Arrived in Dehradun on Wednesday evening. The journey from Delhi to Dehradun is very short. We arrived here on a chilly evening. The weather here is very cold. We were given accommodation in the Golden Jubilee hostel. The food is bland, la canteen style and it is mostly potato and paneer. The IIRS campus is beautiful with a number of trees inside. We could see fir and mango trees mostly. The lecture halls and auditorium are state of the art
Sociology is the study of society and India is the second largest populated country in the world with an immense variety in terms of class, caste, culture, language, religion, occupation, tradition and custom which are the chief interests of a sociological inquiry. From a predominantly agrarian society with a feudal outlook, with a population residing mostly in villages pursuing traditional occupations like weaving, pottery , brass smithy, black smithy, fishing, oil pressing, tanning, toddy tapping, butchery, stone cutting, carpentry, masonry, hunting, sheep and goat rearing and other such myriad occupations some of which are considered menial, India progressed into an industrial society with a vast
Completed reading Charlotte Bronte’s Villette. It is a magnificent work. I expected some flashes of brilliance or a craftily arranged plot. What amazed me is the denseness of her imagination and the maturity of her thought. Lucy Snowe the orphan heroine of the novel arrives in Villette searching for a vocation to establish herself and…
This is small introduction to Ivan Turgenev’s classic novel Fathers and Sons. To those of us who do not know the Russian society, its intense engagement with the questions of life, politics and philosophy at the turn of the 19th century Fathers and Sons is a must read. Turgenev achieves the serene detachment of Tolstoy…
Yesterday KNR was talking about the 1977 cyclone in A.P; the Diviseema Tragedy. The topic came up from the Sardar Sarovar project which KNR had visited that day. He said he remembers it all even now, 1977 when he was just 14 years old, he had seen it. Tragedy struck A.P that year. His Grandmother was talking about her days when the tidal waves (that struck the villages that day) were last seen a good 90 years ago.
The epic nature of Paradise Lost is justified by the exactitude with which it adheres to the epic conventions. In brief the epic conventions are “ Statement of the theme of the epic in the first few lines, Starting in medias res ( in the middle of things), Invocation of the muse, Grand style, and…
Somewhere deep inside all the Russian writers must have been philosophers and thinkers. There is no other Literature which looks so much at the society with such concern, angst and emotion. Let there be no doubt that it was not only intensely engaging with the questions of the outward reality, but also very inward looking….
“O God! that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive thy saints? How long O Lord how long?” Saint Joan by GB Shaw “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart absent thee from felicity awhile and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story”…
The other day I went to kovvur. It was an opportunity to see the river Godavari again. I contemplated about the river on the same lines that Huck Finn does in the novel “The adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Huck sees the Mississippi as awesome, grand and still. Perhaps there is a language that unites the rivers.
All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. Shakespeare has long ago resolved this question about the relation between life and drama. Drama has laid the foundation for the evolution of other genres of Literature like the novel or the short story. In the days before the invention of printing,…