kriticulture

 By Rajesh Sharma Less than a week to go – and it will be a month since Shruti Sachdeva was abducted on September 24. The probe is on. The police is being blamed and ridiculed by turns. The opposition has taken out the whip to thrash the government right and left. True, it is the wretched state of law and order which a minor girl’s abduction by a spoilt brat with ‘criminal’ record has highlighted. But is that all? Is not the crime also a symptom of some deeper, more insidious malaise? To put it briefly but not sweetly, the girl’s abduction is the ripe fruit of a poisonous tree that has been cultivated over the years by all sorts of people among us. The brand of politics that has established itself as the only viable kind, with its deadly blend of wealth, force and an extremely uncouth disrespect for law, comes first to mind. Next, one thinks of the new economy which treats the spectacle as the only reality. Phrases like ‘reforms with a human face’, ‘the feel-good fa...

Rupa Publications, 2012 Rs. 275 Rajesh Sharma Why does Amandeep Sandhu write novels? To release the ghosts knocking under his rib cage? Admittedly. And much else adds up – attracted by the art of story-telling, prompted by the urge to delight his imagined reader, forced by the market’s monstrous hand. Paradoxically, despite a few avoidable, sometimes clichéd, musings on language and literary theory, the stock of additions includes a host of deletions that lurk spectrally under the printed words and make me wish, like a lover in fairy tales, for an undelete button that would be embedded somewhere in the novel. I dream of a publishing utopia in which the writer, like Marcel Proust’s ideal writer, does not have to be anxious about anyone’s approving eye.             Like his first novel Sepia Leaves (2008), this one too – his second – is a fruit of Sandhu’s struggle to come to terms with a difficult past. “ My attem...