A weekly column on what well-known personalities are reading and planning to read. This week, it is Ramon Magsaysay award-winner Bezwada Wilson and poet, novelist and children's writer Easterine Kire.
Bezwada Wilson
I am reading Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? by Essar Batool, Ifrah Butt, Samreena Mushtaq, Munaza Rashid and Natasha Rather. I read good reviews of it and so I picked it up. I am shocked reading this book, which tells us how some soldiers of the Indian Army, who are supposed to protect life and dignity, raped women in Kashmir in 1991. The book I read last was by Harsh Mander called Looking Away. It's about the indifference of the middle class towards India’s poor. Again a great book.
Bezwada Wilson, one of the founders and National Convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan, is a Ramon Magsaysay award-winner.
Easterine Kire
I am currently rereading my favourite book The Watch That Ends the Night by Canadian author Hugh MacLennan. There are passages where I have to simply stop and read again because the prose is so beautiful, and the ideas so universally true. It is also a book about Canada as I have never known it; it is Quebec snow-covered sometimes or teeming with the light and life of summer, and with the enormity of what human life is. There are deeply quiet and profoundly reflective moments in the book which I love. MacLennan is so good at staying truthful to his own life and its experiences which have gone into the making of this book that it is greatly inspiring for me.
Easterine Kire is a poet, novelist and children's writer. She won the The Hindu Prize, 2015, for her novel ‘When the River Sleeps’.
