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THIS is late Dr Kewal Krishan’s autobiography, which also chronicles certain political events in Punjab. On different occasions he was Punjab’s Finance Minister and Speaker of the state Assembly. As a politician, he had set an example by retiring from politics voluntarily in order to "make way for the youth". Son of a hakeem, his childhood was spent in humble circumstances. This volume gives details of his family, as well as of his social and political life. Happenings within and outside the Punjab Vidhan Sabha premises, too, have been recounted in the book. One also gets a feel of the extent of terror that had ruled the lives of Punjabis lives during those dark days of terrorism. The killing of Gurbax Singh Preetlari’s grandson has been vividly detailed. Indeed, this book is a welcome addition to the meager corpus of political autobiographies. An Insight Into
Navodaya
All those looking for answers in this volume will be disappointed. Although the author dwells upon various activities undertaken in a particular Navodaya school, there is no clinical and comprehensive assessment of the overall performance of the 565 or so such schools. Opinions/conclusions are not backed with empirical data. Moreover, this book tries too many things. It seeks to be a facilitator of sorts for networking among the schools’ alumni and at the same time attempts to investigate the system’s working, thus obfuscating the focus. Janki
Unfortunately, Sikka falls short on all counts. His attempts at rhyming result in the bunging in of superfluous words. For example, take this stanza: Now Ramu son of Mai das was a gentleman who thought there That he was in love with a fair lady named Rani very very rare. It is difficult to suffer such rhyming.
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Jawahar Navodaya
Vidyalayas are co-educational residential schools primarily for the
children from rural areas. These have been set up with the purpose of
providing value- based quality education in order to develop well
rounded personalities of students who would also be socially and
environmentally aware. The stress upon development of individual
talents was supposed to have provided the nation with truly productive
citizens. How far have these aims been realised?
Major literatures of
the world are rich with generally tragic love legends, like Heer-Ranjha,
Laila-Majnu, Pyramus-Thisbe, Romeo-Juliet, Hero-Leander,
Tristan-Isolde, Lancelot-Guinevere, and Troilus-Cressida.
Usually, these have been narrated in the epic poem/stage-play format.
And we know that it requires immense talent to attempt such works.
Linguistic mastery, grandeur of vision and the gift for composing
elegant and original verse are essential prerequisites.