We are delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of Dr Sanjay Kumar’s autobiographical tale of impossible odds, surmounted through sheer grit, a passion for education and opportunity for all, and the humility of continually learning.
Dr Sanjay Kumar is currently India Country Director for the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University. He spent two decades working with SEWA Bharat, a consortium of women-led organizations that facilitate the lives and livelihoods of informal sector workers throughout India. If his time at Jawaharlal Nehru University opened up his own life to ambition and security, his stints abroad have done the same for children like him. Kumar has conscientiously gleaned the best in educational resource development, documented the worst of negligence and paucity, and aimed consistently at broadening horizons, unlocking doors, in the unglamorous vastness of India unlit by Bollywood and popular literatures.
In his memoir Kumar chronicles memories vividly, thinks deeply, and appreciates hope – in every sense of the phrase. His journey is a continuing inspiration, his own inspirations are generous, profound, and continual. In lucid, limpid prose he places his circumstances and choices before the reader, never losing sight of the specific struggle, yet transcending narrowness through fluid empathy that engages with the human dilemma at every turn. Kumar’s philosophy is a gift to any reader, an expansive view of a fraught and fragile world.
Vani Book Company, the English language imprint of 56 year old Vani Prakashan Group, welcomes its readers to traverse the long road from Katihar to Kennedy, populated with languages, ideas, and people from every walk of multiple lives, narrated as an exceptionally understated determination to ‘long accomplishment’. Kumar’s sense of purpose is a wonderful corrective to the stock commonplace about distancing the individual self from the troubled world in which we live: it is the late John Berger’s words he seems to have taken unknowingly to heart. Kumar has spent his journeys, literal and metaphorical, holding everything dear.
The book is edited by Saumya Kulshreshtha.
We wish all our readers a very Happy New Year!
Editorial Team,
Vani Book Company
Vani Book Company