NEW DELHI, May 12 (Agencies):It was an evening where beauty and brain both mesmerized a distinguished audience.
Beauty represented by the daughter Ayesha Dharker and brain by mom Imtiaz Dharker.
One is an internationally acclaimed actress and other a renowned writer,poet and artist.
With the presence of such a deadly combo there is bound to be explosition.
It was an explosion of book reading, poetry recitation and overdose of literature.
The occasion was the release of Imtiaz Dharker's latest book "The Terrorist at My Table" in New Delhi yesterday.
Both Ayesha Dharker and Imtiaz Dharker read from the book.
"The Terrorist at My Table asks crucial questions about how we live, work, travel, eat and listen to the while preparing for attack.
What do any of us know about the person who shares this street, thisouse, this table, this body? When life is in the hands of a fellow-traveller, a neighbour, a lover, son or daughter, how does the world shift and reform itself around our doubt, our belief? Imtiaz Dharker's poems and pictures in this book hurtle through a world that changes even as we pass.
The book grows, layers by layer, through three sequences-'The Terrorist at My Table', 'The Habit of Departure' and 'Worldwide Rickshaw Ride'-each cutting a different slice through the terrain of what we think of as normal.
But through all the uncertainties and concealments, her poems unveil the delicate skin of love, trust and suddenrecognition.
"The book explores various beliefs, doubts and fears we all live with in this terror-slaved world.
It's not about terror, but what defines the complexity of our reactions to the terror," says Imtiaz.
The duo flew down from Mumbai where they released the book earlier this week.
The book has already got critical review internationally.
"Strong, concerned, economical poetry, in which political activity homesickness, urban violence, religious anomalies, are raised in an unobtrusive domestic setting, all the more effectively for their coolness of treatment", describes Alan Ross in London magazine Arundhati Subramaniam of Poetry International writes "here is no glib internationalism or modish multiculturalism .
Displacement here no longer spells exile; it means an exhilarating sense of life at thenterstices.
There is an exultant celebration of a self that strips off layers of superfluous identity with grace and abandon, only to discover that it has not diminished, but grown larger, generous, more inclusive".
Imtiaz Dharker was born in Lahore , and grew up in Glasgrow , Scotland .
A documentary film-maker and accomplished artist, she conceives her books as sequence of poems and drawings.
She is the author of Postcards from God (1997) and I Speak for the Devil (Penguin, 2003).
She now shuttles between India, London and Wales.
