Sunday Long Reads: Celebrating Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Salman Rushdie’s Victory City, Lalitha Lajmi’s works, and more

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What the Union Budget’s focus on millet might mean for the humble grain

While rice and wheat fell under the MSP ambit, millets were sidelined, and thus was no longer financially viable for farmers. (Pic source: Pexels)

In the Union Budget 2023 announced on February 1, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman underlined the Centre’s focus on promoting and supporting the cultivation and popularisation of millets. In essence a humble grain, millets, once the staple of India’s diet in the ancient and medieval eras, have been constantly outshone as mass-scale adoption of rice and wheat overtook India’s food discourse through the modern centuries. While undoing decades-old eating habits is no mean feat, India’s latest focus on promoting millets brings hope to thousands of cultivators, advocates, chefs and experts — alongside underlining the promise of millet exports from India building a billion-dollar export economy.

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Impressions of life and loneliness in the work of Lalitha Lajmi

Lalitha Lajmi at her Mumbai residence before her passing earlier this month (Credit: Pradip Das)

YEARS ago, artist Lalitha Lajmi, then a mother of two with a day job as a school teacher, could devote time to creating art only at night, once their household quietened down. With the night light being unreliable, she found it tough to pursue oil painting. She leaned towards printmaking and etching instead. Years later, her plans of exploring oil painting were scuttled again. Due to the pandemic, she could not go to her garage-turned-studio in her Andheri building.

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A tribute to the anti-establishment Bengali writer Subimal Misra, who passed away recently

Photo of Subimal Misra

A chance online encounter in 2005 with writer Mrinal Bose led to my taking up the translation of the early stories of the Bengali ‘anti-establishment’ writer Subimal Misra, and subsequently embarking on a long-term project of translating Misra’s short fiction. I had never heard the author’s name before, and although I had been a voracious reader of literature in English, I hadn’t read a single work of Bengali literature in Bangla till then. All I possessed was a close familiarity with the language through living in Kolkata and having been engaged for two decades with grassroots social and public action in my city. I had learnt to read Bangla in elementary school, but that was rusty.

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Among his finest novels, Salman Rushdie’s Victory City celebrates the power of fiction to shape our understanding of our histories

From the start of his writing life, with first Grimus (1975), then Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983), Salman Rushdie has written into this gap, insisting on the power of words and fictions to shape our understanding of ourselves, and our histories. (Source: Penguin Random House)

Nothing lasts. Empires crumble without leaving traces behind, much of human history is unrecorded, libraries burn, and storytellers and poets through time have lived precarious lives — shot, burned at the stake, murdered by tyrants, brutally attacked by knife-wielding men who have no understanding of their stories.

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Holly Jackson’s ‘Five Survive’ keeps you engaged with its edge-of-your-seat writing and unpredictable twists

Five Survive by Holly Jackson; Electric Monkey; 400 pages; Rs 499 (Source: amazon.in)

Holly Jackson’s Five Survive follows six friends on a road trip from Philadelphia to Gulf Shores, Alabama. Their RV breaks down in the middle of nowhere, leaving them with no cell service. Initially, the group assumes this to be an accident, until they are stranded with the tires shot out by a sniper in the dark. His reason? One of the six members is privy to a deadly secret and none of them will get away until he finds it. The only problem… there isn’t just one person with a dark past or a dangerous secret. Tensions are high and the 31-inch RV is too small for this pressure-cooker environment. One by one, they begin unravelling.

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Valentine’s Day, the nationalist’s way

Cow hug day celebration at Bhagwat Vidyapeeth in Ahmedabad (Express photo by Nirmal Harindran)

February 14 had been declared Cow Hug Day and is also Valentine’s Day. Though the order was withdrawn, it caused a great deal of confusion in my love life as I decided to go ahead as I know hugging animals can be good (and sometimes injurious) to your health. Here’s what happened:

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K Srilata’s This Kind of Child is an empathetic look at the many facets of the disability narrative

This Kind of Child: The Disability Story
K Srilata
Westland
336 pages
Rs 599 (Source: Amazon.in)

What is it like knowing that you are considered different, and blamed for it? When you don’t fit into what is considered to be the norm, say, at a school? When you are told that there is no place for you? The starting point of This Kind of Child by poet, academic, writer, and translator, K. Srilata, was originally a series of short stories that are interconnected through a character inspired by her daughter, and that tried to answer these questions. As she writes, “…it was my daughter who was, in some senses, its protagonist.”

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