Vaasanthi. Translated from the original Tamil by Sukanya Venkataraman, Gomathi Narayan and Vaasanthi
Fifteen short stories of Vaasanthi, originally written in Tamil over many years, have been translated by the author (1 story), Sukanya Venkataraman (11 stories) and Gomathi Narayananan (3 stories) in this collection. The dedication of this collection to Vaasanthi’s grandson who when young ‘asked a profound question/ “Are we real?”’ and the author’s answer to him, ‘We are. Because we feel’ sums up the spirit of all the stories in this collection.
The title Surya Vamsam, translating to ‘the family of the sun’, is a tribute to Sivasankari’s father, Suryanarayanan. ‘…overwhelming, exciting, thrilling, hurtful, shameful, moving, shocking and motivating’, and above all, ‘enlightening’ is how Sivasankari describes the many events and incidents in her life, and hopes that reading about them will bring ‘positive energy’ to her readers.
Volga, acclaimed feminist writer and editor of Telugu: The Best Stories of Our Times, notes that she swam through an ocean and ‘reached the shore holding on to the twenty-six stories,’ that ‘stand as witness to the time’. The resulting panoply features a diverse set of celebrated writers and dives deep into an array of important themes.
Thomas Piketty requires very little introduction. He is a Professor of Economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (French: École des hautes études en sciences sociales: EHESS), Associate Chair at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics.
Pinker follows his other popular writings (on language, violence, the enlightenment), with a lucid account of the importance and astonishing lack of reason in today’s world. Elegantly written, with abstruse ideas clarified (the difference between Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence, for instance), with choice quotes, anecdotes, charts, cartoons.
Indian legal scholarship is going through an exciting phase. Several books have emerged in the past few years which successfully combine meticulous academic research with a lucid, articulate style of presentation accessible to most laypersons. A surprisingly large proportion has been authored not by academics but practising advocates: Gautam Bhatia’s Offend, Shock, or Disturb (2016) and Abhinav Chandrachud’s Republic of Rhetoric (2017) come readily to mind.
To study what happens on the ground, called field experiment in policy research literature, requires developing a research style by creative policy research scholars who can redefine the role of methodological concerns that may lend itself to the disciplinary evolution of politics and policy. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a wave of field experiments in Political Science from Yale University marked a sort of renaissance in policy research in two different ways.
The BJP’s meteoric rise to the top of Indian politics has been variously and copiously recorded by several book-length attempts at authenticity. While The Rise of the BJP: The Making of the World’s Largest Political Party (Bhupender Yadav and Illa Patnaik), How the BJP Wins: Inside the World’s Largest Election Machine (Prashant Ojha), Bharatiya Janata Party Past Present and Future: Story of the World’s Largest Political Party (Shantanu Gupta) and Jugalbandi.
We can extrapolate from the title of the book that civility in India is in serious jeopardy. Despite the fact that majoritarian politics and democracy in India are in place, the book discusses the challenges of ensuring civility for its population. Each chapter delves into this duality and critically assesses the obstacles and problems with democracy by looking at caste and civility in the context of several Indian States.
Ram Nath Goenka was the publisher of The Indian Express. Arun Shourie was twice its editor. The two were the Dhoni and Jadeja of Indian journalism in the 1980s. It was a truly extraordinary partnership.In 1990 RNG, as he was known, passed away. I was asked to write his obituary by the paper I was working for then. It was quite an honour.
After more than seventy years of Independence, the caste question remains one of the most intractable vices of contemporary India. Dalits’ struggles in particular have been made strategically invisible amidst the call for how the ‘dreams of our nation’ must always supersede ‘sectarian agendas’. Both are politically loaded terms.
Mridula Ramesh’s compelling work traces the trajectory of India’s water over 4000 years to highlight the grave crisis India is facing today. Global warming is a tragic reality and it is being predicted that by 2030 India will fail to meet half its water demand. As the book’s blurb points out, water availability per person in India has been decreasing for decades, leaving parts of the country in a cruel ‘Day Zero’ situation, shuttering factories and pushing farmers over the brink.
The wide prevalence of scripts, languages, architectural forms and iconography with a clear provenance from India in a wide swathe of South East Asia from quite early in the first millennium, has interested many in India almost from the beginning of modern history writing and archeological investigation in the country.
There are three special things about the book under review, the last two of which are interconnected. To begin with the first: its description of a battle for Daruchhian between its well-entrenched Pakistani defenders and an Indian infantry battalion of the Grenadier Regiment. Daruchhian is a hill feature across from Poonch on the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir side of the Ceasefire Line—as the Line of Control (LC) was termed then.
The pandemic unveiled the system’s frailty, the dire need to develop a complementary long-term relationship between humans and the environment, and solutions for the crumbling system. Throughout the centuries, the debate of religion and science has been dominant in the discourse, providing a systematic and lawful way to sustain society.
The birth centenary of Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) has spawned a torrent of activities. Despite governmental indifference, there has been an outpouring of books, journals, articles, exhibitions and the like, by individuals and private institutions on arguably the most creative and composite artist of Independent India.
The Queen of Indian Pop: The Authorized Biography of Usha Uthup is a faultless English translation by Srishti Jha of her father Vikas Kumar Jha’s original Ullas Ki Naav in Hindi. Both titles are appropriate for summarizing Usha Uthup’s journey. The book has a distinction in the sense that it has been able to address the conundrum.
Audiobooks and dubbing films for regional audiences in India are opening up a whole new market for people whose vocal cords are their raison d’etre. PC Ramakrishna’s book Find Your Voice: A Definitive Guide for Stage Actors and Voice Professionals could not have come at a better time for voice artistes. The first of its kind in India, the book is an excellent mixture of the theory of Voice and how to cultivate and preserve it, as well as nuggets on the features of the field of Voice.
Like the Draupadi and Sita that she created in her memorable novels, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni emerges in this book as a strong and questioning woman who turns received knowledge on its head. A compendium of academic essays on her works captures the genres of novel, short story and poetry while the interviews with Divakaruni along with her autobiographical note give this book an admirable range.
After Bloodline Bandra (2014), Godfrey Joseph Pereira returns to Bombay in this provocatively titled historical fiction, to document the story of Charlie Strongbow, Cross Island and the erstwhile ‘urbs prima in Indis’, Bombay, in the 1940s and 1950s. The brick red, orange and blue cover with the silhouette of a boat, and a bird aggressively pushing through a torn page, arouses curiosity and promises a story that is full of surprises.