Going by this illuminating statement, let us look at the poems themselves. The very first poem gives the reader a foretaste of what is to come. ‘Egomobile: An Ad’ is like a mock-advertisement of an automobile. Almost all human preoccupations and passions are squee-zed into this tight structure…
To me, poetry is the recording of the emotional world structured by the intellectual reinforcements of indivi-dual subjectivity, through images, metaphors and sculpted words and phrases of specific aesthetic relevance. Even Wordsworth’s well-known descriptions of poetry…
It is rarely that one comes across a full fiction based on music. In Indian Bhasha literature, one immediately remembers S.L. Bhyrappa’s Saraswati Samman winning Kannada novel Mandra and Bani Basu’s Bengali novel Gandharvi…
Academic economics in the capitalist world is in a state of confusion. The recent mathematical reformulations of the theory have been unable to solve it. The theory of income distribution is not an exception to this. But there is one difference, unlike the theory of production, it has been the least emphasized discipline…
In the post-Mandal debates, one commonsensical understanding has emerged that the dalits (Scheduled Castes/Tribes) are more disadvantaged and deprived than the Other backward Castes/Classes (OBCs) and therefore their demands for reservations can be justified but not of the affluent OBCs…
Until sometime back caste was viewed as a kind of odd subject, something which primarily concerned scholars interested in the traditional social order of Indian society, social anthropologists and sociologists. Economists who engaged with the processes of planning…
The book under review is a vital addition to the scholarly writings on Indian political economy, though sadly it engages with the familiar puzzle regarding why and how poverty persists among various social groups of India even after more than six decades of India’s freedom…
Rethinking Work: Global, Historical and Sociological Perspectives, is a collection of essays which explores the theme of work as a separate conceptual category that exists apart from labour. In doing so the contributing authors provide a perspective on the factors that define the contours of the meaning of work and the reality of its experi-ence…
This is a glossy coffee table book commemorating 60 year of diplomatic relations between France and India brought out under the aegis of FICCI, with messages from the presidents of both the republics, and a foreword by the president of FICCI. However, the introduction…
This book, as noted in its preface, is ‘an Evaluation Report on the Elections and Voting Behaviour Studies conducted in India since the first general elections’ commissioned by the Indian Council of Social Science Research. It surveys and codifies this wide ranging, vast and disparate literature and includes the results of a survey of scholars concerning…
For most of the twentieth century, two countries dominated the scene: the United States and Russia (till 1991 as the erstwhile Soviet Union). Students of mod-ern history, political science and international relations, and indeed people more generally…
India’s foreign policy has been, and continues to be, driven by a host of factors which are not easy to delineate. India’s relations with the external world have often been driven by personalities-individual proclivities, orien-tations and worldview. History and geography have played their part in varying tones…
The (re)emergence of China over the last couple of decades as an economic powerhouse with significant military and technological prowess has a direct bearing on India in particular and the global order in general. The re-emergence of China and India in particular has resulted…
Tariq Ali is a gifted writer but can hardly rank among the most coherent political thinkers of our times. Revolution is not a subject on which any work, howsoever monumental, can be said to be the last word, and the book under review is by no means monumental. It reads like a collection of booklets…
What is it about the lanes of Old Delhi that has every ‘authentic’ Dilliwalla preferring to live in their memories than in present-day Delhi? If only one had a time-machine, perhaps the mystery could be resolved. In the absence of such a mechanism, those of us who are bewitched by this city have only…
A renewed discussion over the histories of the Princely States in Colonial India has brought many interesting themes to the fore for some time now. While it is difficult to ascertain whether the subject itself has arrived in the mainstream of Indian historiography…
Empire’s Garden by Jayeeta Sharma is about the North Eastern province of Assam. The objective of the book was to show how a vast wilderness was transformed into a flourishing greenery of tea-plantation around which a colonial state was entrenched,…
The Andaman and Nicobar islands for all their remoteness have nevertheless been the subject of a number of books. Among the classics in ethnography is the study of the tribes of the islands by Radcliffe Brown and as ethnographical studies go it has yet to be replaced. The history of the islands, recorded…
The killing of Mallojula Koteshwar Rao, known as Kishenji, at the hands of counterinsurgency security forces in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district may be a setback to the Maoist movement but it gives no cause to rejoice… Over and above being a threat to security, the Maoist insurgency is a political question that needs political an-swers… His killing deprives the Maoist move-ment of a leader, but not the causes that sustain it…
Minorities and the State is a historical, analytical account of the relationship that has developed in the postcolonial period in Bengal, now comprising two regions, West Bengal in India and Bangla-desh. The province of Bengal was a central component of British colonial machina-tions in the Indian subcontinent.