"What Hope for Humanity?";

'Shall we forgive and forget? What kind of compassion makes my enemy My brother? What kind of humane-ness Makes you die For your 'other'?'

Lamakaan is hosting the release of “Prince of Tears” by Fatima Shahnaz. The book is a collection of English poetry in the elegiac style based on the author’s bereavement at the loss of her maternal uncle, to whom she was close, who died late last year in Hyderabad. Her uncle, related to the family of the Nizam of Hyderabad, was also of the royal Mughal lineage. The poems in this anthology are elegies focusing on feelings of love, grieving and closure. Some are in the unique ‘Marsiya’ style that was developed in Arabic and Farsi in Persia after the martyrdom and murder of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, at Kerbella. Mahatma Gandhi emulated Imam Hussein’s non-violence and protest against tyranny in his own passive non-violent resistance movement, as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did later in the U.S. The poems in this collection, however, are transcendental and inspirational, focusing on Dr. Shahnaz’s uncle’s unique spirituality steeped in the ancient mystical cultures and religions of India and its pluralistic spirituality. In this way these poems are tributes to love in all its diversity and transcendence, and to non-violence. When Dr. Shahnaz first gave a poetry reading at the Hyderabad Poetry Society of this work prior to its publication, some of Hyderabad’s elite academics and authors saluted the poems as “uniquely original, groundbreaking and never done before.”

Fatima Shahnaz, a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne University, Paris, is a published author both in India, the United States and Europe, where she was educated at an English boarding school. She was appointed the first Asian Head Girl there, and was awarded first prizes for Writing and the Jawaharlal Nehru Gold Medal in her childhood and teens. She worked as a Professor of Political Science at the Hyderabad Central University, the Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delh,i and Guest speaker at the Academic Staff College (HCU). Additionally she has been a guest professor at numerous other academic institutions in India and abroad. In New York, where her first novel, GOLCONDA, was published by News India-Times, she was also a featured and awarded poet and writer of the New York literary scene. She also launched an advocacy on international human rights, against racial injustice and for civil liberties in New York, the India Peace Organization. Her speeches and activism on human rights were both in the U.S. and India. As a theatre director and artistic director of her own theatre company in New York, her drama ensemble was listed among the elite rising Off-Broadway companies in the city. She has received a citation from the Government of France as “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres,” or “Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters” for her contribution to international culture and civilization. Among her several books of poetry, “In the Arms of Words: Poems for Tsunami Relief” was published by Sherman Asher publishers, New York. Shahnaz’s introduction and a poem were selected for this book, and proceeds from sales were donated to victims of the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

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