Cracking India News Today

From failing four times to securing an impressive AIR-3, IAS Uma has proved that there is no shortcut to success and hard work.

From failing four times to securing an impressive AIR-3, IAS Uma has proved that there is no shortcut to success and hard work.  

Until the 1990s, Pakistan was hardly ever specifically mentioned in Hindi films. This has since changed — and depictions have ranged from conditional sympathy to unalloyed hostility. Politics and Pak-sponsored terrorism have played a role in determining Bollywood's narratives.

“Can one break a country...Will the earth bleed?” asks eight-year-old Lenny in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988)–a tale about Partition. “No one’s going to break India. It’s not made of glass!”

There were also non-Muslims in East Bengal who had to stay back—many didn’t want to leave their ancestral place. Many didn't have the material support to migrate with their family. Partition literature hardly talks about them. 

“Every time the train stopped at a station, we would all hold our breath, making sure not a single sound drifted out of the closed windows. We were hungry and our throats parched. From inside the train we heard voices travelling up and down the platform, saying, “Hindu paani,” and, from the other side, “Muslim […]

The adaptation of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel ‘Ice Candy Man’ stars Aamir Khan, Nandita Das and Rahul Khanna.

England, having colonized India at its leisure, granted it independence with unseemly haste. Even its most outspoken nationalists were taken aback when Lord Mountbatten, the British viceroy, unexpectedly announced that the date for independence was a few months, not a few years, in the future. The British decision to pull out by Aug. 15, 1947, left a country with no orderly way to deal with the rivalries between Hindus and Muslims, and the partition of India and Pakistan along religious lines le...