Kusum Choppra

All of a sudden India has become a nation  obsessed with Records only --- no matter what the consequences.  The Uttarkhand disaster is still fresh in the memory -- where the unending rush of pilgrims combined with Nature's fury to wreck almost total havoc in what many believe to be the land of gods.   That area has yet to recover.  And off we go again, to invite another disaster , the bigger the better perhaps. This year's Amarnath Yatra, again in a very ecologically sensitive region, is going to be for 59 whole days with the "Government leaving no stone unturned to ensure a record number of pilgrims"?  A record number of pilgrims in an ecologically sensitive environment suddenly turned into a pilgrim tourism peg?   Are we in our right senses? Instead of this chasing of a self defeating record, why not create a record breaking beautiful pilgrim complex elsewhere amongst our hordes of temples,  one that will  challenge the amounts of money that pilgrims routinely po

Appreciation is nothing short of Manna from the heavens for an author.  And if an old book is read, pleasure is more than doubled. “I always wanted to know about the partition from people who lived through it, perhaps because I come from a migrated family too. But each time I went to Pakistan and asked my paternal or maternal grandparents, I got vague answers or an eloquent silence. Now I understand maybe, it was too painful for them or I was too young to listen to their stories….”  Wrote Zoya Tariq after reading my 2009 novel BEYOND DIAMOND RINGS. Appreciation is nothing short of Manna from the heavens for an author.  And if an old book is read, pleasure is more than doubled. Recallling her reactions to the novel, a post Partition generational saga of how the migration enabled strong women from each succeeding generation of Sindhi women to evolve from home makers  into global citizens, Zoya Tariq had this to say: “ Maya's plot hooked me from the begi