Har Barish Mein

Nirmal Verma considered this book and its essays to be a link between two complete points. As a genre, these articles fall somewhere between a travelogue and an essay, where there is neither the pleasure of enjoyment nor the certainty of resolution. During his second stay in Europe, he witnessed and heard the pulse of Europe, its moments of pride and shame, very closely. In this sense, this book documents a fateful moment when many of the dark and bright pages of the twentieth century were revealed for the first time. The Prague Spring of the Dubcek era, the disillusionment of the Soviet dream, the aspirations rising on the barricades of Paristhese were unprecedented events that Nirmal Verma attempted to capture in the shadow of our waning century, not through a framed mirror, but entirely with his own naked eyes. Perhaps this is why the essays in this book sometimes seem like the reportage of an exiled writer, attempting to assess the wounds of wounded cultures as they appeared on the war fronts, and, eschewing Indian complacency, witnessing the very system of our own country seeping into these wounds. Even today, after traversing unimaginable stages of scientific progress, when we see that neither politics, nor cultures and religions, have learned anything from history, reading these essays and reaching their insights seems all the more important.