Navaneetha Mokkil

There is a lovely story in Navaneetha Mokkil’s Unruly Figures describing a moment from the sex worker and activist Nalini Jameela’s Autobiography of a Sex Worker. Jameela, used to doing sex work in a darkened room, is asked by her client to go into the light so he can see what she looks like. His face lights up when he sees her, and Jameela realizes for the first time that she is beautiful. Mokkil likens this to how we often ‘see’ ourselves through others.


Reviewed by: Manjima Bhattacharjya
Mahuya Bandyopadhyay

According to the National Crimes Record Bureau data available in 2016, there is a total of 20 women’s prisons in India, housing more than 3000 inmates. Tamil Nadu has the largest number of women’s prisons, five, and they are less than half full; while West Bengal, Delhi and Maharashtra each have one women’s prison and have more than full capacity of inmates.


Reviewed by: Mallarika Sinha Roy
C. Rangarajan

This book is the story of India’s monetary policy and its economic dilemmas written by a true savant and patriot who had to deal with a whole lot of crises. Dr Chakravarty Rangarajan, until his retirement in 2014, at the age of 82, devoted his entire life to serving the country in one capacity or another. He has been Deputy Governor at the Reserve Bank of India, member of the now abolished Planning Commission, then RBI Governor, the Governor of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, and Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. He is currently the Chairman of the Madras School of Economics.


Reviewed by: TCA Srinivasa Raghavan
Rajesh Veeraraghavan 

The history of welfare provision in post-Independent India has been replete with stories of failure and leakages. Almost every public welfare programme will throw up a side story on how only a fraction of the largesse has reached the intended beneficiaries. India is known for, what Jean Dreze calls, the ‘percentage system’ under which a fixed part of the money is siphoned off as bribe by a wide range of intermediaries across the system.


Reviewed by: Kalaiyarasan A & Srujana Yadav
Tilak Devasher

Pashtuns are one of the largest ethnic groups in the world who do not have their own country but straddle across a contiguous stretch of territory, across northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. They have been embroiled in wars with the British, invaded by the Soviet Union and suffered an almost two-decade long interference by the United States, albeit sometimes benign.


Reviewed by: Rana Banerji
Ashley J. Tellis

Although the title refers to ‘Southern Asia’, this masterly survey by Ashley Tellis focuses on three countries: China, India and Pakistan. In so doing, the author differs from other western scholars and analysts writing about nuclear deterrence concerning India, who take a dichotomous view of India’s dilemma, either India versus Pakistan or India versus China. Tellis rightly takes a trichotomous view because it is impossible to consider nuclear issues in South Asia in isolation from China.


Reviewed by: Jayant Prasad