Author Archives: Thebookreviewindia

Sunil Gavaskar writes as well as he bats—almost. In a simple and straight­forward style he sets out his cricketing experiences. The narrative is full of little stories and anecdotes, which make interesting reading.

It is perhaps axiomatic that charisma­tic leadership absorbed in the projection of its charisma, is followed by nuts-and-­bolts leadership. Of the latter, President Sadat of Egypt is an instructive example.

There is no clarification in the pre­face about the ‘experimental’ nature of this autobiography; there is instead a brief account of the unhappy circumstan­ces in which this book came to be writ­ten.

One of the stock criticisms of the post-Independence I.C.S. is that it is totally devoid of unusual individuals. Unique­ness and occasional eccentricity, it has been said, vanished with the British.

Thakura Ghara, the Sahitya Akademi award winning book of 1976, is the fifth and the latest collection of short stories by the author. ‘God’s Apartment’ is the vantage point from which the author sur­veys the middle class world.

Mathura is a miracle in itself. In its imperial past, it was a scene of high civili­zation, a centre of attraction for far-flung peoples. It remains a magnet; scores of visitors continue to flock there, drawn now not by temporal glory but by the magic of the Krishna legend.

Few rulers have been so maligned and misrepresented as Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, who has generally been pictured as an ‘intolerant bigot’ or ‘the furious fanatic’—and consigned to the category of monsters. Generations of readers have accepted this view of the contemporary Englishman, writing with a sense of moral superiority over the so­-called barbarian.

Inadequate food production and the population explosion in developing count­ries were favourite themes for economists during the 1950s and 1960s.