Upon This Bank and Shoal, from the author of the much-discussed novel The Haunted Man (1997), deals with the perennial theme of the man-woman relationship in a unique manner. Even in the twenty first century one finds the dreamy man in his desperate quest for lost Paradise and the practical woman in her fight against the inevitable smites of fate. From birth to death, every individual passes through the four stages of childhood, youth, middle age and old age, too anxiously trying to find out the mystery of existence before one's birth and after one's death. Being...

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; this is true under dictatorship, totalitarianism and fundamentalism, and democracy as well. Slavery, bondage, suppression and discrimination follow when absolute power corrupts. Perhaps, an Abraham Lincoln could legally put an end to the physical slavery, but its manifestation in various other forms related to race, including color and caste, culture, language, religion, nationality and political system remains a threat to man's spirit of freedom. The nineteen month-long Emergency declared in India in 1975 would be relatively an...

Here's a fine selection of Alexander Raju's stories written over thirty years-ranging between the stories of a tyro giving expression to his idealistic perspective of the world and the society he lives in and intensely feels about, and those of a cynical angry man in quarrel with the world and its ways. They are poles apart also in the sense that the stories do not belong to any particular school: they range from humorous musings on the stupidity of men and women of his social milieu to harsh diatribes against the many evils rampant in his society. The most emotionally appealing are the...

When Babel Tower Is Falling Down is a domestic novel, from the author of the allegorical novels The Haunted Man (1997) and Upon This Bank and Shoal (2008), which makes us rethink about the beauty of natural human relationships, presently contaminated by the craze for individual freedom. We live in a world in which the voice of modern education has taught us to ignore the sanctity of social life in general and of conjugal life in particular, and compelled us to follow the animal instincts of mere survival. We failed to realize the significance of abstinence,...