decided to quit the overcrowded city in which I live and plunge headlong into the wilderness of the countryside.
I finished writing a collection of short-stories, which has appeared as Kafka Sutra, almost after a year of turmoil and obsessive work, in February 2016. Three or four days after I secretly mailed the manuscript to my editors, I still remember how the news left me aghast when I sat down to eat my dinner with the idiot box before my eyes. Some Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students had chanted slogans inside the campus, which they had swiftly denied.
With this collection of short stories, Imtiaz Akhtar makes his bold debut. Kafka Sutra is the sort of book that as a teenager, I would have loved to sneak from my mother’s shelf, and that as a mother, I would secretly enjoy letting my daughter or son whisk away.
