Sankarshan Thakur, editor of The Telegraph whose prowess with words added that extra edge to his analyses and ground reports, died at a Gurgaon hospital on Monday after prolonged illness. He was 63.
Poet, writer and former IPS officer Keki N Daruwalla, whose magic with words gained him national and international repute, has died at a Delhi hospital after prolonged illness and a spell of pneumonia. He was 87.
'The cruelty to animals only reflects the modern, urban Indian contempt for any creatures -- animal or human -- who are voiceless and powerless and unable to fight back,' novelist Nilanjana Roy says, discussing her first book, the well-reviewed The Wildings, with Rediff.com's Vaihayasi Pande Daniel.
In what could further stoke the Salman Rushdie controversy, a section of authors at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Friday launched a campaign demanding immediate lifting of the 23-year-old ban on the controversial writer's book The Satanic Verses.
'Let us rescue history from the leftist high priests of history. In the process, let us also rescue history from the narrow mindset of the political right that has reduced reconstruction of history to an exercise in political victimhood.' Shashi Shekhar on the furore over the removal of an essay on the Ramayana from the syllabus of Delhi University.
'There are tremendous personal, economic and emotional costs to bear in a case.' 'And those costs were suffered by Priya and Priya alone.' 'Nobody goes happily to court and you wouldn't wish that on anyone.'
Six books were nominated for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize this year. The books in contention for this year's cash prize of Rs 1 lakh and trophy are: Boats on Land by Janice Pariat, India Becoming by Akash Kapur, The King's Harvest by Chetan Raj Shreshta, The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy, Foreign by Sonora Jha and a pleasant kind of heavy and other stories by aranyani.
The publishing house faced massive backlash online on Friday after an advertisement of the book launch on Saturday with Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra as a guest of honour did the rounds on social media.
Threatened by protests from Hindutva activists a dismayed Murugan had announced in a Facebook post in December 2014 that the writer in him was dead.
'Surprised by the absence of any sloganeering or even mild protest in an ambience so free and self-regulated, I asked a friend from Delhi whether he too, with sharp political antenna, was surprised at how smooth and easy going everything was,' notes Ambassador B S Prakash.
Mita Kapur has an irresistible love affair... and she's willing to do anything to keep it going.
If Han Kang wrote only about cruelty and suffering, readers might respect her writings and her conscience, but her novels would not be as loved as they are by readers across the world, says Nilanjana Roy
It is a sight that both warms and breaks the heart. The women of Shaheen Bagh seem oblivious of the cold, these women and their children, the latter ranging in age from 19 days to early teens, who have been occupying the road for over two weeks now. Some of them have not gone home for days, but their faces are clear, unlined by fatigue, their eyes bright and fierce as those of the falcon, shaheen, the area is named for.