It may sound ironical but the fact is that the production of literature on human rights as well as human rights violations is moving at the same pace. There is no dearth of Human Rights literature in India. However, the available literature can broadly be divided into two categories, academic and non-academic…
Moynihan is full of bounce and breeze in this 300-page account of his stewardship of American interests in the United Nations for eight months, July ‘75 to February ’76. It pullulates with controversies, but for an author whose background is trumpetted to be one of research and analysis, these are surprisingly built on many wrong premises and unsatisfactory data…
The book under review is the fifth Annual Report on Armed Conflicts in South Asia brought out by the think tank, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi. The Institute’s idea and practice of taking out annual reports is laudable. Over a period of time, these can serve as a reliable contemporary record…
To use a cliche, something Pothan Joseph abhorred, he was an institution by himself. Among the ‘greats’ of Indian journalism, during a period when giants abounded in the Indian press unlike at present, Joseph was as much admired and loved for his personal qualities as he was respected for his writing skill…
Very few political leaders in the world, not to talk about a woman, have attained such iconic stature, fame and received so many laurels as the symbol of democracy and freedom as that of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, who has made enormous sacrifices, including her own family life and spent her best years in captivity…
Partho Datta’s book turns out to be a particularly instructive read in a city struck by an epidemic of dengue and viral fevers in an August of disappeared monsoons, the spread of the vector and virus linked in no small degree to civic mismanagement and lapses in public health administration…
The Rebellion of 1857 has elicited a relentless flow of academic and popular responses, scholarly as well as polemical works, though unarguably, the fiftieth (1907), hundredth (1957) and hundred and fiftieth anniversaries (2007) have generated exemplary interventions on the nature, internal contradictions as well as inhering diversities of 1857.
At a time when it has become fashionable in some academic circles to champion the cause of empire as a guarantee of global stability, at a time when Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s influential Empire seeks to make colonialism respectable by advocating the notion of a ‘centreless Empire’, at a time when we are being told by apologists such as Niall Ferguson that imperialism has been a benign historical force, Partha Chatterjee’s important book, Black Hole of Empire, reminds us that empire is ultimately about lies, deceit and violence…
Professor Misra’s book, Quest for an International Order in the Indian Ocean is a well structured analysis of the politico-strategic significance of the Indian Ocean, the interests of the big powers and the response of the littorals…
Without seaborne activities, human existence is inconceivable. Oceans, seas, waterways, shipbuilding, banking, exploration, navigation and various other activities and sciences are just a few areas that we come to learn of through maritime history.
When a delicately carved Indian miniature ivory statuette depicting a young woman was discovered in 1938 along with other finely crafted goods in the ruins of, probably in a merchant’s house in Pompeii, Italy datable to the first century of the common era, there was not only…
During the last three decades, about a dozen books have been produced by western scholars on the theory and practice of nonalignment. Of these mostly American and British scholars the latter have shown relatively greater sensitivity and understanding of the philosophical foundation and practical implications…
This is a study of women workers in Bangalore’s garment-export industry. It is based on exploratory field study methods, in which much importance is accorded to surveys of the women workers themselves. Along with them, the authors also directed interviews of management…
In the backdrop of the economic recession of 2008, this Report is an attempt to analyse alternatives for productive employment. It predicts a double digit recession that would have an inverse impact on jobs, creating social unrest and a delay in economic recovery.
The WTO and India: Issues and Negotiating Strategies edited by Alokesh Barua, Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Robert Stern, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, is a compilation of eighteen papers, partly based on an outreach…
Even the well-educated layman let alone an ordinary citizen in India does not know the planning process in all its complexities. The concept of multilevel planning is understood even less. A book that describes the process, the way it has evolved over the years, its future directions, the meaning…
Two kinds of debate are dominant in discussions about South Asia’s future: one largely political; the other, at least on the surface, largely economic.The first insists on regional cooperation for the inter-state political harmony that is considered to be a precondition not only for economic growth, but for the region to play a role on the world stage commensurate with its size and population…
Tabish Khair’s fourth novel is a brilliant piece of satire on Islamic terror and Islamism and how the West perceives, as also reacts to the two, post 9/11.
The volume under review is a bunch of studies in the sociology of social movements in India. Never in the history of Indian social sciences has the case for a sociology of social movements received so much attention as it has in the 1970’s. Only a decade and a half ago the conventionalist ‘establishment’ of the Indian…
Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) is easily one of the most well-known Urdu writers from India in the twentieth century. Mostly renowned for a few of her short stories such as ‘Lihaaf,’ it goes without saying that she was a writer who was much, much more than that.