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I must admit to having agreed to review this book by the celebrated Barkha Dutt after a spectacular launch spearheaded by Dutt herself through her pivotal position in NDTV, with a degree of trepidation. Yet the opening chapters and my discovery of Barkha being the daughter of that Amazon among free India’s young journalists of the time, Prabha Dutt, much admired by her contemporaries, who, like her, quested to break new ground in a brave new world, allayed these apprehensions. Through her own words Dutt comes across as a demonstrable example of what free India has made of the new woman: emancipated, independent, free thinking, not only ready but keen to challenge accepted wisdom and go where few Indian women have gone before.

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.