Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities
Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities
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- Author: Ananya Vajpeyi Format: Flexibound
Product Description
When I ventured out, my line of sight was dominated by three beautiful monuments in three cities—Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi; San Giorgio’s Church in Venice; Cihangir’s Mosque in Istanbul. Whatever else I had lost in the meantime, these structures remained steadfast in their unassailable loveliness: domes and minarets, arches and columns, steps and corridors. White and pink, grey and gold, shadowy and lit, all the poetry of built forms; each day that these pieces came together they gave me solace. But political troubles and environmental crises in all three places exacerbated my feelings of personal loss. In the five years that I tacked incessantly between Delhi, Venice and Istanbul, two questions plagued me: How do we lose what we lose? Why do we love whom we love? ***** In this collection of essays written over 25 years, Ananya Vajpeyi recounts her experience of 13 cities across India and the world, engaging with them as layered spaces where history, memory and meaning converge. Through elegantly crafted narratives, interwoven with cultural insight, political reflection and personal meditation, she evokes the emotional and intellectual contours of each place, offering readers her immersive, intimate encounters with cities she loves. ***** PRAISE FOR PLACE: A unique and special book about cities that I like... — ORHAN PAMUK Erudite and hyper-literate, endlessly curious and constantly questioning, Ananya Vajpeyi has one of modern India’s most learned, unpredictable and interesting minds. Place is a wonderful introduction to her work and the perfect opportunity to savour her warmth, her disarming honesty and her restless, searching brilliance. — WILLIAM DALRYMPLE A journey that treats the reader to the riches of place after place—languages, stories, poetry, music, art, architecture, and all their unexpected connections—to make a vivid narrative of people, entangled histories, love, loss and renewal. — GITHA HARIHARAN Place deserves a place in the library of anyone who loves cities, travel or great writing. These essays detail Vajpeyi’s encounters with cities all over the globe—New York, Dresden, Banaras—and explore questions about love and loss and identity that are universal to all of us. Written with a poet’s sensibility and an academic’s intellectual curiosity, it is a wonderful new addition to the age-old genre of the travel essay. — SUKETU MEHTA In Ananya Vajpeyi’s reverberant essays, prose style is indistinguishable from the passage of life and the radical shifts of politics that mark our time. Place records, eloquently, what it means to exist in a continuum in which you’re constantly losing something of yourself and the world that formed you, while always being propelled by some force towards fresh discoveries about yourself and the world. — AMIT CHAUDHURI Read more
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