On March 23, 1988, exactly fifty-seven years after the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, ‘Pash’, a young Punjabi poet was killed as he defied threats to his country. This time the deed was done by the pro-Khalistan terrorists. Born September 9, 1950, Avatar Singh Sandhu ‘Pash’ was one of the most promising names in Punjabi poetry of the seventies and eighties.
The book under review is a collection of essays written by Professors I.S. Gulati and K.K. George individually or jointly and published in the Economic and Politi¬cal Weekly over the last one decade.
A book by a well-known journalist is bound to arouse extensive interest and India between Dream and Reality comes in this category. It is an attempt to make an assessment of present-day India in relation to its ancient as well as its recent past. The task may be an exciting one, but it is also somewhat elusive if its purpose is, as it seems to be in this book, to show how the present has failed to sustain its past, for every revolution is a revolt against the past and India which has a long history has seen quite a few.
The book is a collection of papers pre¬sented at a seminar. The objective is an important one, of growing concern to ex¬pert and layman alike. The contributors include economists, scientists, a historian, a women’s rights activist, a media person, a jurist (who however does not, here, deal with juridical matters) and writers. It is in the nature of the very wide subject that every aspect of our national life can¬not be covered.
Malcolm Muggeridge’s Life of Christ contains this statement of windowpane transparency:
Christ’s mother, Mary, conceived him out of. wedlock…
The sentence dispels, deftly but simply, the coyness with which narrations down the ages have veiled that unself-conscious provenance in a Bethlehem manger. Dr. S. Gopal’s absorbing biography of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan commences, similarly, with a paragraph of refreshing candour:
Some readers may question the utility of reviewing a book that has hardly been seen in this country even three years after publication. If such readers will grant that the primary purpose of a book-review is to make known the existence of that book, then at least that purpose will be served here. Students of Anglo-Indian fiction are by no means snowed under with critical material, and any addition to this sparse field needs to be taken note of as soon as possible.