By Andrea Benvenuti Hurst,

Like Nehru, Mao also came to power in 1949 convinced that he needed 15-20 years of peace in Asia to develop his own country. Mao told Stalin precisely that at their first meeting in Moscow in December 1949, and Stalin promised that he should be able to ensure that. But Nehru and Mao clearly differed on how peace was to be secured. Within six months of that conversation with Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung were seeking Stalin’s approval to reunify Korea by force of arms, and came close to doing so.


Reviewed by: Shivshankar Menon
By Bertil Lintner

One was the reference to the strong defense mounted by Suu Kyi as the country’s then leader in December 2019 at the International Court of Justice at The Hague disputing the charge of genocide against Myanmar’s armed forces for their actions against the Rohingyas. The author notes that the people of Myanmar were full of praise for her performance, even as much of the outside world was outraged


Reviewed by: VS Seshadri
By David C. Engerman

In contrast, Jagdish Bhagwati was one of the leading global defenders of trade liberalization. While Sen worried about social justice, Bhagwati argued that open markets and rapid growth would lift all boats. His influential Planning for Industrialisation co-authored in 1970 with Padma Desai, critiqued the inefficiencies of India’s import substitution strategy and the ‘Licence Permit Raj’ that was stifling rather than promoting industrial growth. He has regularly and publicly clashed with Sen over the proper sequencing of reforms.


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan
Compiled by Y.V. Reddy with Ravi Menon, Shaji Vikraman, and Kavi Yaga

Part V of the book on ‘Media’ has five articles where the authors refer to themselves as ‘journalists’ rather than media persons; each piece contains fascinating details of their encounter with people and events in all walks of life, including challenges that had to be resolved internally within the organization and those encountered in the course of one’s work journey.


Reviewed by: Padmini Swaminathan
By Geeta Menon, Namita Ranganathan and Sanjeev Rai

The book has been written taking this as the backdrop. The authors pose some questions in light of the need for understanding the initiatives taken and the strategies used in a nuanced and detailed manner. Some of these questions pertain to: what were the principles and assumptions that guided them? How was social change mediated? What contextual strategies were devised for the continuity and safety of girls’ education? And how was gender identity reconstructed?


Reviewed by: Alka Behari
By Geeta Kapur

Kapur might carp at my introduction for, as she tells Saloni Mathur, ‘I describe myself quite simply as critic and curator. “Art historian” is not a correct academic description for me, and I am not comfortable with the self-attribution of a theorist. Although the term “critic” seems now reduced to the blogger or the newspaper columnist, in the early 1960s, when I was a graduate student in New York, it was starkly different.


Reviewed by: Kishore Singh