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Agitating The Frame, a collection of Zizek’s six essays, has an ambitious plan with lofty objective which attracts, while the very same turns out to be unmanageable monstrosity.

When M.K. Raghavendra declares in his recent book The Politics of Hindi Cinema of the New Millenium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation that ‘Bollywood is not mainstream Indian cinema’, he ruffles quite a few feathers.

This anthology brought out by the Ministry of Railways is an eclectic collection of articles by several authors—Sir Mark Tully, Ruskin Bond and Sandipan Deb and experts on the Indian Railways such as Ian Kerr.

If we are what we eat, then there is a steady stream of archival material emanating from our kitchens that must necessarily be taken seriously, sociologically speaking. Food, at the first instance, is all about nutrition and sensory perceptions. However, for the attentive listener, food is also the story of who we are as a people.

Over centuries, maharajas and magicians, palaces and palanquins, elephants and erotica, dynasties and deserts, temples and tigers, poetry and poverty, snake charmers and spices—all have been instantly associated with India and have been the enduring reference points for this country.

This is an extraordinary book and the author, Atul Gawande, is an extraordinary surgeon, one sensitive to pain, but more importantly, to history. In my review of one of his earlier books, Complications (a collection of essays previously published in the New Yorker), for The Book Review