The theme we‘ve chosen for this inaugural edition is Looking Back. This title has numerous implications, the most significant ones being – looking back on one’s own life, looking back on the lives of those we have met or been associated with and revisiting or reinventing history. The genres are both fiction and non-fiction narratives and also in-depth interviews. In all – the past becomes a framework within which we explore ideas, places, situations, relationships, experiences and relevant information.
On one end of the spectrum there’s Amitav Ghosh’s River Of Smoke, a novel ‘which has a rich tapestry of characters from various cultural and geographical backgrounds whosecommon interest is trade with China’, a year before the first opium war. And on the other end there’s Oriana Fallaci’s Interviews With History. And in between there are remarkable works such as Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories And The City, Nadine Gordimer’s Telling Times, Issac Asimov’s A Memoir. And there are others too such as the collection prose writings of Adil Jusawalla’s Maps For a Mortal Moon, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.
All engage with the past in their own unique way.
If you have had the good fortune of visiting the Gyaan Adab library, have spent time among our books and have noticed other themes emerging, please write in and let us know, perhaps you too can come up with you own selection of books gathered around a theme.
Randhir Khare,
Director,
Gyaan Adab Centre
