VOLUME XXXIX NUMBER 9 September 2015

Published this year of the London Olympics INDIA at the Olympic Games is a timely and informative publication. It is also fun!

A society dominated by Morality, as defined by the patriarchs who hope to keep the world going according to their writ. This is what The Lesson is about. The blurb describes it as ‘a dystopian satire on the violence that women live with.’

In the summer of 1992 my father took our family and the family of a visiting aunt to Ayodhya, Faizabad. While the objective for the aunt’s family was clearly sacred and devotional, to my father it remained mainly ‘journalistic’.

If any evidence were needed to establish that Cyrus Mistry is one of the finest writers in India today reading just one of his tales from his collection of short stories will be more than enough. Each of his stories is intensely perceived and documented dispassionately, leaving the reader the license to react emotionally and rationally.

Towards the beginning of Anuradha Roy’s new novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, three elderly women, travelling to the temple town of Jarmuli, realize that a young co-passenger has missed the train after having disembarked at a crowded station en route. Concerned, because Nomi had seemed to be in some danger when they had last sighted her, one of the ladies reaches for the emergency chain to stop the train.

Ghost Fleet is a must read for those interested in the future of conflict. Imaginative, thoughtful, the authors have drawn together a diverse set of evolving trends in modern warfare—from ‘hybrid war’ to cutting-edge technological developments in cyber, directed energy and unmanned systems—and woven them into a scenario of great power conflict in the near future where they all interact.

Is it my need, or my wish, To learn that lock-opener That language called English? There is centuries of anger to unleash, And a journey from the dregs to niche.

Parricide is Bhaskar Ghose’s second novel. His first novel The Teller of Tales was published in 2012.

Festivals are intrinsic to communities the world over and are celebrated everywhere with joy, enthusiasm and devotion.

As laid out in the introduction to All Time Favorite Books and Movies and Their Epic Journey, Patil has picked some of his favorite stories of all time from literature and cinema and presented rich behind-the-scenes trivia. To these details are added opinions which reiterate his imagination of their ‘epic’-ness.

‘The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda’, asserted Robert Capa, the legendary conflict photographer.

This book is rife with curiosities—like this image of a smiling dog keeping company with four men, all fashioned out of stone; a Mandrake like figure poring over The Times London with his hat sitting jauntily on the blank space where his head should have been; or the voluptuous beauty of a protea neriifolia growing in a Cape Town botanical garden.