Tabish Khair-Frontline

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Life is not instant coffee

In a world overwhelmed by hustle culture, we need to slow down and watch life as it happens around us.

Part III of Choice, set in a very impoverished family on the Indian side of the border with Bangladesh, features a mother who works as a house help.

Neel Mukherjee’s Choice tackles economics, identity, and the burden of morality

This beautifully written novel strikes a significant blow for the novel as a genre, to begin with, retrieving it from plastic pundits.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s supporters at a demonstration in support of the spiritual leader, in Tehran in 1979. The Freedom Tower, a landmark of the city, is in the background.

Is Sufism the solution?

The book calls for reviving Sufism-influenced traditions in Muslim societies as an antidote to Wahhabism’s perceived Islamic fundamentalism.

Children injured in an Israeli air strike react as they receive treatment at Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip on October 17, 2023.

Israeli-Palestinian conflict a recurring stage for Western powers vying for global control

Despite the empty humanitarian gestures, these regimes consistently support one side.

Storm Troopers carrying in their flags for the May Day Demonstration in the Berlin Lustgarten when Hitler addressed the gathering. May 02, 1939

The Hitler years: Review of ‘Travellers in The Third Reich’ by Julia Boyd

A gripping collection of reports by mostly Anglophone travellers in Germany between the two world wars, trace the rise of Hitler and Nazism.

Rajkamal Chaudhary (1929-1967) wrote ten novels, seven short story collections, and hundreds of poems in Maithili and Hindi.

Reality bites: Review of ‘Traces of Boots on Tongue’ by Rajkamal Chaudhary

The Hindi and Maithili writer Rajkamal Chaudhary is at his best at capturing the essential apathy of modern India.

The women of the village oscillate between rancour, mistrust and solidarity.

Gangs of Gujarat: Review of ‘The Bandit Queens’ by Parini Shroff

This humorous novel is marred by a mismatch between an American, cosmopolitan register and a rural India setting.

Of love, loss, and redemption

An accomplished historian’s novel with a well-researched historical backdrop and narrated with ease and fluency.

Book cover, Nights of Plague

A walk by the sea

Orhan Pamuk’s new book is something of a crime mystery as well as a historical novel.

T.S. Eliot with friend Emily Hale in a 1946 family photo in Dorset, Vermont.

A poem of its moment

The significance of ‘The Waste Land’, which turns 100 this year, and T.S. Eliot’s oeuvre and continuing appeal. By Tabish Khair

Jonas Poher Rasmussen.

This Oscar-nominated documentary delves into the art of darkness

Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s ‘Flee’ is a complex and moving story about refugees, with Afghanistan as its background.

Emily Hale and T.S. Eliot pose in a 1946 family photo in Dorset, Vermont. After more than 60 years of sitting sealed up in a storage facility at Princeton University Library, about 1,000 letters written by poet T.S. Eliot to confidante Emily Hale will be unveiled, revealing the extent of their relationship that scholars have speculated about for decades. (Princeton University Library via AP)

'The Waste Land' by T.S. Eliot: A poem of its moment

The significance of ‘The Waste Land’, which turns 100 this year, and the continuing appeal of T.S. Eliot’s oeuvre.

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