Loss of a crest jewel

Eminent Tamil short story writer Chudamani Raghavan's passing is a great loss to the Indian literary scene. C.S. Lakshmi, a close associate and Tamil scholar, reflects on their relationship which grew from a love for life and literature…

She was not unused to physical pain. She had endured a lot in her life and yet when I saw her emaciated body put on a ventilator, I felt she did not deserve this final indignity of clinical imprisonment in an intensive care unit. Sometimes our love for a person makes us do what is advised by doctors as best for them and there is no way this dilemma can be resolved. And I am sure she understood the love and affection that lay beneath these decisions.

She was that kind of a person. In this instance also she surrendered herself to whatever medical treatment was given to her with no complaints. When I bent down and called out her name on the day when she was semi-conscious, she opened those soulful eyes of hers and they slowly filled with tears. I knew the tears were for me; for the deep friendship we shared. It was her way of saying, “Good bye, take care and keep writing.” At least that is what I would like to think for whenever we met, even when she was ill or otherwise busy, she would always ask me what I was writing. She belonged to that era of writers who had great grace and warmth for fellow-writers. My friend, the well-known Tamil writer R. Chudamani, whom I have known for the last forty-five years, breathed her last in the early morning hours of September 13. Come January she would have been eighty.

Full report here Hindu

Cutting near the aching nerve

GA Kulkarni (1923 - 1987) is one of the great Marathi short story writers.

He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1973. Film buffs, too, might know of him as one of his stories, Kairee — meaning raw mango — was made into a movie by Amol Palekar. In the introduction of one of his short story collections, Kulkarni quoted August Strindberg: “Shallow people demand variety—but I have been writing the same story throughout my life, every time trying to cut nearer the aching nerve!” The line sums up Kulkarni’s approach to writing perfectly, for one way or the other, all of his stories revolve around the theme of immutable fate and man’s struggle to make a mark against it.

Through his career, the settings and style of the stories evolved — ranging from rural Maharashtra, to ancient Greek myth, to imaginary fantasy lands. The same over-riding theme, however, comes through in various guises: When characters are confronted by an odd situation, we find them stopping to think over their lives, trying to understand how they got here, whether any of their efforts made any difference in the larger scheme of things.

Full review here Deccan Herald

Commonwealth short story winners announced

Indian writer, Shachi Kaul, has emerged winner of the 2010 Commonwealth Short Story Competition, with her entry, ‘Retirement’; while Nigerian entries, ‘Somewhere’ and ‘Dinner for Three’ by Jude Dibia and Shola Olowu-Asante respectively, were among 25 other winners in various categories.

Funded and managed by the Commonwealth Foundation, in association with the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, the competition is an annual scheme aimed at promoting new creative writing and increasing understanding and appreciation of Commonwealth cultures.

Set in contemporary India, ‘Retirement’ is an examination of traditional roles coming to an end, and the contrast of outcomes achieves the above. Kaul, who hopes to write stories rooted locally but possessing an international appeal, expressed her delight at winning the award.

“It means many things to win this competition. It is an acknowledgement of my writing, a boost to my future aspirations, and a kind of check to show that I’m headed in the right direction,” she said.

Full report here Next

Parakkadavu's stories in Arabic now

Malayalam short story writer PK Parakkadavu will now be read in Arabic, as a prominent Arab magazine has started publishing five of his selected stories.

AlMar'a AlYom, a fortnightly published from Abu Dhabi has selected Parakkadavu's Vrikshavum Kaviyum (Tree and Poet), Keralam, Jwala (flame), Minnal (Lightning) and Aval (She).

The English translations of these stories had caught the attention of Egyptian-born editor of the magazine Mohammad Id Ibrahim and a story appeared in the August 26 edition of the magazine. "I am happy that my works will now be read in a different language. These stories were earlier translated into English by Yasin Ashraf, a lecturer at the Farook College in Kozhikode," said Parakkadavu.

Full report here New Indian Express

Best of the best

Abhinava Publications, Tirupati, has brought out a compilation of the nineteen best short stories authored by various writers during the year 2009.

The year saw as many as 2000 stories and as it is not possible for one to read all of them, academician-turned-litterateur Sakam Nagaraja has brought out the compilation entitled Varthamana Telugu Katha 2009, meticulously selecting the best of the best.

