To be able to distill your love for words and art into the work that you do for a living, and that work of a nature that fulfills a niche in society, is to be fortunate. Debjani Chatterjee, well known and much awarded poet from Sheffield, England, was once a community relations officer.
Sample this: A headline in a leading Hindi News channel, ‘Tabaahi ki Taaza Tasveerein’ (Hindi?) Another headline in a leading Urdu daily, ‘Cut-Off Ke Doosre Din Honours Courses Ki Demand’ (Urdu?) And yet the Hindi-Urdu divide has played a crucial role in the history of the subcontinent. Any serious attempt to understand identity formation in India…
Raghu Rai is one of India’s most celebrated photographers and his 29th book of photographs on Mumbai is yet another visual treat. Aimed at capturing the essence of Mumbai, it is almost a study of contrasts and very evocatively captures slices of what Mumbai as the city really is.It starts off with an introduction of Vir Sanghvi on the origin and evolution of Mumbai. It is fairly well written, except that it starts off sounding like a history lesson and ends like an anti-Shiv sena rant, but that is besides the point…
The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life edited by Neera Adarkar gazes at the city of Mumbai through the prism of this specific structure—the chawl. The result is an interesting and rather different view of a city that has gathered global notoriety through some recent popular books about it…
This is an intense book but then rarely does a book that indulges in architectural theory make itself so lucid and strong-footed. Setting the stage for declaring the emergence of Post-Rational Architecture, Jaimini Mehta eloquently traces the vocation’s transition over its recent two hundred and fifty year-old history…
It is common fare for books on cultural anthropology to begin with statndard kowtowing to Clifford Geetz and Edward Said. Past the introductory chapter, most often they succumb to the very pitfalls that Said and Geetz warn them about. Images of Afghanistan is cultural anthropology at its finest as it tries throughout to maintain…