Qurratulain Hyder (Annie Khala to her younger admirers) was one of modern Urdu literature's best-known authors.

`R. is right, you can act.`

Business Standard

In 2007, Mohammed Hanif wrote a column that provided a taste of things to come: &#34Pakistan&#39;s General Pervez Musharraf deserves our sympathy.

The dictator in his labyrinth

Amitav Ghosh&#39;s new novel begins with a poor village woman, Deeti, seeing a grand vision  one that&#39;s all the more disquieting because it is so far removed from her real-world experiences.

A whole new world

&nbsp;Last Sunday, I bought the VCD of Partner. One of the biggest hits of last year, it marked the comeback of director-actor duo David Dhawan and Govinda.

Walking through the talkies

The lot of Indian women may not have improved much in recent years, but the women&#39;s movement has lost much of its fizz.

The question of women

Aravind Adiga's novel takes a hard look at the other India, but does it with humour and irreverence.

A tiger`s tale

&nbsp;Three trillion dollars is clearly a startling number. That is what is estimated to be the &#34true cost&#34 of the Iraq war to the US  sixty times more than the Bush Administration&#39;s original estimate of $50 billion  according to this book authored by economist and Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and lecturer and former bureaucrat Linda Bilmes.

The real cost lives on

There is a scramble amongst journalists the world over these days to land a posting in either China or India.

Despatches to distant lands

Mittal's avuncular smile came into play, along with the colder gimlet brown eyes, which always seemed to be on an intelligence-gathering mission.

`Let`s discuss on a friendly basis`

&nbsp;Travel writing, at its best, is subjective. Rahul Jacob describes this collection of pieces written for the Financial Times, where he is travel editor, as &#34travel writing on a whim and a wing  travel for the fun of it.

A traveller with a view

Many years ago, watching a performance of Sakharam Binder in Calcutta, I heard someone in the audience say, &#34What kind of play is this? The language is so plain, the characters are so vulgar  where is the upliftment?&#34
&#34Where is the upliftment&#34: indeed, that was often how the Indian establishment greeted a new work from Vijay Tendulkar, the great Marathi writer who died yesterday after many years of fighting myasthenia gravis.

Vijay Tendulkar: 1928-2008

Bill Emmott, a former editor of the Economist, has argued that power struggle between the three Asian giants  China, India and Japan (in alphabetical order)  will shape the way the world runs in the next decade.

Beware intra-Asian rivalry

&nbsp;Truth is stranger than fiction. One has often wondered about the validity of this old saying, particularly after reading Saadat Hasan Manto&#39;s Toba Tek Singh.

Suffering without borders

Most intelligent readers would say that Stephen King and Salman Rushdie have nothing in common. Their books are severely segregated, with King occupying a large chunk of the bestseller shelf, and

King versus Rushdie: the ultimate wrestling match

A real page-turner or just another thriller on the slightly beaten theme of the Kashmir jihad? That was the question playing in my mind as I read the synopsis of Lashkar at the back of the book

A pawn in the jihadi game

One afternoon, many years before he became Indias finance minister, Sachin Chaudhuri was stuck for 25 long minutes in a lift that was to have taken him to his apartment in Churchill Chambers in south

A pen as sharp as a sword

It has, for some odd reasons, become customary to compare India with China in every field of development although the vastly divergent politico-economic systems of the two countries set them far apart

The soil of communism and democracy

Jhumpa Lahiri's new book of short stories is much more than an assortment of immigrant clichis.


Fruits of diaspora soil

The life and trials of a reluctant Indian-American medical intern.


Siege of the residency

Mushirul Hasan is vice-chancellor of Delhis Jamia Millia Islamia and an authority on modern South Asian history. His latest book takes aim (as, in one way or another, do his others) at the

Giving tongue to the language of politics

Consider this: we are at a point in human history when you can access a book on the Net regardless of where you or the author may live and when a finished manuscript can be emailed to anyone in the

The tyranny of geography

Book News: Check out for latest book news, reviews, book launches and more on Business Standard. Explore now for new books reviews along with books writers and novel reviews and more.

Books News: Latest Book, Book Reviews, Book Features, Book Launches | Business Standard

Check out for latest book reviews, book launches and more on Business Standard. Explore now for new books reviews along with books writers and novel reviews and more.

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