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The Partition: a
novel
Changing India: an
economist’s autobiography &
The ‘how to’ or self-improvement literature has become the most prolific. Telling others how to succeed in different aspects of life has become an accomplished art and a lucrative career. However, there is no foolproof method for achieving success. Attaining all-round success is more difficult still; imagine being a high-profile achiever in profession, enjoying a perfect family life and glorious social relationships simultaneously! Blissful, but a pipedream? True perhaps, for often one has to make sacrifices in one field in order to succeed in another. But this book assures us that pipedreams are realisable. If you believe it, read it.
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Like
the Holocaust related writings, the saga of India’s Partition too has
emerged as a full-fledged genre in its own right. The stories of blood
and gore, trust and betrayal, heroism and cowardice, uprooted humanity
and much else keep cropping up regularly in various forms, viz., essays,
dissertations, poems, fiction, documentaries, movies and TV series.
Sucha Nand’s is one more addition to the expanding corpus. The
narrative covers the period 1947 to 1975. Apart from highlighting the
communal aspect, the novel provides glimpses of sociological and
economic scenario in Punjab belonging to that period, which transcends
the time immediately after the partition.
This
narrative too begins with the horrors of India’s Partition, but goes
much beyond the chronicle of pain and suffering. VS Mahajan’s father
was a lawyer in Lahore. When things started getting ominous, the family
shifted to Ferozepore and thence to Kurukshetra’s refugee camp, losing
almost everything in the process. Slowly but surely, the Mahajan family
began to rebuild itself. After a few false starts the author was able to
carve out a career in academics. He narrates his experiences in
different cities of India like Shillong, Shimla, Calcutta, Delhi and, of
course, Chandigarh where he now resides. More important, you get some
idea of how various aspects of India have undergone changes over the
years.