By Arun Maira

These formative years run like a thread through his later work, shaping his worldview of how large organizations can build trust, uphold dignity, and draw strength from both resilience and imagination. He joined the Tata group in 1964 and spent over twenty-five years with Tata Motors, rising to Executive Director and guiding the company through major changes in the 1980s. In 1989, he moved to the United States to work with Arthur D Little, where he became a Board member and gained wide experience in restructuring and strategy. Returning to India, he served as Chairman of Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in India from 2000 to 2008, advising corporations on leadership and organizational change. In 2009, he was appointed to the Planning Commission of India,


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan
By Sunanda Sen

One, higher financial returns are detrimental to real investment in these countries since only those projects would be undertaken which have a higher return than these financial returns. This could potentially lead to deindustrialization, as she shows with the exception of China. Two, countries have to keep their exchange rates inflated (artificially appreciated), which has a negative impact on their trade numbers. An expensive rupee means expensive Indian goods for the international markets and cheaper


Reviewed by: Rohit Azad
By Shinjini Kumar

And yet these cities and towns are changing and growing as some businesses wither, some grow and new ones are born. Entrepreneurship has been a male-dominated field for many reasons: family businesses being passed on to the sons, only the sons’ business acumen deemed worthy of investment, occupational stereotypes and familial gender roles. Despite all odds being stacked against them, women have established, expanded and worked in businesses across the middle cities and towns of India.


Reviewed by: Shimaila Mushtaq
Edited by K.M. Chandrasekhar and T.P. Sreenivasan

inordinately large numbers of young Keralites remain unemployed or under-employed; though female labour force participation is comparatively high, it has declined significantly since the 1980s. Discussing the Kudumbashree experience, KB Valsala Kumari points to the meagre presence of women in political leadership, and hopes the substantial social capital that the programme has generated will translate into political capital too. K Ellangovan points out Kerala’s health paradox: ‘despite high public spending, individuals still bear the brunt of healthcare costs’, most of the health budget goes towards salaries at the expense of quality improvement.


Reviewed by: Govindan Nair
By Anand Teltumbde

These became a blueprint of sorts for the Constitution of postcolonial India. Coining a term which is replete with irony, Teltumbde calls these the ‘constitutional castes’, meaning thereby that they, along with the later addition called ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs), are castes which have been legally accorded the right to reservation. Once caste had been legally ‘entrenched’, with minimum objection from within the Constituent Assembly, the radical Ambedkarite discourse of caste annihilation was marginalized by the pragmatic discourse of state-administered justice via caste-based reservations. Thus, instead of being used as a contingent fire-fighting mechanism to narrow down caste disparities, reservations, with no timeline and no yardstick to measure the degree of their success or failure, have, over time, been installed as the ultimate panacea for the redressal of a caste-riven social order.


Reviewed by: Tapan Basu
By Ammar Aziz

Islam’s response to the deep conflictual turmoil in South Asia, especially Bangladesh, is one of a resilient and resisting silence. Violence appears to be the norm everywhere; poets and writers in the ‘central jail of silence’ turn inwards to make sense of a world increasingly chaotic. Here a ‘postcolonial teacher’ teaching TS Eliot’s famous poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ deals with ‘the faces that mull over/ how one measures life/ with coffee spoons;/ the faces that look up schizophrenia/ googling a virtual dictionary.’ Intense images are interconnected to reveal the sense of disorder around; the only option left is that of silence, both a prison and a stance— ‘Silence has gripped the whole world/ No one weeps anywhere anymore/ As if all await the final call.’


Reviewed by: Payal Nagpal