Kapil Sibal’s decision to direct NCERT and wholesalers to hold back textbooks featuring cartoons is a move that has stirred attention. The committee set up by the government is to submit its report on June 15, 2012. The discussion in Lok Sabha has touched the topic that impressionable minds of students may not be the best to interpret and understand political humor like cartoons. HRD Minister Kapil Sibal found many of the cartoons in the textbooks offensive an...

    It has been a while now, but we still do remember Oliver Twist walking up, trembling to the cook of the workhouse and asking for a little more. Food has featured in various books of literature, sometimes as key characters. How would have, say, Robinson Crusoe survived without scouring for food on the island he ends up in after a shipwreck.     For all those with the love for chocolate, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a tre...

  On May 24, 2011, the multifaceted, enigmatic, 'the man of the thin-growl voice', the mesmerizing word-creator, the protest-singer, folk-singer, the harmonica-round-the-neck man - Bob Dylan, turned 70. If compared to a very commercial Hindi film song sequence, Dylan wears and discards many of his superhero to ordinary man costumes in the space of one song at a time.   Now, we may not call him a free-flowing great singer like Lata Mangeshkar, but the cul...

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. Virginia Woolf   Thus spoke Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own; avant-garde, writer, woman and feminist, she was way ahead of her times. What gave birth to the book was a collection of lectures that she delivered at Cambridge University in 1928. This book throws light on several issues such as sex discrimination, lesbianism, right to women’s education and financ...

      You have got only three lines to say it. You have lesser characters than you have on twitter to write it down. To be precise, you shouldn’t be exceeding more than 17 syllables. The traditional number of syllables for the three lines is in this order respectively – five, seven & five. We talk here about the ancient form of Japanese poetry called Haiku.   The origins go back to 17th century Japan, where the form was then cal...

  Ever since I read Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, I have always looked forward to his other writings. In the first place, I did not start reading The Buddha of Suburbia because it seemed to have courted a lot of brouhaha talk and controversy. That happened ages ago; however it is timeless in its narration, language, style, and story. It is a brave novel that makes one cringe because it is extremely real and shows the lives of thinking people (a...

  Ever since there have been humans on earth, or more precisely, the male and female species, there has been the omnipresent fatal attraction that goes around by the name of love. It is thus no wonder that writers from time immemorial have featured love in their stories. One of the few early examples includes Indian poet Kalidasa and his poems Sakoontala and Meghdootam. The latter is the tale of an estranged couple, and a cloud who acts as a messenger to the husb...

No. I am not an aging granny who cringes and lectures students to stop creating a nuisance. Nor am I that lady who sits in the reading hall and continuously does a tch tch when I hear people discussing recipes or boyfriends or the TV soap… But not adhering to norms of social decorum definitely irks me beyond measure. I am not against enjoying or having fun, but doing so in a library in a way other that devouring books is a heinous crime. Here’s a checkl...

•    "[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction." •    “[George W. Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, am...

Rightly said, “never judge a book by its movie” stands tall and true with so many books and their weird movie versions. Here’s a list of some books that ruined the reading experience of the books.     The Time Traveler's Wife   The Time Traveler's Wife was the debut novel of American author Audrey Niffenegger. It is a love story about a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably, and about his wife, ...