As Mussoorie-based author Ruskin Bond turned 81 on Tuesday, fans turned to the micro-blogging site Twitter to wish him and quoted many of his memorable lines to highlight the simplicity of his writings....
Involving a long and gruelling stint of study to qualify and everyday exposure to human pain and suffering, the practice of medicine is perhaps one of the last you could expect to serve as a base for comedy. But it is the saving grace of humanity that it too has people capable of seeing - and sharing - the funny side of their life. Like this doctor...
Many fault lines criss-cross Indian society today because of economic inequality, short-stories of the scattered Kashmiri Pandit community who are tourists in their own homeland and a few light-hearted love stories: take a look at what the IANS bookshelf has to offer this week....
It is almost impossible to imagine a 23-year-old man way back in 1949 thought of cultural symmetry in marriage and envisioned a progressive India where the caste system will break down and inter-caste marriages will flourish. He also raised questions about the association of sex and marriage through a grieved and confused protagoni...
A book analyses the drivers of change and the repercussions of present-day gender revolutions, a man in today's Kolkata meets a man who claims to be a werewolf. Some light and some heavy dosage, the IANS bookshelf this weekend has reality meeting fantasy. Take a look....
The book could not have come at a better time. This is a well-written story of the rise, fall (crash?) and most dramatic rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)....
The pioneer was Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" (1764), the first modern novel to encompass supernatural elements, but it was Clara Reeve (1729-1807) who moved the genre forward. In "The Old English Baron" (1777), she took Walpole's plot only but balanced the fantastic elements with realism to make it more believable....
Stories picked up from Ruskin Bond's body of work to a journey into the intoxicating city of Varanasi -...
Obituary : Nobel laureate Gunter Wilhelm Grass, best known for his 1959 novel "The Tin Drum", has died in a hospital in Lubeck at the age of 87. ...
Disproving Percy Bysshe Shelley's description of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of the world", he combined his illustrious poetic career with membership of the Constituent Assembly that drafted free India's constitution. This responsibility followed a four-decade stint as an outspoken, unbending freedom fighter across the politic...
