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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.
‘We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India’ were M.A. Jinnah’s words announcing 16 August 1946 as Direct Action Day.
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.
Studying Sino-Indian relations or comparing the two Asian giants across multiple indicators and themes is today a veritable industry for scholars, analysts, publishers and policymakers.
Three narratives on science and technology (S&T) in China are prevalent today in scholarship and policy circles. Firstly, while China invented the printing press, paper-making, gunpowder and compass (the Four Great Inventions—sida faming) in the ancient times not excluding the Grand Canal or the Great Wall and other grand engineering projects, soon it was relegated to the background since the 15th century as western European countries marched with the ongoing scientific revolutions.
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.
The rise of China and India in the post-Cold War global power configuration is now universally accepted. What is less well known is back in the eighteenth century, these Asian giants accounted for nearly one half of the global manufacturing output. A potential reversal to that era is beginning to unfold.