Annie Zaidi's Blog, page 24

Objective type questions for the Prime Minister

There are several things the nation wants to know and is wondering if the Prime Minister is going to tell us any time soon. I thought I'd put down some questions like these below:
10. When corporations fail to repay loans, how will they be chastised?

[Seizure of assets/ Black-listing for future loan/ Touching them with a twig wrapped in flowers, like bridegrooms are touched by the bride's

In praise of literary festivals

I've mostly enjoyed literature and arts festivals and have learnt a lot through them. This year, I was invited to curate the Chandigarh Literature Festival. Here's the text of the speech I made at the opening:


Hello and welcome to
CLF 2016. This is a literature and arts festival. It showcases books,
screens and discusses films.





Over the last year
or so, I've met a few friends who roll

Lab-band, labaalab, lab-soz

Well, we are all doomed to turn into the thing we turn up our noses at. And besides, I did not necessarily enjoy all those non-discriminatory varieties of chai. One particular concoction, often encountered in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, made me want to throw up. It took me a while to figure out that the problem lay in the water (high on fluoride). In other states, especially Punjab, there was

Gandhi Jayanti 2016

October 2. I was almost content to let it pass without comment or angst. But I read three morning papers and none had a front page or half page or even quarter page ad about Bapu/ Gandhi ji put out by the government. There is one ad with a Gandhi figure sketch, paid for by a private corporation stressing 'swadeshi' enterprise. Other ads urge us to shop without pause - Snapdeal, Flipkart, Sony,

Golden Girls

SIX O’CLOCK ON a winter’s morning. I was kicking myself for promising to show up at the Chhotu Ram Stadium in Rohtak. The sky was still dark, and even the street dogs were too cold to bark. I was certain the officials were mistaken: the kids would not turn up on time. But at 6.30 am I peeked into the practice hall and found a group of boys running circles at the far end. Closer to the door were

Book Review : What Lies Between Us

Instead of building up to a climactic event, this novel seeks to examine a tragic chain of circumstances that leads to a young mother’s ultimate failure. This could have been the novel’s main strength for it could have set the writer free to investigate the links in the chain of tragedy and the complex nature of emotional betrayal within a family. However, the storytelling here is laid out flat

Considering Lucknow

I was asked recently to write about my own relationship to a city. I spent much of my childhood in small townships that qualify neither as towns nor as villages. And though I have lived much longer in Bombay/Mumbai, and Delhi, I don't have the same emotional tie to them as I do with Lucknow, the city where I may have spent a little over a year as a toddler, and then several months of summer and

Jihadi Janes and Jamillas

Tabish Khair has written a fine new novel about Islamic terror and what draws young girls, especially those living in relative comfort in western nations, to the horrific war in Syria. I reviewed it here (headline not mine):


The question gains urgency after recent terror attacks that were carried out by middle or upper class young professionals who attended good schools and degrees. They are

The man who invented poetry

A long review of Afzal Ahmed Syed's urdu poetry, translated into english by Musharraf Ali Farooqi and published in India as the collection 'Rococo and Other Worlds':


Consider the first poem in the collection, ‘Our National Tree.’ It refers to the acacia—known as keekar or babool in Hindustani—and the poet announces peremptorily that it ought to be the national tree of Pakistan. He juxtaposes

Embodying Venus

I HAVE A clear memory of the buttons – large, translucent-white plastic – and the teacher’s fingers unbuttoning the first one. She was shouting: ‘I’m going to take off your clothes! I’m going to strip you naked in front of everyone!’

The child’s maroon tunic, with those big buttons down the middle, hung down to her ankles. In our little township school, parents often bought uniforms three or