The Colour Book is mesmerizing. It invites you into a here-now, gone-now world that you dipped into happily as a child but which may have evaded you as a greying adult. A heady mix of poetry and science, The Colour Book evokes long-buried memories of the colours you once discovered.
Alice fell down a rabbit’s hole and discov- ered a wonderland! Neverfell fell down into Caverna and found a world of darkness that is strangely exquisite, of sinister characters that have a hundred faces without souls and a grotesque underbelly of faceless poor!
There is a Bengali social institution called an adda that is very hard to capture in mere words. It is much more than a conversation because usually at least three people are talking at the same time. It is at times a debate but then some of the debaters are liable to argue for both sides of the subject if they are feeling particularly excitable.
If I lived in India, Delhi would be my city of choice. During frequent bouts of daydreaming, I often fantasize about how I would spend my days there. Of course, as required of any half-decent fantasy, I ignore the heat and the dust, and instead focus on the bright side.
When I began reading Soonoo Tara- porewala’s biography of Fateh Singh Rathore, I thought I would right away begin encountering thrilling tiger tales. I was disappointed. I trudged on, nevertheless, wondering when I would sight the tiger.
Fascination with ‘Otherness’ manifests it- self in many ways; whether it is the intrepid 16th century European explorers embarking on dangerous journeys time and again to find strange new lands, or writers travelling across cruel landscapes to meet new people and create new genres or painters reaching out to exotic settings and subjects for their art.
Lakshmi Kannan’s volume of translated short stories contains selections from her previously published stories. In the author’s note Kannan explains her reasons for choosing these stories: they were the ones that elicited the strongest reactions amongst her readers and often generated controversy.
The Progressive Writers’ Movement stands out among the literary trends in Indian literature because it came as a breath of fresh air in a literary scenario that was struggling under the onslaught of western values.
As a dance critic, I came to know of the work of Bhanu Bharti, through his friend and celebrated director Ratan Thiyam. Bhanu’s adaptation of K.N. Pannikkar’s Malayalam play Pashu Gayatri, a community theatre of the Bheels of the Mewari region of Rajasthan had drawn the attention of serious theatre practioners.
It is indeed ironical that I was reading to review this absolutely brilliant book by Sylvia Federici around Halloween, which narrates the dark saga of Witch Hunts in Europe during the 15th-17th century. In fact Witch Hunts had consumed Europe for more than 200 years, a practice that coincided with the rise of capitalism in Europe.
Feminist scholars have over the last two decades focused upon the involvements of white women in the British Empire, and on their location and agency in the construction of ‘a gendered colonialism’.
Upon being asked why she chose to marry following a very short period of courtship, a friend reasons that had she known the man too well, marriage, the one goal not open to compromise, would have been impossible.
Contemporary globalization characterized by the restructuring of the economy through deregulated markets, international networks, multi-nationalization of production and transformation of production technique has led to systemic changes with serious implications for labour.
Sreeram Chaulia brings out a new survival guide to the global economic crisis that goes beyond the economics of crisis and suggests political mechanisms for social survival and recovery from the crisis.
This review of the above mentioned title must begin on an unusual confessional note. It must be declared that I read this book as a student of social science in general, neither with the focus nor with acumen of a student of economics or development studies, to whom this book is broadly addressed.
In Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, Nussbaum argues that societies aspiring to justice must not only frame their policies according to reasonable principles of justice, but that such societies must also cultivate political and public emotions, like that of patriotism, in their members.
The book under review examines intel- lectual property overlaps in the legal contexts of the UK, the US and, where necessary, the EU. The editors have brought together a formidable scale of collective experience and expertise ‘from those primarily engaged in academic scholarship to those who combine scholarly publishing with practice of intellectual property.’
It is often stated that caste is class in India and that considerations of caste is more important than religion. It is for this reason that Ashwini Deshpande’s work deserves attention as she has researched extensively on caste and the policy of reservations in India.
No other public institution in any po- litical system has public interface with an identifiable visibility than the police. Circumstances are almost entirely regulatory that seldom create a positive image of the institution.
Indian Youth and Electoral Politics: An Emerging Engagement edited by Sanjay Kumar takes up critical questions that have dominated the larger political canvas since 2009.
Delhi probably has the single largest con- centration of scholars and opinion makers in the country who make a living studying, observing and commenting on politics.
India’s democracy is acknowledged and cel- ebrated, at home and abroad, especially because very few Asian, African and Latin American societies have been able to maintain liberal democratic institutions and practices.
One of the critical currents of con- temporary Indian political history has been Hindutva’s cerebral politics over the Ram Janmabhumi-Babri Masjid conflict and continuous struggle by its historians to create a coherent and authentic historical narrative that would demolish the dominant narrative on Ram and Ayodhya as constructed by the ‘Left Historians’.
Kris Manjapra’s Age of Entanglement is a worthy and comprehensive study of the transnational engagements between Germans and Indians, from the nineteenth century to the Second World War, when both nations were trying, in their own ways, to free themselves from British hegemonic control.