The Water Snake Cometh…
KUALA LUMPUR/BEIJING: Fireworks singing in the skies, emotional family reunions, feasting and gift-giving. Millions of Chinese nationals, one fifth of the world’s humanity, ushered in the ‘Chinese Year of the …
Read MoreAuthor: Manish Chand
Look East: Flowering of India’s Asian dream
Intertwining the destinies and dreams of 1.8 billion people, India and the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are poised to pitch their mutually empowering multi-faceted relations into a …
Read MoreThinking Big: Small dreams, small things
The Right to Dream, and to live again! Listening to Mahasweta Devi is a spiritually uplifting and ethically cleansing experience. At the Diggi Palace in Jaipur, the 87-year-old writer-activist wove …
Read MoreLive from Jaipur: Celebrating power and beauty of words
It’s a celebration of the power and beauty of words. The power of words to transform and transfigure the world we live in. In its sixth outing, the Jaipur Literary …
Read MoreDarfur Diary: Lost in a Maze of Fact and Fiction
Flying from the Sudanese capital Khartoum to the mineral-rich western province of Darfur, the seat of an unfolding humanitarian crisis, is like travelling into another country and time zone. A …
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Portrait of an Islamist radical
KHARTOUM: A conversation with Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi, derided by the West as the “Black Pope of Terrorism,” is like descending into the dark heart of Islamist radicalism that flaunts its …
Read MoreThe Nowhere Man: Three Poems
The Nowhere Man Starved of sleep, he lets phantom words Dance in the dark deep Of his mind; kindling a holy unrest. Neither here nor there; ownsome and lonesome; The …
Read More‘Laughing a way of coping in Iran’
A thousand jokes go around in Iran every day mocking Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the pretensions of the righteous and the powerful, says Iranian writer Kamin Mohammadi in an …
Read MoreIndia to Pakistan: It can’t be business as usual
“The recent incident of the killing of two Indian soldiers in the Mendhar sector and the barbaric mutilation of their bodies has been condemned in the strongest possible terms. The …
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Taslima: Portrait of a writer in exile
Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen has willy-nilly turned into an itinerant minstrel, hounded by commissars and fanatics alike, intoning her outcast song of angst against the lies of religion and the state. Kolkata, the famously liberal cosmopolitan city hospitable to the muse and its patrons, looked on as the apparatchiks decided to send the beleaguered writer to Rajasthan after violent protests by Muslim fundamentalists.
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