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There are several authentic dialogues between characters that feel natural. It is a book of approximately 220 pages which makes for a quick and enjoyable read. The story is divided into chapters which helps in connecting all the ongoing processes in the story. Some illustrations could be added in every chapter for connectivity. Overall, it is a thought-provoking and inspiring novel.

When Leela’s meshtru, her teacher at school, tells them about how powerful Gandhiji’s speeches are, she can’t help but wonder, how powerful his voice be. Thus starts the journey of interaction with her community on the freedom struggle tidbits (psst– it is worth reading to find how she describes MK Gandhi’s voice)

The Henna Start-Up is the coming-of-age story of a girl from a conservative family who struggles, makes mistakes and has to overcome many threats and challenges for the simple freedom to study what she wants and to have the friends she likes. It is also a romance in which a young adult has to face her feelings for someone whom she both likes and distrusts. The book, though, is not just about Abir; it also is about her family and friends,

The city’s landscape changes before our eyes. There are tanks on the roads, blockades everywhere, and soon, our narrator is given a machine gun to hold by a kindly neighbour, which is obviously not appreciated by her mother. The narrator, her mother and brother watch Molotov cocktails being flung about on the streets and classrooms are now slowly getting bereft of classmates.

When Akran learns that the kidnapped girls–yes, multiple girls–are being used as part of a ritual to bring back a great evil into the world, he has very little time to stop it from happening and yet he must try his best, because the powerful person on the other side has kidnapped Shukra and is using him for nefarious means.

There are a few lines and phrases that especially stood out to me: the idea of setting up a momo stand— ‘Yes!   That is something that is quite popular right now and which corporate slave hasn’t wondered the same while having street food? I wonder if I would be happier and better off owning a street stall rather than working a nine-to-five, LOL’

Muskaan has been working for over two decades with poor and marginalized communities of Bhopal. Gaanth brings together the narratives of three women who were little girls during the riots of 1992, which took place after the destruction of Babri Masjid. The stories are based on the authors’

Written by young writers, the stories are full of keen observations and lively details. We see the world through their eyes, endowing it with familiarity, attentiveness, compassion and often humour. The book doesn’t follow a main singular narrative. Instead, each story opens a door into the past, present and future that lives on in the oral accounts of the people of Khichdipur. Under the shadow of the monstrous landfill, we are introduced to the worlds existing in Khichdipur’s blocks—Dhobighat, Dairy Farm, Murga Mandi, Bangali Basti, and Indra Camp, etc.

A bustling urban basti greets on the first page. Intricately detailed roofs and fixtures, water tanks and antennas, herons perched on the pillars, the mosque top with loudspeakers and orange flying festoons leave one transfixed…

On a fundamental level, the book would push the young reader to question humanity’s invincibility and technological advancement in times of climate change, artificial intelligence and COVID-19. Though this book will not answer all the questions, it puts forth more complex questions for readers to follow and explore. It can be an excellent classroom book experiment with varied pedagogical methods for different age groups.

Regardless, the book’s framework still makes the following speculations possible.
First, even as the societal consensus around America’s ruling ideology of democracy, capitalism and freedoms has collapsed at home, the number of its takers internationally has dwindled, including within the West, as the rise of inward looking, nationalist and far-Right forces across the West indicates.

The first section of Part Two deals with Trudeau’s foreign policy, Canada’s failure to win a non-permanent seat in the UN Security Council and his challenges in dealing with US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The book is structured imaginatively in two sections, A and B. Section A deals with Northeast Asia and B with South Asia. In Section A, there are three sub-chapters which discuss extensively the countries in the region, such as North Korea, Japan and South Korea and their relationship with China, in particular under Xi Jinping, and separately the influence of Donald Trump in Northeast Asia. In Section B, relations of the US with three countries of South Asia, namely, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan are studied in detail followed by the developments in these countries under President Trump.

The Indo-US nuclear deal and the Sri Lankan affairs count for Basrur as exemplars of drift. These two cases show why the Indian state got checkmated by domestic conflicts and institutional infirmities. In contrast, Basrur argues that the absence of a cohesive policy in Indian nuclear strategy and its approach to cross-border terrorism caused a ‘responsibility deficit’.

‘The Age of Nationalisms: Competing Visions’, the first chapter sets the stage by exploring the rise of nationalism in early twentieth century. The author highlights the diversity within nationalist movements in South Asia, showing how they were marked by competing visions and internal conflicts.

However, the book falls short of mentioning any American departure and post-war impacts on the West Asian region. The US withdrew from a long, bloody war in Iraq on the assumption that they had left the country in a better place and condition. Nevertheless

Midway through the book, the author sheds light on how a series of networks were built by the Iraqi regime during the war to appeal to the western world against US actions in Iraq. Numerous political cells were created by Baathist supporters of Saddam to mobilize people in cities like New Jersey

The three essays in the final section centre on war and diplomacy. Shantanu Chakrabarti discusses the writings of Hiranmoy Ghoshal, who spent considerable years of his life in Poland. These writings include Ghoshal’s ‘eyewitness account’ of the German invasion of Poland during the Second World War

According to Matos, white socialization teaches white individuals about their obligations, anticipated behaviours, assigned roles, and strategies to preserve the exclusive nature of their community. She explains that the moral choice that whiteness affords (which ‘not all racial groups have’) is the choice to either continue to follow and strengthen a system that is structured on white supremacy or challenge it.

For Jaffrelot, Modi’s personalization of power coupled with identifying the cosmopolitan origins of the Nehru-Gandhi family in particular allowed him to claim ownership to being a victim of elite politics along with the common people. This ‘national-populism’ for Jaffrelot is undergirded by a mimetic syndrome wherein Modi successfully managed to create a discourse of unanimism—the idea that the people and the leader are one and the same. This ‘Moditva’