Rain - Sudeep Sen

In this beautiful, inspiring treasure of a book, Sudeep Sen reflects on rain -- its passion and politics, its beauty and fury, its ability to "douse and arouse". He ultimately explores the various moods that water and fluids inherently unravel. The evocative art by an impressive array of leading contemporary Indian artists that accompany the writing are not meant to illustrate the text, but simply to act as an aesthetic counter-point, leitmotiv, and antithesis -- thus creating a fine tension and balance between words and images. Sudeep Sen's fiction which is at the same time balletic and precise, poetic and minimalist, stylised and wise, combines the virtual and visual -- coalescing to convey the intensely special magic of monsoon rains as felt in the Indian subcontinent.