Present Tense: Living on the Edge is the culmination of the second annual Writers' Retreat organized in Mussoorie and Landour by Roli books and Namita Gokhale. The participants were from a cross-section of society - two politicians, a Bollywood lady-director and scriptwriter, a dreams analyst, a famous general, a war-reporter, a respected administrator, and emotive painter, a cartoonist, a historian, a sociologist, and several media persons. An anthology of essays, musings, fictional speculation, and visual art, Present Tense attempts to understand, discuss, sometimes define the difficult times we inhabit. Present Tense takes issues of ethnic identity, divisiveness, riots, hamara-tumhara, the insidious cycle of marginalization, alienation, anger and reprisal, beyond the sanitized constraints of media discourse into voices of real and visceral fears, of outrage, protest, and of hope.
