A City on Rent (भाड़े का शहर)

The story begins brilliantly with Ivan's death already announced, showing his colleagues' reactions, mild inconvenience, calculations about promotions, relief that it happened to someone else. This opening establishes Tolstoy's central concern: how we live in denial of death, treating it as something that happens to others. Only then does the narrative move backward to trace Ivan's life, a life of perfect conventionality and superficial success. Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a masterwork of compression, achieving in fewer than a hundred pages what most novels struggle to accomplish in hundreds. Published in 1886, this novella confronts mortality with unflinching honesty, following a high court judge as he faces terminal illness and the terrifying realization that he may have wasted his entire life. It's arguably Tolstoy's most philosophically direct work, stripping away social complexity to focus on one man's reckoning with death. What makes the ...

The landscape, littered with the torments of intermittent memories and the detritus of betrayed promises, remind the predicament of the unrequited 'tryst with destiny.' The Painstakingly built Nehruvian consensus is in tatters and the dynasty which he willy-nilly promoted and thrust upon the nation despite his wit and wisdom is tottering-intensity of scepticism matched only by the desperation of disillusion. India is clearly in the heat of change. The disillusion induced by the years of betrayal unlikely to be assuaged by the promise of a cornucopia in the future with the people no longer willing to submit themselves to some inscrutable will of an obdurate providence or to the fanciful caprices of self-righteous politicians with heads in the clouds but their feet of clay dangling and pulling them down. There are labyrinths of disappointment and juxtaposed with these are green shoots of pessoptimism . A large section of the Indians, groaning under disorder and desolation, exaspe...