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I happened to be reading A. Mangai’s book, Acting Up: Gender and Theatre in India, 1979 Onwards’ during the run-up to what promised to be high drama at the Shani Shingnapur temple in Sonai, Ahmednagar District, Maharashtra. Trupti Desai of Pune’s Bhumata Brigade had announced her plan to storm the sanctum sanctorum of the temple, forbidden to women, with an army of 1000 women. If the police debarred them from marching in, she planned to drop down on the open sanctum from a helicopter.

In 1983 the noted scholar of early Indian textiles and trade routes, Lotika Varadarajan wrote a seminal book on South Indian Traditions Of Kalamkari, published by the National Institute of Design & Perennial Press, It covered all three traditions of South Indian Kalamkari—Macchlipatnam, Srikalahasti and the lesser known Sikkinaikenpet.

To a Kolkata-Bengali to the core like me, who unfortunately has lived out of the city for almost a quarter of a century now and in this period has been to the city only once during the Pujas, that too more than a decade back, and yet who is aware of the fact that it is exactly during this period that Durga Puja in Kolkata has completely metamorphosed, and is vaguely aware of what he has missed out on, this beautifully produced book came quite literally as godsend. Beautiful the book certainly is—shaped, sized, priced, and in looks as it is like a coffee table book—with glossy pages, a wonderfully designed dust jacket, and almost five hundred full-colour photographs, and yet it is not your usual coffee table book.

Our experience, both at the personal and the public level, shows that Art lives and grows in a climate of freedom, peer rivalry, and infrastructural support. An element of spontaneity and a dropping of one’s defences are key for human expression to be creative, for your imagination to take flight. Art begins here, in that flight of fancy which all of us have experienced at one time or another. Fear, the fear of someone looking over your shoulder, is often the biggest enemy of such flights of fancy.

Religious nationalism remains an important phenomenon in the last three decades, which has manifested itself in an explicit manner after the fall of the Soviet Union. The books under review seek to study the phenomena of terror and violence unleashed across the globe, which the authors argue, have deep linkages with the advent of religious nationalism.

Drones, or remotely piloted aircrafts, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), so to speak, have added a new dimension to the way war is conducted in the 21st century. Drones, besides being used as lethal weapons of war, have added functions of being instruments used for collection of intelligence and surveillance. Proponents of the use of drones in warfare, counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency believe that drones have made it possible to target the enemy without much collateral damage (civilian casualties). The added advantage of a drone is that not only can it hover over an area of operation for a long time, but also it does not require manpower in the line of fire, thereby removing the greatest limitations states face in war: body bags.