After Katha, a compilation being published jointly by Vasireddy Navin and Papineni Sivasankar for the last 20 years and the decade-old Katha Varshika by Madhurantakam Rajaram Trust, this is said to be the third such annual compilation in the field of Telugu literature.

The book includes short stories by veteran writers like Thummeti Raghothama Reddy, Mohammad Khadeer Babu, Vinodini, Vempalle Sharif, Attada Appala Naidu, T. Patanjali Sastry, S. Venkatrami Reddy, Swamy, Kasibhatla Venugopal, Pasupuleti Gita, Sai Brahmanandam Gorthi, Ramanajeevi, T. Karuna, Bhanu Kiran, D. Padmakar, G. Gouru Naidu, P. Ramakrishna and novices P.Raji Reddy and Anil S. Rayal.

Full report here Hindu

A vampire comes to India

The book is called Excess but one can’t say that it is excessively interesting. It’s a mixed collection of a few very touching stories, some pedestrian and some plain banal.

Manjula Padmanabhan’s blood-curdling story, Feast, about a vampire that has a free run of bodies to feast upon, stands apart from the above. Masquerading as Andrew Morton, a vampire from Europe who lands in Delhi finds he can drink to his heart’s content from Indian bodies without ever getting caught. In fact, nobody ever misses the dead bodies which he cuts up and dumps in garbage bins after he has sucked out all the blood from their passive bodies. “It’s a system based on infinite abundance, in which nothing and no one matters because there is always more where it came from,” explains Cindy, another vampire. “They don’t fear us,” she continues, “because they know in their deepest hearts that their sheer numbers will prevail.”

Is this story about the ease with which invaders, down the years, have looted India’s riches? Or is it about India’s spiritual triumph over all marauders? Indians, they say, never die completely. They get reborn. And with each re-birth hope springs afresh. ‘Feast’ is an intriguing story that gives you goose bumps.

Full review here DNA

Rahul Mehta's Quarantine is a slice of gay life

Rahul Mehta’s brassy debut short story collection Quarantine unravels the lives of openly gay Indian-American men — men who are strident in their sexuality, not hiding in pseudo marriages or behind the guise of bisexuality. However, that doesn’t prevent them from being damaged by the various complexities of life — infidelity, heartburn, shady gigolos, past lovers or small-minded relatives.

On his 21st birthday, Rahul came out to his mother about his sexual preference. Now, years later, was this book his way of coming out to the world? “No, I never thought of this book as a coming out (although, in effect, it is kind of functioning that way when it comes to my relatives in India, who, unlike my relatives in America, don’t know that I’m gay),” says US-based Rahul, who is a lecturer in English at Alfred University. “But that’s certainly not why I wrote the stories. Instead, the book came from a desire to tell stories. In the end, I hope that the stories speak.”

With the camp classic Dostana and the recent Supreme Court ruling, does he see the emergence of a stronger gay-themed genre in Indian pop culture? “I hope so. And I hope that we continue to see more and more realistic representations of LGBT characters rather than reductive stereotypes. I think it’s so important in helping us move toward a more tolerant and socially-just society,” he says.

Full report here DNA

REVIEW: Curry Is Thicker Than Water

REVIEW

Curry Is Thicker Than Water
Jasmine Anita Yvette D'costa
Bookland Press
Rs 867
pp 130
ISBN: 097837939X
Paperback

Blurb
A cobra flies in through an open window. Wives form a pact against their bigamous, abusive husband. A mother and son battle over eagles' eggs. A homeless guest with a secret. An elephant protests on a highway. A woman marries a pumpkin. Diverse people - one country This is the teeming, hectic world of India. It is also the vivid, startling world that Jasmine D's Costa gives us in Curry is Thicker than Water.

Review
Humour seasoned with a dash of satire DNA
This collection of six short stories is by a Mumbai-born, Canada-based writer, and not one of them has anything to do with the worn-out theme of alienation.

Hallelujah. Why, none of the characters even whip up an improvised bhel puri with Kellogg’s Rice Krispies (yes, Jhumpa Lahiri has scarred me for life). All the stories are set in India instead, and are seasoned with a nice dash of local flavour and loads of satire.

