Talking books in an industrial Coimbatore

COIMBATORE: Perceptions often hide more than they reveal about a place. Take the case of our city. The dominant image of Coimbatore is that of an industrial town with a grey skyline spotted with chimneys and all.          Yes, textiles, small and big machines run the wheels of the city's economy, but there is much more to the city than just machines except that those activities rarely grab the headlines.  ...

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Memories haunt in Shyam Selvadurai's 'The Hungry Ghosts'

Past and present collide in Giller Prize-winner's new novel       Regardless of how hard one tries, it is impossible to shed the past. This is a realization that Shivan Rassiah, the protagonist of Shyam Selvadurai's latest novel, The Hungry Ghosts, must grapple with. As the novel opens, Shivan — who emigrated from war-torn Sri Lanka to Canada as a young man — is preparing to travel back to the country of his birth to bring his...

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Chinese mum teaches Bharatha Natyam

MUAR: Forty-two students aged from 8 to 16 performed Indian classical dances, the Bharatha Natyam, here for the first time under the guidance of a Chinese teacher. The dances was staged at the Sri Muthu Mariamman Temple in Jalan Mohammediah here. The teacher, Lim Siew Wan, from Malacca, began teaching the dances in March l998. She started learning the dances after giving birth to two boys when she was 27 years old. She has about 80 students...

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36th Chennai Book Fair 2013 opens at YMCA ground, Nandanam

Chennai, Jan 12 (TruthDive): The 36th Chennai Book Fair was inaugurated at YMCA Physical Education College Ground, Nandanam on Friday, January 11, 2013. School education minister N R Sivapathi inaugurated the book fair in the presence of minister for information and special project implementation K T Rajendra Balaji and Chennai mayor Saidai S Duraisamy. This year Chennai Book Fair would have 747 stalls in 180,000 sq ft area, with 450 participants...

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Interview with D. Selvaraj, winner of the Sahitya Akademi award

        Almost four decades have rolled by since the world-renowned Czech Tamil scholar Zvelebil made his assessment of writer Daniel Selvaraj’s contribution to modern Tamil literature in his famous work A History of Indian Literature published in 1973. Selvaraj’s novel, Thol (Hide), which speaks about the travails and struggles of the Dalit tannery workers of Dindigul in the composite Madurai district...

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D. Selvaraj gets Sahitya Akademi award for his Tamil novel

Eminent Tamil novelist D. Selvaraj, one of the founders of the Progressive Writers’ Association has won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Tamil Literature for the year 201...

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A historic vow revisited

On the 130th birth anniversary of Subramanya Bharati, Panchali’s Pledge — an English language translation of the poet’s classic Panchali Sabatham — by Usha Rajagopalan was launched by the Chennai Chapter of the Association of British Scholars (ABS). The book attempts to translate the many poems that culminate in Panchali’s pledge when she was disrobed at the Kaurava court. “I grew up listening to Bharati’s songs in...

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