Sheila Dhar

1995

TBR completes four decades of publication. Which were the most significant books on Hindustani classical music published in these years? Four titles immediately come to mind, one symbolically for each decade. Right on top is Sheila Dhar’s brilliantly funny memoir Here’s Someone I’d Like You to Meet (1995) now available in the omnibus edition Raga ’N Josh (Permanent Black, 2005, 2015). The book is an anecdotal classic about the earthy world of Hindustani vocalists, a perennial favourite among music lovers.


Reviewed by: Partho Datta
Jim Shepard

Ever since the movies were invented, people have been writing about them. There was WG Faulkner, who, in 1912, became the first regular critic in a British newspaper (The London Evening News). ‘The picture theatre has taken a firm place in the social enjoyment of the people,’ he declared. ‘It is no longer a matter of wonder; it has become an everyday part of the national life.’ Americans like Otis Ferguson and James Agee followed.


Reviewed by: Baradwaj Rangan

I must, of course, begin by congratulating The Book Review on her 40th birthday. For survival and growth with integrity, and for what it is doing to encourage discussion and debate, without which, as Romila Thapar and TBR have recently reminded us, we cannot have democracy. There are increasing signs that this is indeed the case. I was scared when I gave a talk on socalled Love Jihad recently. After Professor Kalburgi’s assassination, my mother called me to say I should install a spy-hole in my door, if I didn’t have one. Do not open the door to strangers, she said.


Reviewed by: Mohan Rao

In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Merlyn asks his owl Archimedes, ‘What is your favourite bird?’ ‘Archimedes thought this over for some time, and then said, “Well, it is a large question. It is rather like asking you what is your favourite book.”’I’ve been reading for six-and-a-half decades. Learnt reading at mum’s knee through a wonderful Lucy Mabel Atwell book. Obviously one cannot talk about all the books one has read.


Reviewed by: Shobhana Bhattacharji
Helen Macdonald

Wandering idly through my mind’s library, pausing at books that I had read long ago, at those I remembered vividly and others that had receded from immediate recall, I realized that somehow, I had always been drawn to non-fiction. Essays, letters and diaries, memoirs, travel writing of the interior-monologue-George Schaller variety, biographies.


Reviewed by: Ritu Menon
Yashwant Chittal

In the last forty years Bangalore has exploded from a sleepy ‘air-conditioned garden city’ into one of the most chaotic megalopolises of India, its economy dominated by business corporates like Infosys, Wipro and Biocon, and a host of others which have come up in their shadow. There was a time when it was a city whose hotels filled up only during the horse racing season and emptied immediately thereafter, whose finances were controlled by two distillaries, and whose intellectual reputation was sustained by half a dozen research establishments protected from the hurly-burly of the outside world by hefty government funding and sprawling green lawns.


Reviewed by: Girish Karnad