Author: Eminent Contributors
Editor(s): Dipa Chaudghuri
Publisher: Roli Books
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 123
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8174363084
Description
This volume is an anthology of essays, musings, fictional speculation, and visual art that attempts to discuss and sometimes define, the difficult times we inhabit. The pieces in this collection lack any apparent unity, except perhaps in theme and provocation. They are of varying lengths, styles and points of view.
Present Tense: Living on the Edge is the culmination of the second annual Writers Retreat organized in Mussoorie and Landour by Roli Books and Namita Gokhale. The participants were from a cross-section of society-two politicians, a Bollywood lady-director and scriptwriter, a dream analyst, a famous general, a war-reporter, a respected administrator, an emotive painter, a cartoonist, historian, a sociologist, and several media personas.
An anthology of essays, musings, fictional speculation, and visual art, Present Tense attempts to understand, discuss, sometimes define the difficult times we inhabit. Present Tense takes issues of ethnic identity, divisiveness, riots, hamara-tumhara, the insidious cycle of marginalization, alienation, anger and reprisal, beyond the sanitized constraints of media discourse into voices of real and visceral fears, of outrage, protest, and of hope.
REVIEW
Do books, movies, philosophies really change the world? Do they alter human behaviour, which hasn’t seemed to improve despite centuries of great literature and art. No other species on this planet-except the proverbial ant- behaves so horribly. In the face of such lust for war, how can I pontificate to others, or even convince myself that stories of love, justice, peace and heroism will actually transform the world into a better place? Yet, it’s our eternal hope that someday these dreams will come true.
-Tanuja Chandra
Contents
About the Contributors
Foreword
Freedom and Fraternity in Bollywood
Present Tense : A Historian’s Perspective
A Bureaucrat’s Experience-Civil-Military Relations in Jammu and Kashmir
The Remains of the Self An Epitaph for a Bombay Reporter
You, Me and Us
OF Ghosts and Writers : A Graphic Story
Empire and Hubris
Licence to Strike: U S Policies of Counter-proliferation Post 9/11
Old Times and Present Tense
Stepping Across Lines:
Transnational Activism and the Promise of Peace in India and Pakistan
Present Tense: Anger and Alienation