This book is the author’s attempt to make her reader experi-ence diverse aspects of the lives of the ‘poor’ in this country. Without going into the complexity of defining a phenomenon as massive as poverty, the author has simply taken the reader through journeys of people from various parts of India in their quest of the basics.
The Turn of the Tortoise (TOT) is an exhaustive and superbly written book that enagages the gamut of governance issues concerning growth, welfare and foreign policy with significant and unusual insights that derive from the author’s engagement with the real world. The book speaks to a wide range of issues ranging from entrepreneurship, corruption, governance, environment, poverty alleviation, foreign relations, and even compares the governance of growth in India and China and the implications of the rise of China for India.
India has recently been introduced to the idea of the Smart City. Exactly what shape any ‘smart city’ will take is a matter of debate. The reality of Indian cities is that they are messy, with multiple processes and phenomenon going on at the same time, several of which appear to be the exact opposite of one another. Sanjay Srivastava’s book Entangled Urbanisms: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon, contends with some of these processes that are making the city what it is
As a sociologist of education, I have dwelt on the inequalities present in not only our education system but also in the many processes, activities and inter-subjective interactions that characterize life in educational institutions. These have brought home to me the heightened significance of certain categories in understanding inequity in education, including caste, gender, religion, linguistic abilities, and disabilities of different kinds.
The ‘Insider’ versus the ‘Outsider’ debate is not new in social science research. Indian sociology, in fact, has largely privileged the Outsider. Part of the reason for this phenomenon is that the late 18th and mid 19th century Orientalists were convinced that Outsiders like themselves were more capable than Natives of obtaining authentic knowledge, because of their guiding principles of ‘objectivity’ and ‘scientific rigour’. Even after Indian Independence, many sociologists believed that emotional and intellectual detachment was possible by studying a social group very different from one’s own.
Destination India: From London Overland to India is the last co-authored book of Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph—the intellectual stalwarts and eminent scholars of modern India. The book under review is an intellectual biographical account of their joint academic journey of six and half decades revealing the historical trajectory of their writings. The book is neatly divided into three essays in a compact and small size with an attractive lay out.