Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

I would recommend Paul Coelho’s Like a Flowing River: Thoughts and Reflections if you are looking for (a) a book to carry on a journey, (b) a gift for a student achiever or (c) a mood-elevator.

This is a compilation of 102 stories and articles published in newspapers around the world by one of the most widely read authors of recent times. Unlike some of Coelho’s earlier works (Veronika Decides to Die and Eleven Minutes,

Jagannath Prasad Das who was recently awarded the prestigious Saraswati Samman is a versatile and outstanding Oriya writer who has been consistently writing poetry, fiction, drama and essays on art for almost four decades now.

Issues of education, community, modernity and Indian women are highly contentious these days, evoking aggressive and often violent passions. Kumar brings ethnographical studies that compel our gaze to be tempered by her readings of history and raises questions on the need to revisit our notions of the nation and most importantly of education.

Profusely footnoted, elaborately indexed and extensively researched, this volume is a valuable contribution to the on-going debate on the merits and demerits of high dams to meet India’s growing needs for irrigation, hydropower and drinking water.

Is sati a burning issue or a burnt out issue? The theme of sati has been thrashed out threadbare in the last decade with both western and Indian scholarship converging on this crucial area of social history and societal practice.

The task of a historian is not only to go through already identified paths and throw new light on well known events but also constantly look into sources and archival material, and identify moments which have played an important role in social dynamics.

Dalley begins with the best of intentions. Debunking myths, demonstrating how the practices of history writing and representation implicitly and explicitly make and unmake myths and understanding within this how and why the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756) became so central to the formation of the British Empire are his overall concerns. Unfortunately,

Democracy is the most ambitious political project of the last century and Indian democracy with a vigorous free press, apolitical military, regular and competitive elections, and a functional overburdened judiciary is one of the good examples of a formal democracy.