The book begins with a comprehensive overview and a strong introduction to why we should understand what went into making our present. Subhadra Sen Gupta, in her inimitable style, takes us on a journey around the world and offers a great many nuggets of information about the world’s earliest civilizations. We read about the Egyptian rulers who built lavish tombs for their afterlife
With the onset of adolescence, girls and boys are pressured to conform to socially sanctioned gender roles. They are expected to follow the gender norms and practices that a particular society has set. The problem arises when children develop a gender identity that is set against a society’s expectation. There are cultures that are more fluid but there are many which discriminate against non-binary individuals because of stereotypes and misinformation.
Arzu is essentially a coming-of-age story but the beauty of the book lies in the fact that it is able to beautifully capture the process of growth, change and hard work, which can be tremendously difficult to write about in an interesting way. Arzu’s efforts to develop herself and find her place in the world are inspiring, especially for young readers who are trying to figure themselves out.
A delightful if apocryphal story involves the legendary Hindustani vocalist Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan switching off the radio halfway through a Lata Mangeshkar broadcast, muttering to himself ‘Kambakht ladki besur hoti hi nahin hai!’ (The accursed girl doesn’t strike a single false note anywhere!). This facile technical perfection was in a sense deceptive. It…
In The Violence in Our Bones: Mapping the Deadly Fault Lines Within Indian Society, Professor Neera Chandhoke compels us to deliberate on violence in its many manifestations in India and suggests how we may extricate ourselves from this abyss by inventively imagining participatory democracy. The treatment of violence in the social sciences often diminishes the starkness of human tragedy, when reduced to mere statistics. While recognizing that violent urges might lie dormant in our psyche, Chandhoke is concerned with stalling the eruption of these violent urges onto the socio-political arena.