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His own family, comprising his grandparents, his grandmother’s father, and two of his aunts, were a casualty, a number among the one million who lost their lives.
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Even the title -Ī Time of Madness - signifies that the terrible fate that befell his family was shared by many, many others. That he chooses not to write a dark book and instead leavens his heart-felt narrative of a slowly unravelling mystery with empathy and compassion is laudable - especially in these dark days when it has become so easy to hate the ‘other’ and blame them for all one’s misfortunes.įrom the dedication page itself, Rashid attempts to make common cause with all the others who were affected by the tragedy of the partition. Rashid, a well-known travel writer, who has travelled the world in search of stories, writes of his desire to come to India not merely to see the ‘enemy’ country but also to attempt to unravel the mystery about his family, the circumstances in which they left their ancestral lands in Ughi and their home in Jalandhar, and why they always maintained a stoic silence about the events that transpired ‘out there’ during the horrific humid days of August 1947. We know this is not a run-of-the-mill book, timed to cash in on the 70th year of the Partition hoopla in 2017, from the dedication page which reads: “Dedicated to all those Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who lost their worldly possessions and sometime their lives for the creation of Pakistan.”Ī Time of Madness: A Memoir of Partition could well have been a dark book, for it carries within it a terrible secret. That silence has been broken with great poignancy and immense grace by Salman Rashid in his new book which is part-memoir part-travelogue with a generous dollop of political observations and critical asides. Naya Ghar, there has been a peculiar silence. The Weary Generations ) and Intizar Husain’s trilogy comprising Udaas Naslein (written originally in Urdu and subsequently translated into English to much acclaim as Edith Widder shows us how exploration is the key to conserving the oceans-and our future on this planet.While a great deal has been written on Partition in India - in English as well as the four major languages most affected by the traumatic events, namely Urdu, Hindi, Bangla and Punjabi - there has been relatively little in Pakistan. This engaging memoir, imbued with optimism and a sense of wonder, is an adventure story as well as a science story.
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Alongside Widder, we experience life-and-death equipment malfunctions, and breakthroughs in technology and understanding, set against a growing awareness of the deterioration of the world’s largest and least understood ecosystem. She reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of creatures, from microbes to leviathans-many never before seen or, like the giant squid, never before filmed. Why was there so much light down there?īelow the Edge of Darkness takes readers deep into the mysteries of the oceans as Widder investigates one of nature’s most widely used forms of communication. On her first visit to the deep ocean, in an experimental diving suit that took her to a depth of 250 metres, she turned off the suit’s lights and witnessed breathtaking explosions of bioluminescent activity. But after complications from surgery caused her to go temporarily blind while at university, she became fascinated by light, and her focus turned to bioluminescence. Title: Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of exploring light & life in the deep seaĪn exhilarating underwater exploration for readers wanting to recapture their sense of wonderĮdith Widder grew up wanting to become a marine biologist.