Monthly Archives: October 2017

Deewanawas a hit. The audience loved him. Shah Rukh Khan, the actor, had made it.A hundred and six pages into Mushtaq ShiekhsShah Rukh Can, the lines wash over you and ring loud the words that youve been waiting for from the moment you started reading it. Careful choice of wordsShah Rukh Khan, the actor, not Shah Rukh Khan, the star…

Poet and philosopher Khalil Gibran noted, Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart Leela: A Patchwork Life, among other things, reveals precisely this. Radiant, ethereal, stunning, Leela Naidu was the purveyor of beauty for a generation of Indians and foreigners alike. With her sublime smile…

This is a new and slightly abridged edition of Khwaja Ahmad Abbass autobiography of the same title originally published in 1977. Edited and introduced by Suresh Kohli, the reincarnated version has a Foreword by Amitabh Bachchan as its novel feature, highlighted on the front page of this hard cover book…

Writing on film in India was for a long time mired in different kinds of bias and untouchability. While only certain kinds of films and filmmakers in the realist tradition were considered worthy of critical attention, bulk of the films produced here was considered trash. As for the writings, most of them…

Back to Gondwanaland: An Account of the Gondwanaland Expeditions Journey from the Top of India to the Tip of Africa is a highly entertaining and educative account of a three month expedition by a team of about ten persons from different disciplines driving three Scorpios through sixteen countries that lie between Iran and South Africa, in 2006…

Fabindia is our favourite fairytalea dashing young foreigner in India with a dream, marrying a beautiful Indian girl, and creating a kingdom based on high principles and beautiful craft skills. Armed with a belief that success and prosperity, used wisely, can also bring prosperity to the poor. Now someone has written the story.

Mapins richly illustrated book does what its editor Hasan-Uddin Khan promises to: produce a broad look at the city by having a range of international specialists examine Chandigarh through different lensesto creatively speculate about the city and the way that its original conception has stood up to the pressures of a contemporary Indian city…

The function of communication to shape the dialectics of the time provides it with a rare power. Defined as the interplay of various, often conflicting, images and symbolizations, the process of communication as well as the import of that process hold within them the innate will to move thought-processes in a particular direction…

The book under review is a comprehen-sive picture of the developmental trajectory followed by the ICT industry in India. It underscores the historical role played by the state in promoting the industry. Primarily focusing on the institutions responsible for laying the foundation of IT, the author adopts…

Once upon a time, and not very long ago either, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg in New Delhi where several large and small newspapers have their offices didnt used to be as horribly crowded with cars as it is now. From 1982, when I first went to work there at the Express Group, until 1987 when George…

Acollection in honour of distinguished philosopher Mrinal Miri, this volume is held together less by any thematic unity, despite its title, than by the personal closeness the authors and editors (two of his former students), feel towards an undoubtedly remarkable thinker and institution builder…

The blurb of Celebrating Delhi appropri-ately mentions that the book takes us on a journey varied and unexpected. We may add that it also infuses and inspires a deep sense of involvement and enchantment with the city through the passionate and committed writings of each author. The themes cut across pre-colonial…

If one were to write a history of Namdev and trace the traditions that bear his name, how would one set about doing it? There is no historical record of his life and composition, either in court documents or in inscriptionsa fate he shares with most great bhaktas or devotional poetsaints of medieval and early modern India…

Max Weber spoke of man as a meaning making animalspinning constantly and being suspended in webs of meaning to make sense and give an orientation to the world that he lived in and wished to order. Such a formulation seems to lie at the basis of Heinrich Von Stietencrons study of the iconography of the Ganga and Yamuna on temple doors…

The Harappan or Indus civilization is a subject where the amount of new data and analysis are constantly growing, and it is difficult to keep pace with both. That is why a new book on the subject excites interest. Rita P. Wrights The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society is part of a series that aims at introducing students…

The book under review written by an eminent artist with emotional appeal has twelve hapters with impressive photographs and lay-out and is not too unwieldy for capturing the salient features of the life of a colossus that Rukmini Devi was. In the preface the author says that she started her research in 1992 collecting data regarding years…

This slim book seems to be the outcome of a well-meaning attempt to understand thoroughly the communicative aspect of Gandhiji’s personality and politics. Much energy has obviously gone into the enterprise; the many tables, appendix, the pages of endnotes at the end of each chapter as well as the long bibliography…

Crooked Stalks is a powerful reminder, especially to those who believe otherwisedespite mounting evidence to the contrary, that development is not a codewritten computer programme. In this wellresearched study of the Piramalai Kallar community of southern Tamil Nadu, Anand Pandian blends precolonial past and colonial history…

A slim volume, you pick up the book imagining that it is contains short chicken-soup-ish love stories. It is however, an unfortunate compilation of unanchored thoughts.

Cynicism and hopelessness often tint our view of the political situation in our country and with news channels painting bleak pictures for us twenty-four hours a day, an almost existential sort of hopelessness tends to grip us from time to time.