Monthly Archives: June 2017

The memoir under review is a chronicle of Egypt’s ‘Arab Spring’ from an author who not only had a ringside view of the events as they unfolded but played an important part in channelling the people’s pent up emotions.

When, in 1977, I got a Korean Govern- ment scholarship to study Korean at the Seoul National University, everyone in the family wanted to know where it was.

Various studies recently by the World Bank, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and others have indicated that China and India are poised to enhance their economic profile further in the international arena.

The book under review, a collection of essays, is thematically divided into four sections. It juxtaposes the Indian state within the broad process of globalization and sees it as an influential power as a result of its growing military and economic might.

It is often noted that International Rela- tions in India does not have a culture of meaningful internal criticism. Groups of scholars may occasionally comment on policy implications of one another’s work, but scholarly criticisms that are fruitful for new knowledge are hard to find. Why? Some fault tardy work ethics of scholars; others blame the disrepair of institutions.

There is little doubt that domestic politi- cal ideologies, ideas and personalities play an important role in the foreign policies of states. We can hardly talk about Indian foreign policy without considering Jawaharlal Nehru’s personality or his ideological predilections, or for that matter that of others including Indira Gandhi or Morarji Desai.

At the time when India was on the cusp of Independence, it could be said with a fair degree of confidence that the expecta-tions of its people did not exceed their collective hope. The role of its political leader-ship then was to organize this economy of hope in the state’s favour.

‘In the beginning there was a little boy’. Irani’s novel starts on a promising note, but very soon we are caught up in the web of uncertainties and confusion that make the book a unique attempt at an allegory.

Gone with the Vindaloo is a charming book by Vikram Nair. Tracking the lives of three generations of cooks (Kalaam, Param and Pakwaan),it covers the better part of a century, romping gaily through British India, Betty Crocker, World War II, the hippie movement redolent with its hash, booze and acid freely mixing with ‘peace’ and ‘free-living’, baby boomers…

Take a bow KSD! One crackling humor- ous novel is difficult enough, you have now given us two. I thought Ice Boys in Bell-bottoms was going to be a difficult act to follow (and it was meant to be the first of a trilogy, but the second is yet to come) but you have come up with the seriously funny Jump Cut. Indian English readers have waited decades for a writer like this.

Growing up in India in the 1990’s, some films stood out from others simply because of their different storyline—removed from the ‘mast, mast, ‘dhak, dhak, ‘choli ke peeche’, ‘sexy sexy’, ‘sarkailo khatiya’, ‘gutur, gutur’ kind of songs and their corresponding stories that dominated during the period.

There has been growing interest in aca- demic scholarship to study and analyse the emerging legal regime in China. The reason simply is that three decades of economic reform that China underwent since 1978 has significantly contributed in reshaping its legal jurisprudence on several key areas.

The gang-rape and murder of a 23-year old physiotherapy student on December 2012 has been a watershed of sorts, galvanizing discussion around sexual assault, a hitherto taboo subject, like never before.

The book makes some landmark probings that is relevant not only from the perspective of women studies, gender and identity discourses but also understanding measures of Muslim women’s assertions, accommodation and adjustments in an imperial and indigenous patriarchal set up.

Gender and Neoliberalism by Elisabeth Armstrong is an important book because it advocates the belief that a gendered understanding of the political economy is essential and indeed possible. It attempts to displace the myth that the economy has nothing to do with questions of gender.

The study of material culture has evolved alongside the discipline of anthropology, though the field has taken an interdisciplinary turn only in the last two decades or so. At a very fundamental level, material culture refers to the study of any and all objects, be it buildings, books or beads.

The life and personality of Maulana Azad remains, to put this in a clichéd manner, an enigma. Aside from his deep scholarship, active politics and religious inclinations, there is another aspect of this enigma. Azad, unlike many other Muslim figures in India’s pantheon of great men leading the freedom struggle…

West Bengal, one of the major States in India’s East, an unfortunate by-product of the Partition of India in 1947 and the one which bore the brunt of the Partition by receiving millions of refugees from across the border, remained for a long time India’s most ungovernable State since Independence.

For those who want to get a sense of the history of Arunachal Pradesh or to understand how many cultures and religions and traditional groups of the land coexist, this book will make an excellent recommendation. The text is meticulous and deals with social and cultural symbolism well.

This is a fairly slim book. It has only about 15 odd pages of text, and 60 photographs. Yet, it contains a lot to think about and see. In any case, if it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, then this intriguing little volume contains more than 60,000 words worth of matter.