Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 27

An Indian POW in Italy: Part 3 of 4

Satyen Basu, a doctor from Calcutta, joined the Indian Medical Service (the army medical corps) early in the Second World War and served with the Allied forces in Iraq, Syria and North Africa. His unit surrended near Tobruk in 1942 and he was transported to a POW camp in southern Italy, not far from Naples. [...]

An Indian POW in Italy: part 2 of 4

  Satyen Basu, a doctor from Calcutta, joined the Indian Medical Service (the army medical corps) early in the Second World War and served with the Allied forces in Iraq, Syria and North Africa. His unit surrended near Tobruk in 1942 and he was transported to a POW camp in southern Italy, not far from [...]

An Indian POW in Italy: part 1 of 4

    As a child of the nineteen-fifties, I came of age at a time when the Second World War was still fresh in public memory. The war was everywhere: in the toys we played with, in our books and comics, and in the movies we were taken to see. The fact that my father [...]

Two poems for Agha Shahid Ali: his grave in Northampton

    A few years ago, I don't know exactly when, my essay on the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali (which is posted here) was included in a textbook that is read by millions of schoolchildren in India. Since then I've received many letters and messages about Shahid through my website. One of the most [...]

Letter from Austria

  From: Shankar Nath To: chrestomather@yahoo.in Sent: Wednesday, 11 January 2012 2:57 AM Subject: khatirdari   Dear Amitavji Being aware that this is one of a million bothersome Fan letters, attacking you daily like mosquitos in a tropical evening, i still could not restrain myself from writing it.  It has been obstinately haunting me, forming [...]

'Tristful' post makes news in Trieste!

    Amazing to relate, but my post of  (March 13), 'Trsitful Trieste' has occasioned an article in a leading newspaper of the city, Il Piccolo.           I was told about the article by Anna Nadotti,       who has been a close friend ever since she translated The Shadow [...]

More on Zoroastrian rites

    Further to my post on Zoroastrian Hong Kong, Shernaz Italia writes:   Dear Amitav, There seems to be some degree of confusion regarding the disposal of the dead in the Zoroastrian tradition. A brief explanation: Zoroastrian tradition considers a dead body a pollutant – and hence had rules for disposing of the dead [...]

'Glass Palace' translator wins Myanmar National Literature Award!

On October 20, 2008, I received a message that all but knocked me over on my beam ends. It was from the distinguished American novelist, Robert Coover, author of The Public Burning and many other celebrated works of fiction and non-fiction, including the provocative 1992 essay The End of Books (Robert is a pioneer in [...]

Two letters from Europe

    Dear Mr. Ghosh, I am Serena Bellon an Italian student at the last year of the master in BA in Italy who read your book "River of smoke". Last Christmas I chose your book as present for my mother among bunch of others: probably the smoke a effect made me decide for buying [...]

Marvelous Histories

'Magical realism' is as much a part of history as of fiction. It could not be otherwise, for history is replete with instances of the 'marvelous', at least in the sense of the highly improbable (my favourite instance, which I've described at some length in my essay on the Babarnama, is the story of the [...]