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The painful transition of universities from merely an examining body to a teaching institution in history could be observed in terms of the balancing acts between diverse academic demands including research. These acts can be contextualized within the systemic realities of new public management. As a result, the optimistic vision of perceiving the universities thoroughly in terms of original research is seemingly impractical in the heightened market capitalism.

A journey through the eight States of North East India, the present book is a sequel to Sanjoy Hazarika’s earlier published and much acclaimed title Strangers of the Mist: Tales of War and Peace from India’s Northeast. Hazarika states that Strangers No More is a deeply personal book through which he intends to understand and express his concern on topical issues pertaining to politics, policy, law and disorder, violence and painful reconciliation, conservation, oppression, acts of stereotyping, thereby capturing hope and despair in the process.

Twenty-first century India grapples with a unique conundrum: how to satiate desires and aspirations of close to fifty percent of the population under the age of twenty-five. This group of millennials have a profound preoccupation with change, novelty and acceleration of time. This heightened time-consciousness condemns the youth to deal with unforeseen and unthinkable circumstances. The feeling of nothingness acts as an unlikely springboard that catapults one to harbour audacious dreams.

I must say I thoroughly enjoyed Shashi Tharoor’s timely book: Why I am a Hindu. Not a scholarly work, but an eminently readable one.
Shashi demolishes the facile Right-Wing Hindutva assumption that the only criterion for ‘Hinduness’, is subscribing to their Talibanized ideology. He delves into the many centuries of Hinduism in India and talks about the tolerance, the welcoming inclusiveness and the profound metaphysics of Hindu traditions, all the way from the sublime non-dualism of Shankara to the atheism of the Charvaka.

Neyaz Farooquee’s memoir An Ordinary Man’s Guide to Radicalism:Growing up Muslim in India has raised the all-time charged question of identity Indian Muslims have been grappling with. This is basically a tale of an ordinary Muslim youth who migrated from Bihar’s Gopalganj district and settled in a ‘Muslim ghetto’ called Batla House in Jamia Nagar, a locality behind Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He has documented his stories in the backdrop of the infamous Batla House encounter (widely believed to be fake), which took place in 2008, just 200 meters away from his residence.

Caste continues to be a reality in India even as the country is moving to the third decade of the twenty-first century. Undoubtedly the most inhumane and oppressive aspect of the caste system is untouchability. Not only are caste and untouchability experienced in quotidian life across the country, come elections and they manifest in the most pronounced fashion in a variety of ways as the parties and politicians set out to garner votes.