On a foggy winter morning a tough-looking man wearing a mask surveys each bank in a residential-cum-commercial area to choose one to take his money. After making doubly sure that there was no one around, he chooses one to grab his money when lo and behold, the security guard appears from nowhere, points his gun at the "thief" forcing him to unmask to be identified.
A big built woman suffering from leprosy and pushing an empty cart bursts into tears on being asked by a nodding acquaintance as to why the cart, which usually has her husband sitting, was empty. It seemed that he had passed away.
The seeming calm that urbanization had brought in a caste-ridden society was reflected by people of different castes sitting side by side, eating lunch and relaxing afterwards together. But this underlying calm was disturbed when the foot of a low caste woman accidentally touched the body of a high caste man when both and many others were having their afternoon siesta side by side. There was a big furor with the high caste man going home to have a purifying bath before coming back to resume his duties. A decision was also taken to ban the low caste woman from joining the group in future.
These are teaser summaries of representative stories contained in the three different sections of the book sub-titled Frivolity, Digging Deep and Churnings contained in this collection dealing with Indian society in transition.
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Produkt-Hinweis
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ISBN-13
978-1-956696-90-5 (9781956696905)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
The author, born in Thiruvananthapuram in 1937 was brought to Delhi for higher studies by his mother de facto separated from his father. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Delhi, where he taught and researched for over four decades on developmental issues related mostly to women, children and the aged at the regional level in India, during which he became more and more convinced of the need to take to creative writing to bring about social change in India.He slowly shed his garb of a development economist to put on a new one as a creative writer. His maiden venture of this kind was " Road not Taken, Memoirs of a University teacher from the newly emerging second world", Bookage Publications, Delhi, 2011. His three other forays into this field are (1) Onam on the Yamuna banks, Palimpsest Publishers, New Delhi. 2012 (2) Extraordinarily Ordinary, Partridge Penguin Random House,2015 and (3) Double Rainbow, LiFi, New Delhi, 2016.The sharp insights that he had drawn in his earlier avatar, coupled with his flair for writing makes interesting reading particularly since he is also blessed with an excellent sense of subtle humor. No wonder that his books have all been received very well in the market and also by reviewers.
