April 7, 2002 Welcome to a generous selection of articles from DAWN's Weekly Books & Authors. This page is updated every Sunday. For current issue Click here Translating the inner depth ON November 13, 1913, the world learnt that the Nobel Prize for literature that year had been awarded to Rabindranath Tagore. The English public had some acquaintance with his name due to the publicity generated by the India Society around... EXCERPTS: The encroaching sea SEA level is a sensitive indicator of global warming since it is affected by both thermal expansion and the melting of land-based glaciers. The respective contributions to sea level rise of thermal expansion and ice melting are estimated... EXCERPTS: Free consent? A singular hostage is set in 1838, the year Lord Auckland, the British Governor General, travelled from Calcutta to Firozpur together with his two spinster sisters, his government, an army, and forty thousand... ARTICLES: The view from the other side “SIX months ago the journal Nature published a study about a dangerous mechanism in the human visual system. The study sought to explain why the brain sometimes refuses to see what... ARTICLES: Denationalization on the cards THE issue of the denationalization of some schools and colleges is again in the air. The government of Sindh has indicated that it is planning to hand back to their previous owners some of the denominational education institutions, which were nationalized under the 1972 reforms. Given the fact that 30 years on, the Pakistan... ARTICLES: Desecration most foul THE latest among the many victims of the communal madness in Gujarat is Urdu’s first poet, Wali Dakhani. Hindu zealots dug up his grave located on the outskirts of Ahmadabad, where... AUTHOR: The pen after the gun LT General (retired) Kamal Matinudin is one of those army generals, who, in the past few years, decided to take up the pen after leaving the gun. One wonders if it... SYNDICATED: Multitudinous mouthfuls of air THE story of Babel, as told in Genesis, is one of presumption and punishment, echoing the story of the Fall itself. Once, “the whole earth was of one language”. Its monoglot... SYNDICATED: Cataloguing the shocks of war IN his legendary column, “Low life”, the late Jeffrey Bernard once asked why the health service didn’t simply prescribe money. I filed this away as an amusing apercu until reading, in this book, that there was a rather vexed debate after the first world war about how to treat traumatized veterans. Simply paying soldiers pensions seemed to keep.... CHILDREN''S BOOK REVIEW: Harry Potter in Urdu AN extremely poor woman struggling to make ends meet started her career as a writer in a small cafe, writing on used pieces of paper and drinking a cup of tea... CHILDREN''S BOOK REVIEW: Imagination unwind AS I flipped through the pages of the children’s books in Urdu published by the Book Group, for review, my first reaction to the flamboyant display of endless dark and gaudy... REVIEW: Difficult choices THE power to choose by Laila Kabeer, a social economist, is an unusual study of global garment industry women workers at two geographical extremes, Dhaka and London. In Bangladesh, a country... REVIEW: To stir and rethink IN 1980, Robyn Davidson wrote a book about a journey she took across an Australian desert on a camel and she was surprised that it was classed as a travel book and she as a travel writer. She does not seem to have escaped from the labelling because here she is 20 years later entrusted to produce an anthology of travel writing.... REVIEW: Junking the Ottoman heritage ‘I AM nothing but a corpse, a body at the bottom of the well’, and so begins this stunning novel set in Istanbul during the reign of the Ottoman ruler Sultan... REVIEW: Cloak and dagger story WRITTEN with authority and insight, Yossef Bodansky’s Bin Laden: the man who declared war on America, is more than the story of a single individual. In fact, those readers looking for... REVIEW: Language and power TOVE Skutnabb-Kangas has become famous as a champion of language rights, an area in which she has published some of the most powerful and insightful academic work for two decades. Unfortunately,... REVIEW: Bard of shattered dreams NIDA Fazli is an esoteric poet and writer. His fame as one of the most successful song writers of the contemporary filmdom is beholden, almost entirely, to his marathon presence in... REVIEW: A wide canvas THE most striking feature of this remarkable book by Mehdi Ali Siddiqui is its title Bila kam-o-kast which cannot be adequately translated into English. It means an honest and candid narration...

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