She comes to India not as a tourist but as one coming home to the Bhansi Estate, where her great-grandfather had built a magnificent colonial bungalow, the Nandan Van. Anjula finds the landscape unattractive in comparison to the English countryside (p. 5). But the first five months make her adjust to the family home of paddy fields, eucalyptus and sal trees, tomato plantations and fruit orchards,
The illustrations complement the story very well.
The Red Bus; Laal Bus by Harjeet Ahluwalia, illustrated by Saurabh Pandey, winner of a prize in the category Concept Books in the Competition for Writers of Children’s Books organized by the Children’s Book Trust, is a fun read aloud picture book for the very young. Join the little red bus on its journey from the bus station to its shed, carrying the rabbit, brown bear with baby bear, a dog with long ears, a cat with big whiskers,
He clarified the distinction sharply: ‘We grew, but we didn’t have structural transformation.’ Turning to governance, Subramanian addressed debates on decentralization and federalism. While acknowledging the normative appeal of decentralization, he warned against treating it as a cure-all. He argued that performance often deteriorates as authority moves downward, citing weaknesses in State Finance Commissions
This the author seeks to achieve by expanding the archive to include real residents––the natives––in local histories and heritage descriptions. By referencing her work to Mullingar Hill, and not the Landour Cantonment, the author immediately succeeds in shifting focus away from the colonial. Mullingar, perhaps the second oldest bungalow in this hill station and the erstwhile home of Frederick Young,
The anticipated positive externalities of the railway soon outweighed scepticism. Although the system was designed to serve colonial interests, facilitating troop movement and promoting commercial crops, often at the expense of local needs, it nonetheless contributed to a profound shift in social perception, introducing a velocity of movement far beyond the pace of bullock carts and reconfiguring notions of space and time.
Her general serenity makes the explosions all the more fierce: ‘In a country run by politicians who are almost all thugs of different shades, the poor know that governments are of the rich, for the rich, by the rich.’ In the chapter on ecological devastation poignantly titled ‘The Wounded Mountain’, she asks, ‘Isn’t it convenient for governments like ours to have climate change to blame?’