Banaras

It is a winter afternoon at the Dashashwamedh Ghat, and we three sit cross-legged on a marble slab overlooking the Ganga.Up in the distance, a paper kite soars high in the sky. Below, on the river, boatloads of pilgrims sail past us. A boy comes by with milky tea. It's been years since I drank milk in my tea, but sitting with my two friends, going back thirty years to our college canteen, I nod my head. The tea is delicious, and soothing in its milk, sugar and cardamom flavour. We are sitting at the very spot where Lord…

Have you ever fallen so deeply in love with a place that you’ve wanted to protect it with all your might? Poet Mirza Ghalib felt this way about Banaras, the city also known as Varanasi and Kashi. In his Persian masnavi Chiragh-e-Dair, he wrote: “ta’ālallah banāras chashm-e-bad dūr/bahisht-e-khurram-o-firdaus-e-ma’mūr”. Maaz bin Bilal’s Temple Lamp: Verses on Banaras, a recent English translation, presents this as: “May God keep Banaras/ from the evil eye, / it is heavenly bliss, paradise established”. Hindustani…

Originally written in Hindi, Banaras Talkies is a fast-paced novel about three law undergraduates who live in Bhagwandass Hostel at Banaras Hindu University (BHU). Satya Vyas, now the author of five best selling books, captures the mood, hopes, aspirations, and challenges of his protagonists even as he hilariously presents their hare-brained schemes to steal exam papers and critiques of bad mess food. PREMIUM Students at the BHU campus that’s the setting for Banaras Talkies. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO) As those who…

In 2019, I published my collection of poems Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu. I was very clear that just as Delhi and Belfast were cities I had lived in, perhaps even more significantly I lived in multiple languages and cultures. English and Urdu being two primary ones for me. Wherever we go, we carry our cultures with us, and inhabit them. And so I wrote poems such as Biryani in Belfast on my culinary experiments with food and comparative politics in that troubled city. And this hybridity is what makes…

PalimpsestThere is something melancholy in the act of writing about one’s past PalimpsestThere is something melancholy in the act of writing about one’s past FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS Read original article here Denial of responsibility! Techno Blender is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to…

Tell us a bit about your journey with Persian. Why, how and when did you start learning? I learnt Persian formally during my MA days from the Iran Culture House in Delhi but I had been interested in Mirza Ghalib from childhood and Urdu is my mother tongue. Urdu traces the etymology for many of its words to Persian and Arabic. Ghalib’s Urdu poetry employs a more Persianized register than most poets. With Ghalib as my favourite Urdu poet, I felt pushed towards Persian to read even his Urdu poetry and eventually started…

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of a self-reliant India is picking up traction in Varanasi as Banaras Rail Engine Factory (BLW) located in the city is now preparing rail engines completely from indigenous materials. Even less than a decade ago, the factory used materials imported from abroad. Now the factory produces 98 per cent of its material, which is then used in rail engines. Cutting down the cost of importing material, not only is the Banaras Rail Engine Factory earning profits but also making the campaign of…

The Indian Railways is changing terminals of various trains from July 10. Due to operational issues in the terminals, the authorities are compelled to make changes. Major changes will be made to trains under Northern Railway. Trains operating in cities of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Karnataka will have their terminals changed. At least three pairs of trains, which earlier terminated at Varanasi, have now been shifted to Banaras station. The arrival and the departure of these trains…