Autobiographical sketches and stories from India’s best-loved writer in English. For over six decades now, by way of innumerable short stories, essays, poems and novels, Ruskin Bond has championed simplicity and quietude in life and in art. This collection of essays and episodes from his journals is, in his own words, “a celebration of my survival as a freelance’. His early forays into the literary magazines of the 1950s and ’60s are described in the first part of the book, along with some examples of his work at the time. With understated humour and compassion, Ruskin records the charming eccentricities of friends and acquaintances (a former princess cheerfully obsessed with death and disaster); the silent miracles of nature (“New moon in a purple sky’); life’s little joys (the smell of onions frying) and its fleeting regrets. Nostalgic and heart-warming, full of wisdom and charm, The Lamp is Lit opens a window to fascinating glimpse into the life of our very own resident Wordsworth in prose.

[Source: Penguin Books]