I am reading Amalendu Misra’s The Landscape of Silence: Sexual Violence Against Men in War . I greatly enjoyed reading Joanna Bourke’s An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare . It offers a chilling and unromanticised account of how perfectly ordinary men normalise violence, the process of which includes sexualising killing, demonising the opponent, and collecting his body parts as trophies.
I shall soon start reading books, some published recently, on the Nazi Holocaust, the Rwanda genocide, and the Partition.
Bhikhu Parekh is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a professor of political philosophy at the University of Westminster, U.K.
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I am currently reading a graphic novel by Malik Sajad called Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir . Set in the 1990s, this book is a poignant, heart-stopping account of what it means to be a young boy growing up in a conflict-ridden land. The drawings are modelled on Art Spiegelman’s Maus . To read it is to understand the tragedy that is Kashmir. The last book I read was Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations .
His translations of Federico García Lorca, Allen Ginsberg and others are outstanding. Next I plan to read In a Time of Burning , the poems of Cheran translated by the magical Lakshmi Holmstrom, and Joe Sacco’s Palestine.
K. Srilata is a poet, fiction writer, translator and academic.