Being anal retentive, I started with the very first story. And honestly, I wanted to stop there itself. ‘The elephant on the highway’ is a crazy caper about a talking elephant that’s sick of begging and decides to protest by lying down slap bang in the middle of Mumbai’s Western Express Highway, making the traffic situation infinitely worse.

A beggar (who earns an astronomical amount a day) befriends him. There are some faintly amusing sketches of chaps from the BMC and animal rights activists wondering how to move it or save it, but this is certainly not the best story in this book and I cannot for the life of me imagine why it took the lead. Oh right, I’ve just got it: it was published in Canada and elephants are exotic there. Tsk.

Gay men in grey tales

Rahul Mehta's debut collection of short stories, Quarantine, launches in India this month. In simple, fluid prose, Mehta weaves intimate tales of ‘ordinary' Indian-Americans trying to find meaning in their lives and relationships. Many of his characters are gay men, who appear to have come to terms with their sexuality a long time ago. Thus, ‘gayness' is part of every story's normal landscape. Mehta, the son of Gujarati immigrants from Mumbai, was born and bred in Virginia and teaches English at Alfred University in New York state. He talks storytelling and sexuality with Amit Bhattacharya by email. 

Your stories portray family dynamics among Indian immigrants in the US with great intimacy. How autobiographical are they?
The work is certainly shaped by personal experience (but) I would definitely resist any attempt to characterize it as "autobiographical". The work is definitely fiction, not memoir.

Gay relationships are a common thread in your stories. In some of them, parents are comfortable with their son's homosexuality. Does that accurately reflect attitudes within the Indian-American community?
I'm not sure the Indian-American community as a whole is any more accepting of homosexuality than similar communities in India. In fact, in some ways, Indian communities in America might be even more conservative than in India. There is a perception that many Indian immigrants from the first big wave of immigration in the 1950s and 1960s still cling to an idea of "Indian values" that is essentially 50 years out-of-date. However, I've been very fortunate that all of the people in my life – my parents, my brother, my uncles, aunts, cousins, and my parents' family-friends – have been incredibly supportive, not just of my being gay, but of my being a writer, my choosing a path that may be different from the standard stereotype of the Indian-American doctor or engineer or banker.

Full interview here Times of India

'Laburnum...' an evocative, powerful read

Gripping, not in the sense of a thriller novel, but one in which the reader feels compelled to go on as events unfold in each of the tales. Temsula Ao's collection of short stories, "Laburnum- For My Head" is a sensitively written book, which draws inspiration from the vibrant and troubled region of northeast India.

A bouquet of eight stories, the book is interesting because of its sheer diversity. There is a wide gamut of emotions -- heart wrenching, witty and those riddled with irony. There are stories which are inspired from myths and others which are contemporary and very relevant to today's times.

In short, it has something for everyone.

"Laburnum- For My Head", the first story in the book, the title of which is same as that of the cover, is about a woman who falls in love with the buttery-yellow Laburnum blossoms- so much so that she decides that instead of a grand tombstone, a Laburnum tree should rest on her burial site and works towards ensuring the same in her lifetime.

Relevant to the present times, "The Letter" is another story in which Ao adeptly portrays the complicated relationship that a village has with an insurgent group and the Indian armed forces, bearing the brunt of both and struggling to balance the two while dealing with their own lives.

Full report here Little About

English translation of Panchlight launched

Panchlight & Other Stories, eminent writer Rakhshanda Jalil’s English translation of a collection of short stories by one of Hindi’s foremost writer Phanishwar Nath Renu, was released by Jawahar Sircar, Secretary, Union Ministry of Culture, on  February 17 at India International Centre, in the presence of a galaxy of noted writers including Harish Trivedi, Sudhir Chandra and Mushirul Hassan.

The stories in this collection are set in rural Bihar, a world of poverty, ignorance, helplessness, superstition and exploitation. The characters are the landless, the disenfranchised and the marginalized.

Phanishwar Nath Renu wrote of passions spent, hurts unresolved, dreams unfulfilled, in the context of a changing world and a crumbling social order, thus making the appeal of the stories universal.

Full report here TwoCircles.net

Related stories
Panchlight and Other Stories Jahane Rumi
Bihar in translation Hindustan Times (Khushwant Singh)