Intellectuals and academicians pre-occupied with ‘armchair theorisation’ in past have been showing much sentisation towards the present socio-economic-political crisis coming forward with their research and academic skills to take up the challenges of development and the incarnation of the book titled ‘Orissa Vision 2020: Towards Building a New and Modern Orissa’ represents this divergence of past and present.
The above book is a volume that has come out of a three day National seminar organised by the C.Achuta Menon Foundation , Thiruvananthapuram on 8, 9, and 10 December 2005. The volume has been deservingly dedicated to Comrade K.V.Surendranath, the founder secretary of the Foundation and whose first death anniversary took place recently.
This somewhat unusual book is a biographical profile of the state of Jammu. The book is by no means a consistent historical work, a task that has been fulfilled by other historians such as L.N. Dhar, Mohan La! Kaul and many others who have written the history of Jammu and Kashmir.
This volume is a collection of 14 papers covering Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan in the north, Maharashtra in the central and old South Travancore in south India. The papers are organized in VI parts. Part I is composed of four papers which deal with Khalapur in western Uttar Pradesh – the first two are about Chuhras during 1950s and the second two draw from later fieldwork undertaken in 1984 with a gap of about thirty years.
The book under review is the second part of the two-volume publication on the emergency period (1975-1977), but it covers only the 21-month period (November 1, 1974 to July 24, 1976) with focus on the run-up to the point when the democratic set-up was demolished and a loose autocratic rule put in place which had neither any purpose nor any well-defined ideas to defend the collapse of democracy.
It is common to hear from both extreme left and right that contemporary Indian foreign policy is adrift of its moorings. Ninan Koshy’s book attempts to put forward the left basis for this claim. He believes a desire among India’s foreign policy establishment to attach itself to the coattails of the United States is the main cause of India’s heresy.
Kees van der Pijl is the director of the Centre of Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. His earlier books include The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984) and Transnational Classes and International Relations (1998). He is currently working on a project entitled “Tribal and Imperial Antecedents of Contemporary Foreign Relations”.
2005 saw the publication of Forging the Raj, a collection of more than a dozen essays by Thomas R. Metcalf, now Emeritus Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
Thee subtitle given to it explains the content and context of the book ]eevana Rekhalu, Vakchitralu. This book contains life-sketches and views and attitudes of twenty-five literary personalities who have been associated with the world of letters in contemporary times, and draws for us the images of these writers in their own words.
Translation is a desperate act, but culturally imperative and worth every attempt, on the part of the translator, to mediate between a canonical author and an eager reader when they are divided linguistically.
Owing to the inordinate emphasis on English writing in India, there has been hardly any perceptible recognition of writings in other Indian languages. Recently, Sahitya Akademi has published two big volumes comprising selected writings of individual authors.
Autobiography has of late been taking unusual turns to reach us. Fiction is an easy choice when writers give their voices to handpicked characters, but we notice nearly everyone telling us where they live and what they live for in critical essays, professional notes and comments,