Mitali Chakravarty is a connoisseur of writings from around the world. She writes, translates and edits for peace, love and harmony. In that spirit, she established borderlessjournal.com, which features a wide array of writers from more than thirty- five countries. She has authored a book of humorous essays on living in China, In the Land of Dragons (2014), where she spent eight years. Trained as a journalist, Mitali has written for the Statesman, the Times of India, the Hindustan Times, the Pioneer and the Daily Star. Her reviews, stories, poems and essays have been part of many anthologies and online forums. Mitali lives in a tropical island surrounded by lush greenery and her doting family and has been trying to complete her first novel for the past three years.
In quest of a world without borders As nations redraw borders to undo imagined past wrongs or reclaim past glory, the world remains a silent witness to conflicts that are as old as history—the struggle between the weak and the powerful; the oppressed and the oppressor; the right and the wrong.While politics often invents a vocabulary that insists on differences, the arts expand the borders of our minds. Ideas and imagination, like stories, are borderless. Over the past few years, the Borderless Journal has been bringing together distinct voices from different social and cultural milieus.This anthology showcases a few of them. The stories, poems, essays lay bare the conflicts between religions, classes, genders, ideologies, the old and the new, and also the conflicts within us. These narratives by literary stalwarts like Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam and Louis Couperus, and several emerging voices, including Aditya Shankar and Bibek Adhikari, offer an insight into human conditions. It is important to read and share them. At the heart of this collection are conversations with writers, poets, thinkers, like Aruna Chakravarti, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Devaki Jain, Goutam Ghose, who not only share their personal journey in writing, but also reflect on the role of translations in building bridges between people and cultures.These conversations entertain us, nourish us, stir us, unsettle us and centre on values that Borderless Journal hopes to nurture—syncretism, truth, courage, love, forgiveness and kindness. Monalisa No Longer Smiles will definitely bring a smile to your face because it is a celebration of the human spirit.
