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October 27, 2005

NIRMAL VERMA DIES

According to the Scotsman, Nirmal Verma, one of India's leading writers in the Hindi language and a noted literary critic, has died after a heart attack aged 76.

Inspired by India's independence from British colonial rule in 1947, Verma was a pioneer of a new short story genre that bloomed in Hindi literature.

Elsewhere, he is remembered by his friend, External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh:

"I am deeply grieved to learn of the passing away of my very old friend, Nirmal Verma, undoubtedly one of the greatest Hindi novelists in the post-Premchand era," said Singh in a condolence message.

"He and I were together at St. Stephen's College between 1948 and 1951. He was a self-effacing intellectual and writer of the highest quality," recalled Singh, who is in Moscow on a our-day visit.

Posted at 12:11 AM in World Beat |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

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