It is to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that the credit for embarking Pakistan on a nuclear course goes. The idea of an Islamic Bomb was his and it was he who against much opposition, set up the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology and started negotiations for the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant.
Enslaved Innocence: Child Labour in South Asia examines the exploitation of children in India which has the largest number of child labour in the world today.
A volume such as this has been needed for a long time. It is true that the peasantry did not play such a crucial and spectacular role in modern Indian history as it has done in other parts of the world, and it is not surprising that India finds no mention in a book like Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century.
Mother Maiden Mistress is an attempt to map women’s representation in cinema from 1950-2010. The contribution of women in the Indian film industry has received minimal attention. This is a much needed addition to the historical narrative of Indian cinema. The book is premised on the argument that no matter how the decades…
The city of Chennai was remembered until the early 2000s for its huge banners lining most of the arterial roads. Huge hand painted film hoardings battled for prominence with equally massive ads for consumer products. And then suddenly the denizens of Chennai felt that these hoardings were not really aesthetic and were also…
The adaptation of fiction into films is one of the earliest interventionist modes of analysing cinema and bringing the cinematic medium at par with the written word. Cinema needed ‘respectable’ literary moorings to step out of the shadows. James Naremore in his seminal work on film adaptation…
This book is a collection of essays in English by Satyajit Ray, dating from as early as 1949 to 1989, collated from different newspapers, journals and bulletins on cinema from India and elsewhere. Twenty-two written pieces have been arranged accordingly in three segments titled,…
Donald Preziosi in his, A Crisis in, or of, Art History? recounts an instance which will become the cornerstone to radicalize the conventional disciplines of art history. He talks about the 1982 Winter issue of Art Journal which was dedicated to the theme of ‘The Crisis in the Discipline’.
Abiography is usually the life of a person and Douglas Knight’s book features Balasaraswathi, a Bharatanatyam icon. He meticulously traces her life as a dancer, emphasizing her family’s influence on her career. As a child, there was an initial brief period when Bala, as she was popularly known…
Not by pen, nor by author, nor indeed by technique, but life by its own motion went on spreading, page after page, on paper, as if there had sprung up a mighty living tree on earth’, says Krishna Sobti about her novel, Zindagi Nama Ek Zinda Rookh. It is nothing short of a tour de force, a fascinating kaleidoscope of the life and times of pre-partition Punjab…
2012
This is a very useful book for two types of readers. It would be a good pick for the outsider with an interest in an India beyond the lonely planet guides who would like some insights into how the system and processes work here.
Rights delineate relationship between the State and the individual hence; they are some sort of parameters to determine the nature of any State. Individual and group rights, including a gamut of second generation rights called civil and political rights, when guaranteed by a State serve as milestones to mark democratization of society…
The book, the dust jacket claims, is the first ever collection of long Hindi poems written in our time. The poets whose works are included are Agyeya, Muktibodh, Dharmvira Bharati, Raghuvir Sahai, Raj Kamal Chaudhary, Dhoomil, Amrita Bharati, Baldeo Vanshi, Mani Madhukar and Leeladhar Jagoodi…
It may sound ironical but the fact is that the production of literature on human rights as well as human rights violations is moving at the same pace. There is no dearth of Human Rights literature in India. However, the available literature can broadly be divided into two categories, academic and non-academic…
Moynihan is full of bounce and breeze in this 300-page account of his stewardship of American interests in the United Nations for eight months, July ‘75 to February ’76. It pullulates with controversies, but for an author whose background is trumpetted to be one of research and analysis, these are surprisingly built on many wrong premises and unsatisfactory data…
The book under review is the fifth Annual Report on Armed Conflicts in South Asia brought out by the think tank, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi. The Institute’s idea and practice of taking out annual reports is laudable. Over a period of time, these can serve as a reliable contemporary record…
To use a cliche, something Pothan Joseph abhorred, he was an institution by himself. Among the ‘greats’ of Indian journalism, during a period when giants abounded in the Indian press unlike at present, Joseph was as much admired and loved for his personal qualities as he was respected for his writing skill…
Very few political leaders in the world, not to talk about a woman, have attained such iconic stature, fame and received so many laurels as the symbol of democracy and freedom as that of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, who has made enormous sacrifices, including her own family life and spent her best years in captivity…
Partho Datta’s book turns out to be a particularly instructive read in a city struck by an epidemic of dengue and viral fevers in an August of disappeared monsoons, the spread of the vector and virus linked in no small degree to civic mismanagement and lapses in public health administration…
The Rebellion of 1857 has elicited a relentless flow of academic and popular responses, scholarly as well as polemical works, though unarguably, the fiftieth (1907), hundredth (1957) and hundred and fiftieth anniversaries (2007) have generated exemplary interventions on the nature, internal contradictions as well as inhering diversities of 1857.