By Sunil Gangopadhyay. Translated from the original Bengali by Chitrita Banerji

In the very first story ‘The Drought’ we are shown how eight reporters going from the city to report on a particular event for a company promotion are stranded midway in the Chhota Nagpur region when their car breaks down. They put up at a guest house, drink, and lazily while away their time talking and debating endlessly over different issues and have the best rice in that drought-stricken area for lunch. The debate about what they should do with the surplus food makes for interesting reading and the way in which a journalist is grappling with moral fatigue in a drought-stricken land leaves us awestruck.


Reviewed by: Somdatta Mandal
By Nirmala Thomas. Translated from the original Malayalam by Radhika P. Menon

Self-talks help Aswini get a clearer focus on her random thoughts. She voices her opinions to others without inhibition. For instance, she doesn’t care to concede and agree with everything that her friends tell her anymore. She helps Vidya, one of her friends, in finding a very crucial answer to her query about life and love. Aswini is not a weak character from the beginning, but she becomes stronger in the process. Her world is turned upside down when her meticulous timetable is disrupted with the onset of illness. After she starts to depend on herself more than friends and family, she grows sturdier in mind.


Reviewed by: Nithya Mariam John
By Raj Sekhar Basu

It is so striking that the militarist metaphor used in this campaign enters the world when the RF funds the global war on malaria, using DDT. DDT was devastating environmentally as shown by Rachel Carson in The Silent Spring, published in 1962. The production of DDT was dependent on oil produced by the Rockefeller industries. The RF supported the discredited Khanna Study, on which India’s family planning programme was based;


Reviewed by: Mohan Rao
By Maia Sutherland

The author’s claim that this diet is a panacea for all ills is however hard to accept. Fasting is an important component of the diet under consideration. The author can’t stop waxing eloquent about fasting which she, her mother and her brother have done successfully and for a long time.


Reviewed by: Jaya Krishnamachari
By Guy Standing

In this, the shift away from the possibilities of ‘education commons’ has been towards facilitating education to serve the needs of industry and a larger economy in which the learner becomes primarily a worker, an employee, and a subject of the larger capitalist system. Human capital, now accepted uncritically in most international circuits and policies (including India), focuses on enabling ‘money-making, employability, competitiveness and the fetish of the age, economic growth’ (p. 62). In this shift, Standing highlights the loss of the key foundations of what liberal, classical Western education once stood for: Paideia (search for truth); Arete (moral virtue); Schole (learning with public participation in the life of polis); Praxis (practice as an end in itself); Parrhesia (speaking truth to power); Matthesis (moral or ethical thinking skills);


Reviewed by: AR Vasavi
By Jean-Pierre Filiu

A History, one of the authoritative works on this contested strip of land, is Professor of Middle East Studies at a leading French University, and a well-known columnist. He has visited Gaza multiple times through the decades and knows the land, its history and its inhabitants intimately. However, Filiu undertook this clandestine and imperilled visit after the most recent and savage war to see for himself the site of his study; to check if anything at all remained of the civilization.


Reviewed by: Rohini Mokashi-Punekar