The plot of The City of Ravens: Paradoxes of Contemporary India begins with a Spanish architect's trip to Delhi to build the mansion of a wealthy businessman there. During his four-year long stay in the capital, he will have the opportunity to travel throughout the country and reflect on its music, its mythology, its architecture, history, mysticism, that is, all the aspects that make this country unique.
The difficult balance between ancestral traditions and modernity; between the excessive and the minuscule; between elegance and kitsch; this is the great challenge of India that the gaze of this observer, devoted to what he sees, discerns.
Carlos Varona Narvión (Madrid, 1956) did a Masters in Philosophy and Art. His doctoral research was in Arabic Philology and Islamic Culture, with a thesis on Architecture and Water in Cairo city. He was a professor of Spanish Language and Literature in Jordan, and director of Instituto Cervantes (Spanish Cultural Centre) in several places of the Middle East: Damascus, Amman, Tunisia, and also in New Delhi, where he lived for six years. His publications are primarily essays on mysticism, art, and philosophy. He has also published a novel on lucid dreams. Currently he lives in Marrakech (Morocco).
Sonya Surabhi Gupta is a professor in the Centre for Spanish and Latin American Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She translates from Spanish, and has to her credit translations of the works of Gabriel García Márquez, José Ortega y Gasset, Rodolfo Walsh, Camilo José Cela, and Carlos Fuentes, among others. She also coedited an anthology of stories by Indian women writers translated into Spanish, titled Lihaf: Cuentos de mujeres de la India (Madrid, 2001).
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