Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

The human protagonists of the story are a pair of iconoclastic fifteen-year-olds, Asha and Zeb, who protest against the stifling system through illegal graffiti (the author mentions the British artist Banksy as an inspiration in the Afterword). Things escalate when the young rebels witness the callous murder of a word mid-transport by security forces during one of their furtive getaways and are eventually scapegoated as criminals.

Constrained by the chicken-pox and trying to deal with it during the summer holidays, Paromita and her fellow chicken-pox afflicted neighbouring teens—Sunidhi, Agastya, Darius, and Nihal—decide to solve the mystery that has scarred all of the denizens of The Orchard.

The story circles around a hidden sandalwood grove near the Sahyadri Range. The sandalwood trees are in the middle of a change of guard with the young Siah taking over from her mentor Bhuja when they come under the shadow of traffickers. To rescue her clan, Siah is willing to go to great lengths and even follow the forbidden paths. The story carries an element of speculative fiction at its core. Who set the fire that left Samr half burnt? What happened to the little girl who died mysteriously? Several parallel narratives seem to be unfolding simultaneously, making the plot pleasantly challenging and complex. All the threads converge in the climactic chapters and the ends are tied up neatly.

Memory is the well from which poets draw inspiration, but poetry is the ‘zazen’ that brings acceptance for loss. Thus in ‘Recognition’ the poet poignantly recalls:
The taste of twin Genoise sponge
baked and partly burnt
for my fourth birthday bash…
…the agency of

As a result of persistent and systematic discrimination by the Sinhala majority, the Tamil resistance movement had by the early 1980s turned militant, led by the well-armed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In 1983 the Sinhalese reacted by systematic attacks on the Tamils, which of course further exacerbated violence by the Tamils.

The volume concludes with three important, though controversial organizations—the Police, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the National Investigation Agency (NIA). The NIA is the newest of the three, which was created following the Mumbai terror attack in 2008. Akshay Mangla and Vineet Kapoor’s chapter analyses the administrative capacity of the police in terms of police/population ratio and other resources at their disposal

Writing on high level decision-making while history is being made is never easy. Woodward has mastered the art of getting principals, including Trump in the past, to speak of what they knew and why they did what they did in near real time. The book is thus fascinating in what it reveals of the working of Biden Presidency on foreign and security policy. War is a blow-by-blow account of Biden administration’s response to the Ukraine and Palestine crises.

hey start with a clean example of Neche and Gretna on the United States-Canada border, where the citizens of Neche are closer to Gretna across the border than to any other American town. While the Americans in Neche do their shopping and socializing in Gretna, they cannot avail the welfare services offered by the Canadian Government in Gretna. Similarly, another American town, Point Roberts

Chaulia terms the India-Japan partnership as a ‘quasi-friendship’, which though encouraged by the US earlier, has its own logic and internal dynamics today. He says one reason for Japan to turn towards India is its fear that the US would not defend it in the case of a frontal attack by China and that together, India and Japan are alternatives to the other countries vis-à-vis China in the Indo-Pacific. He argues that Japan has helped India sustain its regional predominance in South Asia (p. 91).

These were soon joined by direct recruits, chosen by the Union Public Service Commission. Three officials especially marked out by the author for their contributions are K Natwar Singh, Brajesh Mishra and JN Dixit. MK Rasgotra and Muchkund Dubey were among the several other stalwarts who significantly contributed to India’s conduct of its foreign relations.

During the initial years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), an important task for the Foreign Ministry was to implement a united front strategy in the countries that had kept their recognition of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang regime. Emerged from CPC’s experiences during the war against Japanese imperialists, the united front strategy sought to establish relations beyond the formal governmental level with political parties, civil society organizations and individuals.

Each of the chapters tries to focus on the BRI and its effects across the Indian and Pacific Ocean. Chapter one dwells on the various theories on ‘Silk Road’. The Chinese have tried to revive the idea of the ‘Silk Road’ by initially calling the overland route ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ and by water as ‘Maritime Silk Road’. The purpose was to make China ‘great again’ and to dethrone the US as ‘the world’s leading superpower’ (p. 2). Lintner views China’s initiatives and particularly the BRI from the prism of a new ‘Cold War’.

Warikoo refers to Kashmir as the undivided State of Jammu and Kashmir including Ladakh, Hunza, Gilgit, Baltistan and adjoining frontier territories. Following the Independence of India, when the Gilgit agency was restored to the Maharaja of Kashmir, the British launched a secret mission called Operation Datta Khel, employing their officers posted in Pakistan, Peshawar, and Gilgit to physically occupy Gilgit and hand over to Pakistan.

The book cogently touches upon the dichotomies that beset the nation during its nascent stage and some of which continue to haunt its path. Kamran argues that an inherent religious bias prevented democracy from flourishing in Pakistan. This was despite the nation’s conceptualization on lines of the western modern construct. The religious ‘rationale’ conflicted with ideas of democracy as interpreted and propagated by the West and instead an ‘establishmentarian democracy’ started taking shape.

The concept of the Indo-Pacific itself is a debated one and is seen differently by various theorists, as pointed out by Shubhrajeet Konwer (p.105). It is seen either as a balancing strategy by the realists, or as a new institutional setting of cooperation among the countries of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean by the liberalists, or as an ideational construct of shared values to face a common enemy by the constructivists.

Bangladesh has had democratic governments with intermittent breaks when the military junta took over power through coup d’etat. The recent uprising was not an intervention by the army—to many it appeared to be spontaneous outburst of the masses although now, with the unearthing of many sources, the narrative does not correspond with that which attracted our attention at the outset.

There is disappointment, particularly at the exclusion of Dalits in the Republic’s politics of representation as Nepal de facto returns to the pre-revolutionary political system of domination of hill khas Nepali upper castes. Dalits may be 14 percent of the population but in the November 2022 elections

The world witnesses Israel’s barbaric destruction in Gaza, and people took to the streets to demand a ceasefire to end the horrific destruction on Gaza instigated in October 2023. The Israeli (occupation) defence and armed forces, along with private industries, seized this opportunity to market their goods. Israel uses video footage of their weapons in action to aim at boosting their sale of arms and surveillance technology.

In many parts of the Ottoman Empire, the massive immigration of Caucasian refugees created a demographically chaotic situation, as what Lord Curzon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary termed in the early 20th century, ‘unmixing of peoples’ which later on spawned a plethora of parochial nationalist and sub-nationalist movements in the post-Ottoman era.

Nationalism, a recurring motif in the novel, is presented as both a unifying ideology and a vehicle for violence and marginalization. Through the lived experiences of his characters, Islam interrogates how nationalist discourses justify systemic exclusion, displacement, and cultural erasure. It also reflects how even such a unifying force could not cut across social boundaries like caste.