NRK ACADEMY

GIRISH KARNAD

1938-2019

Girish Karnad is a contemporary writer, playwright, actor and movie director. He is a recipient of the Padma Shri (1974), Padma Bhushan (1992) and the Jnanpith Award (1998). He writes in both Kannada and English. His plays generally use history and mythology to focus on contemporary issues. He is also active in the world of Indian cinema. This play, too, can be looked at from multiple levels—the focus on values, both personal and academic, and the issue of bilingualism in today’s world.

G.B. SHAW

1856-1950

George Bernard Shaw was a dramatist and critic. His work as a London newspaper critic of music and drama resulted in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. His famous plays include Arms and the Man, Candida and Man and Superman. His works present a fearless intellectual criticism, sugar-coated by a pretended lightness of tone. He rebelled against muddled thinking, and sought to puncture hollow pretensions.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

1882-1941

Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her father’s extensive library. The famous group of intellectuals which came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of Cambridge University graduates and their friends in Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia started the Hogarth Press which became a successful publishing house. In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she experimented with new techniques, particularly new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed that much imaginative literature is false to life because it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our experiences actually flow together like a stream. This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate shades of mental experience.

INGMAR BERGMAN

1918-2007

Ingmar Bergman is a well known Swedish director of films noted for their starkness, their subtle use of black and white and ‘shades’ of those extremes, the ambiguity of their content, and a certain brooding presence that seems to pervade them all. The list of Bergman films is long; his best known include The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960), The Silence (1963), Persona (1967), The Passion of Anna (1970), and Cries and Whispers (1973)—this last film in colour, though emphasising red in all its shadings. In the following selection, the Introduction to Four Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960), Bergman discusses how he views the art of film-making.

D.H. LAWRENCE

1885-1930

D.H. Lawrence was born in a coal-mining town. He was the son of an uneducated miner and an ambitious mother who was a teacher. His wife was German, and the couple lived, at various times, in Italy, Germany, Australia, Tahiti and Mexico. Lawrence’s writings reflect a revolt against puritanism, mediocrity and the dehumanisation of an industrial society.

AMARTYA SEN

Born 1933

Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 for his contribution in the field of welfare economics. He is Lamont Professor at Harvard. This text forms the opening sections of the first essay in Sen’s book of the same title published in 2005. The sub-title of the book is ‘Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity’. Sen argues in this essay that in India there has been a long tradition of questioning the truth of ideas through discussion and dialogue.

ISAAC ASIMOV

1920-1992

Isaac Asimov was a Russian born American author and biochemist. He was a highly successful and exceptionally prolific writer best known for his works on science fiction and for his popular science books. Most of Asimov’s popularised science books explain science concepts in a historical way, going back as far as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. He also lent his name to the magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction.