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In 1926-27, Kalidas Desai, a student of English literature at the University of Cambridge, wrote a letter every other week to his friend and colleague Vishnuprasad Trivedi.
During one of her visits to Surat, his daughter Padma Desai was handed a metal box containing these letters, written in ink on brown decaying paper, the ruminations of a young Kalidas on a wide spectrum of topics: from his battles with Icelandic Norse and Scandinavian Anglo-Saxon languages to his great delight at attending the lectures of T.S. Eliot; from his enchantment with London, its theatres and cricket, to his deep appreciation of the English countryside; from the cultural and social contrasts between Britain and India to the general nature of love, religion and education.
In From England with Love, Padma Desai presents a comprehensive selection of these letters. Detailed, picturesque and exquisitely crafted, Kalidas’s prose captures the ethos and zeitgeist of England in the mid-1920s, the trials and victories of an Oxbridge education almost a century ago, and the scholarly reflections of an Indian student in the midst of new and exciting adventures.
Imprint: India Penguin Enterprise
Published: Nov/2014
ISBN: 9780670087822
Length : 240 Pages
MRP : ₹399.00
Imprint: Penguin Audio
Published:
ISBN:
Imprint: India Penguin Enterprise
Published: Nov/2014
ISBN: 9789351189022
Length : 240 Pages
MRP : ₹399.00
In 1926-27, Kalidas Desai, a student of English literature at the University of Cambridge, wrote a letter every other week to his friend and colleague Vishnuprasad Trivedi.
During one of her visits to Surat, his daughter Padma Desai was handed a metal box containing these letters, written in ink on brown decaying paper, the ruminations of a young Kalidas on a wide spectrum of topics: from his battles with Icelandic Norse and Scandinavian Anglo-Saxon languages to his great delight at attending the lectures of T.S. Eliot; from his enchantment with London, its theatres and cricket, to his deep appreciation of the English countryside; from the cultural and social contrasts between Britain and India to the general nature of love, religion and education.
In From England with Love, Padma Desai presents a comprehensive selection of these letters. Detailed, picturesque and exquisitely crafted, Kalidas’s prose captures the ethos and zeitgeist of England in the mid-1920s, the trials and victories of an Oxbridge education almost a century ago, and the scholarly reflections of an Indian student in the midst of new and exciting adventures.
KALIDAS DESAI, born in a farming family of modest means in a village in Gujarat state, studied at Bombay's celebrated Elphinstone College on a scholarship. He started teaching English literature in Surat at the M.T.B. College, which was managed by the philanthropic Savarjanik Education Society that sent him to Cambridge in 1926. He later served as the principal of the college.
PADMA DESAI is the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Comparative Economic Systems at Columbia University, New York. A leading scholar on the Russian economy, her publications include Conversations on Russia: From Yeltsin to Putin (2006), which was the Financial Times' Pick of the Year in 2007, and From Financial Crisis to Global Recovery (2011). Her memoirs,Breaking Out: An Indian Woman's American Journey, were published by Penguin/Viking in 2012, and subsequently brought out by the MIT Press. Her awards include the Padma Bhushan and an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College, USA. She is married to the economist Jagdish Bhagwati.