Reaction to Reading: FROM A CLEAR BLUE SKY: SURVIVING THE MOUNTBATTEN BOMB by TIMOTHY KNATCHBULL

The great events of world history are at bottom profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole hist. of the world ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these …

To be a Wiccan: Beloved Witch by Ipsita Roy Chakraverti

Have you ever wondered why witches are shown as riding atop brooms? It is because a broom symbolises hearth and home to which a woman was tied by male domination. As she 'flew' away on it, it meant that she was breaking the bonds. It symbolized her freedom (263).This and more such interesting views are …

A Forgotten War: Easterine Kire’s Mari

When you go hometell them of usand say for your tomorrowwe gave our todayInscription on the war memorial of the 2nd Division at the Kohima War CemeteryThe Battle of Kohima was called the "Stalingrad of the East", so vital was it that the British wrest the land back from the Japanese who had conquered it. …

Entry Denied: Deb Simpson’s Closing the Gate

James Edward Pirkey Jr. died on May 13, 1997. He was thirty-six years old, had never married and had no children. He had placed a gun to his head, and reached for the next level, the place where he hoped to meet the precious spirits already departed.  This is the story of his life, of …

Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s Ammi

Ammi: letter to a democratic mother ‘…in the twentieth centurygrief lasts at most a year.’I have used this quote from the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet as a prelude to a small tale before I go on to the War in iraq. The reason I chose to use this quote is because I wonder how long …

Journey of the Self: Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History

"I had sought out my father because I couldn't live with the darkness of not knowing him."Absent fathers make for haunting presence. Think of Hamlet, Ghosts, and The Glass Menagerie.Aatish Taseer's first book: Stranger to History: A Son's Journey through Islamic Lands is a young man's search for his father who like the father in …