Gautam Bhatia can very easily be misunderstood. The Delhi-based artist and architect’s discomfort with mediocrity in Indian architecture has been poured out through scathing critiques over the past decades. One could dismiss Bhatia as being cynical if not for his prolific inspired artistic and architectural output that counterbalance the despondency found in his literature.
Yashica Dutt’s compellingly gritty tale offers points of identification for probably scores of third or fourth generation Dalits today, who are ‘new’ arrivals in public/professional spaces, as well as those from other marginalized, minority communities. Her memoir is a conscious exercise in reminiscing and examining lives and events, personal and communitarian, including that of her own as a student, as a journalist, and, most germane to this narrative, as a Dalit.
Ethnographic research by its very nature is a dialogue among investigator(s) and subjects. Such translations of a way of life must respect confidentiality, yet properly recognize those so central to making intelligible the lives they live. In this co-authored memoir, scholar, researcher, and grandson, Anand Pandian, critically honours the life and works of his grandfather.
It is not easy to review a book that should be a classic in the field, or one that follows another book that is already, in my view, a classic. Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s earlier book Bio-Capital is indeed what I would describe as a classic: it is an exhaustive work, a final word if you want, that shows you what the structure of the global industry of drugs and pharmaceuticals is and how this global industry has moved away from chemical formulations…
Three valid reasons could be offered to write a book. First, nobody else has written on that theme. Second, one has something original or different to convey from what has already been in the public realm. Third, one may be able to provide a different perspective, approach or terms of analyses on the given theme. While Heewon Kim’s The Struggle for Equality: India’s Muslims and Rethinking the UPA Experience…
The Begum is a captivating,…