MURTYMUSE

    President Rajendra Prasad & the Kashmir Tangle [An extract from ‘The House of Truth: A Biography of Dr Rajendra Prasad’ by BSM Murty, relevant to the present scenario, in which the Abdullahs play a crucial role, Omar Abdullah, grandson of the Sheikh being in the CM’s saddle. The extract gives the background of the present tangle.]   The Early Fifties: Rajendra Prasad, as the first popularly elected President, was now firmly in saddle with new governments at the centre and in the provinces committed to a coordinated re-building of the nation, with a Prime Minister dedicated to secular, democratic principles and a vision of India’s dignified participation in international affairs. The weekly parleys between the President, the new Vice President and the Prime Minister, and the audio arrangements for the President to be in regular touch with the proceedings in both houses of the Parliament constituted a perfect mechanism for Prasad to be fully conversant and p...

  Turning over pages of History ‘The Butcher of Amritsar’ Jallianwallah Bagh in Amritsar is now a National Memorial where a notice board proclaims that the ground was ‘hallowed with the mingled blood of about 2,000 innocent Hindus, Sikhs and Mussalmans who were shot by British bullets’. Patrick French, the British writer in his book Liberty or Death (pub. 1997), describes the place he visited while researching for his book: I reached the site of the massacre by walking down a narrow lane, about six feet wide, which was and is the only entrance or exit to the garden. It was very calm and quiet, full of birds and flowers, with a few people walking slowly around the wall. The bulletholes were still there, ringed with metal plates, as was the large open well into which terrified people had jumped to escape the firing. Sikh boys, their hair scraped into cloth-wrapped balls, were playing on the lawn.PF/33-34 It was here, on this ‘hallowed’ ground – an open rectangular field, a kind of un...

  I am a woman first… By   Raja Radhika Raman Prasad Singh   The tabla -player Ustadji’s fingers started playing on the tabla but Mohini’s feet, tied with strings of tiny ringing bells, would just not move, let alone start dancing. Wiping the beads of perspiration from his forehead, the Ustadji looked at Mirza, the sarangi player, who had started playing the soft tune in the mean time. Seventy years gone, the Ustadji’s crown was already half-bald, only fringed with chalk-white hair. Ustadji’s hands, when not playing on the tabla, would always keep shaking, but once on the tabla, they would seem charged with electrical energy. Then you could hardly count his fingers there. For decades he had been playing tabla for countless wealthy zamindars and aristocrats in their mehfils , but for the last three years he had been playing tabla only for Mohini, living with her on her kotha , may be till his last breath, as he imagined.   He took a pan from the pandan w...

  E E Cummings: The Poet of Love E E Cummings is a relatively less known poet in English poetry, and even lesser read. Though he may be slightly better known in America - being American - than in England, because it is said that at the time of his death, he was ‘the second most widely read poet in the US, after  Robert Frost ’ . In India, however,  he is among the least known as an English poet. And in the Indian academia, particularly in the class-room poetry text books, he is seldom to be seen; mostly because of his   too fanciful, almost tyrannous typographical experimentations in verse – displacement of Capital letters by lowercase letters, putting ‘parts of speech’ categories helter-skelter, – often using   words like ‘if’ or ‘am’ or ‘because’ as nouns – radically flouting traditional rules of grammar and linguistics, his wilful use of punctuation and rules of syntax, sometimes synthesising two or three words into one, and such other shocking innovation...