Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

One of the many things wrong with growing old is that people we once admired become what is called past their prime. Pretty girls put on weight; batsmen go out for a duck; singers keep clearing their throat and sipping water or whatever; columnists recycle news and views . . . Sachin Tendulkar is an exception.

For those of us born before the age of television, we can only rue the afternoons spent indoors reading or outdoors playing with friends instead of being regaled by the adventures of SpongeBob Square Pants.

Hindi cinema, or if one may, Bollywood, is such a fascinating subject of study that almost any lens through which you might choose to look at it offers myriad possibilities of providing fresh perspectives on history, culture, society, politics, nationhood, gender etc.

In his autobiography Nirad Chaudhuri describes how on his wedding night he asked his young bride Amiya if she had heard of Beethoven. To his relief she had indeed heard of the composer and even spelt out the name correctly.

There are not many Indian authors who had the courage and confidence to write about the United States of America despite the fact that many young and not-so-young men, and young and no-so-young women in post-Independent Indiaespecially from the 1950s and 1960s onwardshave literally grown up loving American popular fiction, popular music and popular cinema (Hollywood).

Divided into four sections, each one with an introduction, this book is with five essays on the renaissance in Europe, four on the Indian subcontinent, and two each on eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe and ‘Art and Philosophy’, the scope of this book is quite vast even if it is largely Eurocentric.

Reviewing Shanta Acharyas previous collection of poetry, Shringara (2006), I had called it a sheaf of grief, an elegiac volume about the loss of loved ones, through which a rawness of the pain still throbbed.

Following the publication of her ambitious doctoral book The Hindi Public Sphere in 2002, Francesca Orsini was promptly acknowledged as one of the more knowledgeable and capable Hindi scholars teaching in the West and writing in English.

When a man has spent as long as Jamsheed Marker did at the highest levels of diplomacyhe was Ambassador of Pakistan in ten countries with another nine concurrent accreditationsthe memoirs are bound to be of considerable interest.