The volume under review examines the interlinkages between education and culture in Northeast India using a socio-historical and cultural lens. The author argues that the erstwhile province of undivided Assam’s trajectory of development of education was quite different from the rest of India owing to the delayed growth of western and higher education in Assam.
If you believe Margaret Mead’s words that we should, never “doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has”, then the four examples of democratic schools presented in this book will enrich, invigorate and serve as a much-needed tonic. It appears as if there exists a universal tacit agreement on schools becoming factories, of being further distanced from the community etc.
Jawaharlal Nehru, on a number of occasions and in a number of ways, defined himself as a product of the Indian National Movement and all that it stood for. This implied among other things anti-imperialism, commitment to national sovereignty, and a measure of internationalism. In addition Nehru also acquired early in his political career a left-wing orientation to politics. All this he inherited from the national movement and practised, with some exceptions, during his long tenure as independent India’s Prime Minister.
Amit Dasgupta is a career diplomat who ruefully intimates that career compulsions have made him into something of a specialist on that bureaucratic labyrinth, the World Trade Organisation. Poring over the arcana of the Uruguay Round, and import quotas, and non-tariff barriers and intellectual property rights, and purchasing power parity…
Bapsi Sidhwa’s Water is an unusual work which translates Deepa Mehta’s film “Water” into a novel. It renders an audio-visual experience into words, significantly reversing the commoner trend of turning novels into films and problematizing the usually assumed authority and “originality” of the literary text over the “adapted” cinematic version.
