Alka Saraogi

Sarala boarded the train from Ahmedabad. Her body seemed to burn. As if she was in the grips of a fever. She craned her neck to the sills of the window, to breath in a little fresher air. She perhaps went to sleep without intending to. When her eyes opened, her neck was stiff. Half of her face blackened by fine particles of coal flying from the rail engine looked at her from her hand held mirror. She shrank to the core. What if someone saw her like this, what would they make of it?’


Reviewed by: Neelakshi Singh
Sara Rai

Sara Rai, a renowned contemporary author in Hindi who is at home with its literary and sociocultural landscape, notes that she has chosen to write about writing, as well as the journeys of her family and their times, in English. Perhaps it is to reach a wider reading public. Or perhaps, it is a language which allows emotional and intellectual distance. For Raw Umber is a literary memoir fashioned with circumspection in some ways, and with an evocative lyricism in others.


Reviewed by: Asma Rasheed
Vishes Kothari

The translator Vishes Kothari’s note that prefaces Vijaydan Detha’s collection of folk tales reminds us that what we are going to read is an act of literary and cultural translation as well as a feat of literary magic where the intangible is made visible and accessible to the readers who do not have access to the original Rajasthani stories and perhaps even the milieu in which these stories are set and from which they emerged.


Reviewed by: Anjana Neira Dev
Toby Walsh

Today, Artificial Intelligence is the dominant topic of discussion with questions about its expected rate of growth and its impact on various aspects of human life. The outcry over ChatGPT is just one of the many examples in our midst. People want to understand how AI is going to affect their lives and Toby Walsh’s book is an outstanding read which deals with this topic comprehensively, in a very easy to understand manner.


Reviewed by: Ilika Trivedi
Nigel Shadbolt

At the meat of The Digital Ape: How to Live (in Peace) with Smart Machines lies the fundamental question that has been haunting us human beings for the last few decades—is Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the cusp of ‘waking up’ and consigning humans to the trash can? If you look at the rapid technological advancements that have taken place in the last 50 years or so, there is great evidence to suggest that the possibilities of AI are no longer restricted to the works of sci-fi, that there are actual reasons to base our fears on.


Reviewed by: Jairaj Singh
Chris Miller

In September 2022, Apple launched the iPhone 14 and its different variants. The phone came armed with different chips, viz., A15 and A16. A15 was the lower spec version as it has 15 billion transistors while A16 carries 16 billion transistors.In 2019, the then-latest version of the iPhone (p. 11) carried the A13 chip.


Reviewed by: Ankur Bhardwaj