You know that a discipline has come of age when academics and practitioners talk the same talk. They discuss approaches and strategies to and of their common area of interest, and find that they are actually on the same page and not at the extreme ends of the spectrum.
The book under review is an anthol¬ogy of short stories put together by Indian novelist and publisher, David Davidar. The collection is inimitable with thirty-nine short stories by literary giants like Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand, R.K. Narayan, Saadat Hasan Manto, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer…
Natwar Singh’s book is like the man himself—to the point, sparse and understated. It covers mostly his public life and carefully spans over the pri¬vate in measured words. If there are expecta¬tions that he will ‘spill the beans’ and come out with juicy details over private life happenings…
Malavika Karlekar has produced an¬other work for the ‘Common Reader’, as Virginia Woolf called the general reader, who would have special¬ized or lay interests in a multivocal world. Colonialism has been read for the last hun¬dred years from many vantage positions. What Karlekar attempts to do is to compress her erudition, while dispensing with foot¬notes…
As a narrative which relies on photographs to communicate, The Camera as Witness is a remarkable book of history. Possibly one of the first academic history writings of its kind on North East India, it traces the history of Mizoram from the colonial to the contemporary times.
The book is a long awaited one on three counts. One is that it fills a gap in South Asian strategic affairs literature and on that score will be valued by students and initiates among the attentive public.