Sunday Long Reads: Brampton’s connection with Punjabi rap-pop music, political legacy of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, books, and more

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Why Atal Bihari Vajpayee remains Pakistan’s best-loved Indian Prime Minister

Atal Bihari Vajpayee; by Sagarika Ghose; Juggernaut; 432 pages; Rs 799

Sagarika Ghose, author of a celebrated biography of Indira Gandhi, has done it again — this time with Indira’s rival and successor at several removes: Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Her writing technique is very similar to that of a first-class cine camera. She zooms in and out of her narrative, now highlighting the intimate and personal, now panoramically surveying the larger picture. The reader thus ends with a vivid portrait of the personality painted against the background of his times.

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Are there single parents in the animal kingdom?

A suckling infant with its mother monkey (Photo: Ranjit Lal)

Parenting plays a vital role in the lives of most living creatures and here again, even the casual observer will note the similarities between us and animals and birds. There are doting parents on both sides, where both parents share the duties of child-rearing equitably. In birds, both parents usually have the same plumage. Single-parent families are hugely popular in the animal kingdom and it’s usually the mother who brings up her babies single-handedly or with the help of her sisters and female cousins. Some animal-dads (such as lions) may not partake of the daily diaper-changing, but will be around to keep a glinting eye on his harem and its cubs and occasionally help bring down a big kill.

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Can a novel compete with OTT platforms? Annie Zaidi’s City of Incident shows the way

City of Incident: A Novel in Twelve Parts
By Annie Zaidi
Aleph Book Company
144 pages
Rs 499 (Amazon.in)

“Who can refuse to live his own life?” the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova had once written in a letter to a friend. I remember
copying these words neatly on to a notebook, at the height of my Akhmatova-phase.

Fifteen-odd years later, as I was reading Annie Zaidi’s new book City of Incident, a slim little novel, in which we meet – briefly, burningly – six men and six women as they navigate life, these words, long buried in the mound of memory, emerged from somewhere.

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When words are all we have

Pristine sandy beaches and a night sky most shockingly bursting with an abundance of stars made for a one-of-a-kind experience (Credit: Suvir Saran)

The Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) story is a story of a festival celebrating words that celebrate all that life is about. It is a most-inspired gathering, planned to ensure that those entrusted with words and those reading them present and understand them in ways that they remain most inspiring.

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Why Stephen King let his novel ‘Rage’ lapse in the Nineties

Flashback: ‘Rage’ by Stephen King (Source: Wikipedia)

On May 24, an 18-year-old boy in Texas, USA, fatally shot 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School and wounded 17 others in the premises. The shooting is the worst gun attack on an elementary school in the US since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, that left 20 children and six adults dead.

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‘Tomb of Sand’, Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell’s International Booker Prize-winning novel, traces a storied past and the futility of borders

The winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize is ‘Tomb of Sand’ by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi to English by Daisy Rockwell. (Twitter/@TheBookerPrizes)

On the very first page of Tomb of Sand, the translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi by Daisy Rockwell that won this year’s International Booker Prize, Shree writes that the book is a story of two women and one death. But it isn’t merely that. It is a tale told across the vanishing leap of time, across borders, genders and relationships, across the insurmountable hopelessness that men generate and the sea of hope they populate. “Women are stories themselves,” writes Shree. As the novel progresses, the many storied lives of her female protagonists hold the universe of her novel together.

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