News

Autism: Book of Revelations is a unique take on the subject of autism in terms of the spiritual insight experienced by professionals involved in autism care. In fact it would be an oversimplification to state that the book deals with the ‘spiritual’ considering the vast array of ways that people with autism and professionals involved in caring for them experience autism as a state of being beyond what is humanly possible, a state of ‘soul consciousness’ as Tasleem Farzana and Pekka Kontiainen summarize in the foreword to the book.

This is a memoir of a part of the political life, of sixteen years to be precise, of the President of India Pranab Mukherjee. It is clearly not an autobiography, though obviously Mukherjee is the narrator of his story and a commentator of goings-on around him, which he does in a lucid narrative. It follows his earlier publication The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years (2014). It must be stated at the outset, critiquing a political memoir is not an easy task for any reviewer, I would therefore critically look at the events he has described and commented upon.

Displacement and migration constitute what might be called a traumatic experience for many as they lead to uprooting one from one’s base. But if this happens due to some large scale violence, which has a communal and a caste overtone, it doubly marginalizes the victims. Till recently, it was the violence in Muzzaffarnagar that had become such a distressing story. According to a conservative estimate, more than 41,000 Muslims were rendered homeless, with most of them never being able to return to their villages and having to live the lives of destitutes. Gujarat (2002) was another example of communal violence which led to the displacement of a large number of people, as more than 2 lakhs were displaced within the first two years itself.

Political writing is dangerous in proportion to the ignorance and fanaticism of hearers and readers, and it is more than likely that, if sedition continues to avowed [sic] with impunity by a few, it will become the leading idea of many.It is very easy to attribute these words to any leading light of the present government. However, these words that betray so much anxiety with so much candour belong to a nineteenth century colonial official. Writing in 1875, M. Kempson, Director, Public Instruction was building a government consensus towards a greater clampdown on political literature in public circulation which was to eventually culminate in the Vernacular Press Act, 1878. In the case of draconian colonial laws, we often have the luxury of hindsight on our side. But contemporary governments and their pallbearers often speak in forked tongues and are seldom so candid about their intentions. It is then left to us to look for our sources elsewhere.

The public sphere is a phrase coined by Jurgen Habermas to refer to the critical space for public discourse and rational argument. It has its roots in postEnlightenment critiques of state authority. Increasingly the public sphere has been seen not only as a conceptual space but also as a physical one, the locus for action, but made possible only within a truly democratic polity: the sphere where men act with other men. Mit-sein is the Heideggarean term that Divya Diwedi’s essay imports to demarcate where the private and the public interface: human beings are related to others through their deeds. The polis, in Greece, was the theatre for all such interactions.

Incarnations, the dust jacket reveals, is based on the celebrated BBC Radio 4 series, broadcast in 2015. Perhaps the terms of commission had stipulated fifty lives—as a substantial number, and a round one. Fifty lives lived end-to-end would just about span the two-and-a-half millennia between Sunil Khilnani’s bookends: the Buddha and Dhirubhai Ambani. However, a footslog through history is not his aim. While the fifty subjects appear in chronological order, seven individuals feature from the first one thousand years and twenty-one from the last century alone. Exactly six women make the cut—under-represented to the same degree as in the current Lok Sabha. This Khilnani blushes at but blames it on the absence of non-royal women from records till the twentieth century.