Monthly Archives: May 2018

‘Today’s children want everything about everything—and right away too. Keeping this in mind, Pustak Mahal of Delhi has brought out the Children’s Knowledge Bank in six volumes…. The question and answer format with an illustration is one of the best ways, to give young children basic information on various subjects and thus develop a healthy interest in books and reading’—Pioneer, Lucknow.

Small, insignificant provincial towns enjoy brief moments of prominence when they are catapulted on to the centre-stage of the country’s attention. The reason is a combination of people and events which culminates in outbreaks of violence in previously peaceful environs.

It has been well and truly said: Bhagwan Rajneesh is his worst enemy. He is the agent provocateur of the first order. It is not that he is out to provoke people for the sake of provoking them, though, one suspects that he does, too, for effect. Plainly, the man believes in what he says. And there lies the difficulty of all those who want to take him seriously. He seems to say: ‘Don’t take me too seriously. I am enjoying myself watching your discomfiture’.

It is intriguing as to why Penguins chose this book for inclusion for the first lot of six books with which they started their operations in this part of the globe last year. First, this book was originally published by Vanguard Press Inc., in New York five years ago. This particular publisher is one of the many book-publishing (packaging) racketeers in New York. This outfit for purely mercenary considerations lends its NY.

A handy paperback version of the original collection published in 1973 by the Uni-versity of California in 1973, this collec¬tion remains neither modern nor truly representative of the short story trend in Modern Hindi. Perhaps the ‘modern’ in the title could have been defined in a subtitle indicating the years which this collection represents.

We have from the author of Circle of Reason (1986) a square, a cube, a tantalizingly misarranged Rubik Cube of Emotion. Action and reaction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines do not follow or justify each other. They are caused by and influence events that are widely dis¬tanced in space and time. Relationships are established and broken by acts, feel¬ings and thoughts that belong to other arenas, other theatres, other times.

It is sixteen years ago that I’ had the opportunity to be introduced to George Sioris’ interest in the comparative study of Japanese and Greek Mythology, when he presented his paper, ‘Two Char¬acteristic Similarities in Japanese and Greek Mythology, Amaterasu and the Cave, Persepone and the Underworld—Demeter’ at the International Conference on Japanese Studies held in Kyoto, Japan in November 1972.

Of late, studies on socio-economic history of the peninsular India, especially of the regions that were under the Colas and later under the Vijayanagara rulers have received a great fillip with the adoption of new conceptual frameworks that were not employed by scholars till recently. Attempts made by K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, Appadorai, B.A. Saletore, T.V. Mahalingam, Kenneth R. Hall and a few others to throw light on the socio-economic aspects of peninsular India during the medieval period have been re-examined by foreign scholars like Burton Stein and Naboru Karashima.

The November 1987 Kathmandu Summit ‘ of the leaders of the SAARC countries seems to have accepted the principle that efforts of these countries to operationalize ‘regional cooperation can only be helped – by including the economic dimensions of regional cooperation at some future date in the official SAARC action plan.

Many serious writings in Chinese journals during the last two years have started characterizing the emerging poli¬tical economy in China as ‘Market Socialism’. This new formulation refers to a system where there is planned econo¬mic development but it is at the same time responsive to the market; the princi¬ple of distribution is ‘each according to his work’, but interpreted as adequately giving material incentives for higher labour productivity; and while public ownership remains predominant, diverse forms including cooperative, individual and joint forms of ownership would be promoted.

Earlier, texts were illustrated by pictures; today photographs are more often supple-mented by texts. This book is a collection of very beautiful photographs of the better-known monuments of Delhi, by a well-known photographer. It is not a guide-book, for it lacks the professional¬ism of one—no map, no index, no chronological chart (which is necessary in a book written entirely in terms of the various rules of Delhi), no bibliography.

The importance of the education of the handicapped is now universally recognized. All over the world special education is increasingly demanding and getting attention. In the developed countries interest in special education is certainly not new, issues involved in special education have been discussed, debated and acted upon since the last century.

Any publication in the value of the socio¬economic dimensions of education in India is a welcome addition as study in the field is much needed and writings are few and far between. This rather compre¬hensive collection of readings embraces a number of vital issues presented for dis¬cussion at a conference held at the McGill University in Montreal in June 1985.

Viswarupa is usually synonymous with the dazzling revelation of Krishna’s infinite divinity, as narrated in the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita. The visual association that has gained popular vali¬dity is that of Vishnu, standing like a veritable pillar and the entire Hindu pantheon arranged around and in the space inhabited by the principal deity.

Two important books have appeared recently which seriously examine the environ-mental problems with the inten¬tion of working out a strategy for sur¬vival. These books differ in more than one way from each other. Still there is a commonality—they agree that all major malfunctions in society are ecolo¬gical. They intend to see ecology emerge as a ‘super’ subject, just like August Comte saw sociology and Karl Marx saw political economy.

In some recent literature on aspect of food problem, there is a welcome initia¬tive to look at some long neglected areas. For example, problems like pollution or depletion of drinking water sources, loss of forest-based foods including fruits, flowers and roots which prove particularly useful in drought years, the conversion of staple foods of the poor into luxury foods of the rich though various processing technologies, and of course the growing problem of wood-fuel shortage.

The Centre for Policy Research has a knack of selecting issues of national importance, investigating them in all aspects and bringing out policy impli¬cations for the benefit of planners and practitioners. The focus of this publication is on one such issue of great national significance i.e. people’s participation in family planning without which there is no guarantee that the programme will succeed in future.

The epistemological problem pervades all research. Demographic research is no exception. In fact, the epistemological problem seems to be more serious in demographic research which is characteri¬zed by large-scale sample surveys. Any¬thing smaller than a sample size of 5,000-10,000 households and as many respon¬dents is not only ridiculed but also frown¬ed upon.

The Security of South Asia edited by Stephen Cohen presents a thought provo¬king perspective contributed to by some of the principal commentators in the field, as they look ahead to the sub-continent’s future and examine the implications for the rest of the world.

For those not born to it, Hinduism is not an easy religion to understand, much less to warm up to. And it has not been well served by exegetists—both Indian and non-Indian—who been have swept off their feet by the epistemological and ontological absolutism of Adwaita Vedanta and have therefore tended to over¬emphasize the ‘other-worldliness’ of the Hindu view of life.