Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Are the Pakistani people faced with a devil-and-the-deep-sea choice: condemned to live forever in backwardness and anti-democratic mould, of remaining permanently in a feudal set-up or going the Taliban way?

The contention that modernization of the agrarian sector is a precondition for economic growth and development is not a mere claim. It is an irrefutable fact which the economic history of the pre­sent day advanced countries has admit­tedly established.

Maleeha Lodhi’s edited volume is one of the few books that Pakistan military’s Inter-Services Public Relations’ head Maj. General Athar Abbas recommends to his visitors. The value of this book for Pakistan’s armed forces and establishment is that it presents Pakistan as ‘beyond a crisis state’. The basic thesis of the volume…

The elephant has become an obvious, even if cliched, symbol of modern India but the imagery of the dancing elephant has been used in other contexts as well. Thus Louis V. Gerstner in his Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? recounts the dramatic turnround in the fortunes of IBM that was once considered too big and not nimble enough to survive…

Terrorism as a subject has evoked a great deal of academic interest from various disciplines. Professor Unaiza, a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist, has put together this work ‘to sensitize and create awareness about the relentless sufferings of innocent civilians globally following 9/11.’…

Despite being consciously underestimated’ and described in anodyne terms as ‘unconventional’ or ‘irregular’ conflict’ the fact is that ‘insurgency’ has been the most common form of warfare in history. Conventional or regular conflict’ in brief’ ‘wars’ as commonly understood’ is the exception’ rather than the rule’ if past conflicts were to be reviewed…

The study of urban sociology has fast gained ground in India in the preceding decade. This is concomitant with the rapid pace of urbanization taking place across the country. The city has always been the focal point of aspirations. Almost as soon as India realized its aspiration of integrating with the world in a fuller manner, its populations,…

It is commonly argued today that the greatest threats to world order and security come not from strong and well-organized sovereign states, but the world’s most fragile states, alternatively called ‘failing’, ‘quasi’, ‘faltering’ or ‘weak’ states. While the first murmurs about these so-designated ‘failed states’ began to be heard around the time of the Clinton adminis-tration…

Translation, like criticism, must be perpetually re-undertaken. Art, prover­bially, is long, so that translation, in so far as it is an art, should also be timeless, persistently reappearing as an inevitable response to stimuli felt by succeeding generations.

With increasing globalization, economic integration is an important part of development efforts in any region. Despite a lack of cohesive economic unit in South Asia, there has been growing interest in South Asia as a destination for trade and investment. Also politically South Asian countries are in a state of flux given…

The book under review is a refreshing volume rich with brilliant theoretical insights, first-rate empirical analysis and bold academic arguments which would not only be useful for students of South Asian international politics but also policy makers of the region. However, the book also suffers from a number of shortcomings…

International Relations (IR) theory has been a relative latecomer to South Asia. Until a few years ago, much of the IR literature in South Asia—and indeed on South Asia—had been unabashedly untheoretical. But the last decade has seen a flowering of very deliberately theoretical work in South Asian IR…

Good books often get their timing wrong. In the current context in India, where morality and ethics are both at a discount, this book is both timely and excellent. It comprises a collection of papers, of somewhat uneven quality, presented at a workshop in 2007 in Vancouver on South Asian ethical practices.

There is a great diversity in the in­equality of social, cultural, political, demographic and economic facets of the vast structure of Indian society. Mani­festations of many of the various indivi­ous modes of inequality, innate in this society, often make us appear to be a queerly ‘hierarchical breed’ of people.

India has completed nearly two ‘successful’ decades of economic liberalization aimed at unrestricted movement of goods, services and investments across economies.

First published in 1970, the book has been revised and updated to cover deve­lopments up to the first year of the Janata government to serve as a textbook for studying the determinants, institu­tions, and processes involved in foreign policy making.

International migration is not a new phenomenon for the globetrotting Indians who today constitute more than twenty-five millions living either permanently or temporarily in different countries around the world.

The articles in this book are written by various authors who deal with nume­rous aspects of the Government National Adult Education Programme of 1978. The book reads as though a group of people are discussing the means of trans­porting a doctor, some suggest that the doctor should be brought by road or by air and yet others are talking of the financial implications.

In the classical Marshallian framework, citizenship was visualized in terms of a contradictory relation to capitalism. The three components of citizenship, under the scheme Marshall espoused, referring to civil, political and social, were coterminous with the expansion of the right to free speech, right to participation and economic welfare.

There is a common belief that books published by government departments are not worthy of serious evaluation because of the lackadaisical treatment they generally receive from their publi­shers. But exceptions are there and this book under review happens to be one.