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In 1469 the tiny village of Talwandi, forty miles south-west of Lahore, witnessed the birth of one of the greatest spiritual leaders of mankind and the founder of India's youngest major religion, Sikhism. Born into a society caught in the throes of orthodoxy and ritualism and further crippled by child marriage, infanticide and a rigid caste system, Guru Nanak was to become the harbinger of a period of social, spiritual and religious enlightenment. Deeply ...
From the rose gardens of Shiraz to the snowpowdered hillside above Kabul; from the water and stone mirages of St Petersburg to gritty Mumbai, the essays in the collections combine travel and literature using a charming mix of the personal impression and incisive literary criticism.Whether writing from the cocoon of a booklined study, digging into forgotten secondhand bookshops, trekking the Himalayan hills or searching out farflung literary sites around the ...
Written in exquisite Persian verse, the Zafarnama or ‘Epistle of Victory’ was a defiant message composed by Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh guru, and addressed to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, following a series of fierce battles between the imperial forces and Sikh warriors. Despite the ravages of the war and the loss of his four sons and many brave fighters, the guru felt that he had won a moral victory over the emperor.With wisdom and ...
At the start of the new millennium, Aftab’s life came undone. He turned forty, and his wife of fourteen years left him for another man, taking their only child with her. Now he is on a train to Dehradun, the town of his childhood, doing the one thing he feels he is still good at: running away. As he looks back on his imperfect past, crowded with personal and professional compromises, only a slim hope saves him from despair: perhaps this flight will give him a ...