Despite our efforts to help him, Oliver’s anxiety at being left alone only increased in the years he lived with us. His storm phobia reduced him to a shaking, inconsolable mess, and it took him hours, sometimes days to recover’. A concerned relative or friend could have said this about a person suffering from an anxiety disorder or extreme depression.
With 1.1 million schools, 143 million students and 4.9 million teachers, the government school system in India is one of the largest and most complex public systems across the world. The past three decades have seen an exponential rise in the number of schools and enrolment due to various government initiatives.
The enigma around motherhood has produced much interest among feminist scholars who have highlighted social construction of the same. The two books under review, carry forward the feminist tradition with a specific focus on the Indian context.
The troubled, indeed fraught, position of women in India had informed arange of nationalist debates in the nineteenth century, from the age of consent, to sati. Practices such as widow immolation and child marriage were evidence to the British that they did indeed have a civilizing mission among barbaric, tradition-obsessed natives.
Professor Vina Majumdar, one of the grande dames of Indian feminism, was fond of telling the story of the South African MP who visited India in the late eighties. ‘Why do you need a women’s movement when your bureaucrats and you are saying the same things!’ was her tongue-in-cheek comment after a meeting with the Planning Commission.
Call Centres’ entered the Indian market in the late 90s, and since then have been an intriguing space for researchers, considering their crucial position as a conduit of ‘communicative capitalism’. Their success was instant and monumental¬—a quick glimpse into the numbers, in terms of export revenue brought by the Information Technology enable Service (ITeS) industry ($8.4 billion in 2006-7), as well as growth rate and employment (growth rate of 33.5% pa and employment provided to nearly half a million), gives us an estimate of their puissant presence in the Indian market.