Selected Posts

Latin American Literature

A Decade of Blogging Latin American Literature (Part I, Part II, Part III)

Roberto Bolano:

• Nazi Literature in the Americas
• The Savage Detectives
• Distant Stars
• Two Novels about Mexico

Cesar Aira

• How I became a Nun
• An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

Mario Vargas Llosa

• The Discreet Hero (2015)
• The Dream of the Celt (2009)
• Mario Vargas Llosa’s Exasperatingly Long Wait (for the Nobel)
• The Bad Girl
• The Feast of the Goat
• The Time of the Hero

Tomas Eloy Martinez

• Santa Evita
• The Peron Novel

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Now, who will tell the tale? (Obituary)

Others

• My Documents by Alejandro Zambra
• The Book of Lamentations by Rosario Castellanos
• The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela
• Eternal Curse on the Reader of these Pages by Manuel Puig
• El Infierno by Carlos Martinez Mareno
• The Last Song of Manuel Sendero by Ariel Dorfman
• The Burning Plains and other stories by Juan Rulfo
• With Borges by Alberto Manguel
• The Assistant by Robert Walser

Literature

Book Reviews

• Shifu, You’ll do anything for a Laugh by Mo Yan
• The Assistant by Robert Walser
• On Tolstoy’s War and Peace
• On Lesser Known Classics
• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
• The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

Short Essays

• A Decade of Blogging: A literary journey through 20th century Russia
• On Mario Vargas Llosa
• On Albert Camus
• On Joseph Conrad
• On Garcia Marquez
• On Yasunai Kawabata
• Carlos Fuentes, Turgenev and Thomas Mann on Faust

Films:

Anhey Ghorey da Daan (Alms for a Blind Horse)

India

Chandigarh’s Rock Star: Nek Chand
Half Slum, Half Paradise: Two Takes of the Indian City
Kanshiram by Badri Narayan
Bipan Chandra; The Historian of Modern India
The Known Turf by Annie Zaidi
Jangalnama: Travels through Maoist Guerrilla Zone by Satnam
Ayodhya 6 December 1992 by PV Narasimha Rao (Book Review)
The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen
Indian Nationalism: A Study in Evolution by Sitanshu Das
The Sena Story by Vaibhav Purandre
The Concerned Indian’s Guide to Communalism by KN Panikkar
Indian Modernity: Contradictions, Paradoxes and Possibilities by Avijit Pathak
Words Like Freedom: Memoirs of an impoverished Indian family by Siddharth Dube
Everyone Loves a Good Drought by P. Sainath

Literature

Writing as Resistance: The indomitable Art of Mahasweta Devi
Wrong Heaven by Rabindranath Tagore (a translation)
Under the Shadow of Kamakhya by Indira Goswami
The Shelter of the World by Salman Rushdie
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh
Drizzle of Yesteryears by MK Ajay
The Famous Ghalib by Ralph Russel
The Ardent Pilgrim: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Mohammad Iqbal by Iqbal Singh
Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags by edited Tapan Basu, Sumit Sarkar et et al
The Babri Masjid- Ramjanmabhumi Issue: Anatomy of a Confrontation edited by S. Gopal

Indian Politics

• Indian Writers’ on Warpath
• The Significanceof being Kansi Ram
• Running Away from Gandhi
• The Deafening Silence of Dalits in Punjab
• The Left, Caste and Dalits: A Troubled Relationship
• Understanding the Spirit of Indian Politics
• Dr. Ambedkar and Sikhism
• It is Still 6 December 1992
• CPM and the New Class
• When it was a bliss to be a communist
• Tehelka Expose: The Political Context
• The Honest Policeman
• Gujarat: Thoughts on the threat from Hindutva and Islam
• Kaifi Azmi: The Poet who would die in Socialist India
• Pramod Mahajan’s Legacy
• How Kashmir is Being Won
• Nuclear Deal and the Tragic End of an Experiment
• Midnight’s Children: An Analysis of Independence Day Speeches of 1947
• A Politician Called Manmohan Singh
• In Praise of Sonia Gandhi
• Short note on Dalit painter Savi Sawarkar
  
• Mayawati’s iconoclasm and the statues
• The Significance of being Lalu Yadav

Satire
Delhi pollution Buoys Indian Industry
Ramar Sethu and the Narmada Bachao Andolan
New Twist to the Dera Controversy

Short Essays/ Critiques
The Agenda of the Gita
IT: The Future is here, almost
A Bicycle Diary

In the Heart of “the Monster”- 8 days in Mexico City (travelogue)

A Pilgrimage to Nagarjunakonda (travelogue)
Books of the Century
A Salute to Comrade Fidel
A Chinese Road for Rural India
The Sancho Panza of Hindi Cinema: Johnny Walker
Antonio Gramsci and India
On Bhagat Singh: jis marne te jag dare
Paul Robeson and India
Midnight’s Children: Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah

Globalization

From One Wall to Another: Marx’s Specter Looms Large
Wall Street Crisis and Das Capitalism
Contradictions of Globalization: The Strange Case of India
Scavenging the Sticky Glue
An Alternative to Globalization
Food in the time of Crisis

Marxiana/ History

Karl Marx: A Biography by Francis Wheen
Lenin: A Biography by Robert Service
On Edge of the New Century by Eric Hobsbawm
Stalin by Eduard Radzinsky
Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders who Built the Soviet Empire by Dmitri Volkogonov
A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution by Orlando Figes
On History by Eric Hobsbawm
Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution by Richard Gott (Book Review)
Discovering Che: 40 Years On
Reading Capital with David Harvey
Das Kapital: A biography by Francis Wheen

Where did the Indians go? by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Urdu Poetry

And in such myraid ways your memories comes to me, as night falls (On Faiz)
On Mirza Ghalib
On Mir

Of Friends and Comrades

Tum mere paas raho- Shahid Anwar

The year gone by series (just completed 10 years!)

The year- and a decade gone by- 2015
The year gone by- 2014
The year gone by- 2013
The year gone by 2012
The year gone by: 2011
The year gone by: 2010
The year gone by: 2009
The year gone by: 2008
The year gone by: 2007
The year gone by: 2006
The year gone by: 2005

Guest Posts
Adivasis and the Environmentalism of the Rich by Ishwar Singh Dost
Imagining Punjab in the Age of Globalization

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