By Pratap Padode

The urban disposition they have conceived is a triad, a three-legged stool, which must ‘articulate normatively where it begins and what motivates it, be able to think analytically about how cities actually work as well as about the nature of complex urban problems and move operationally to point to how one could get to different desired ends’. It is not a new urban theory or paradigm, but a process to engage with the problems of cities in order to produce new knowledge towards change that one desires, but crucially, it is never fully predetermined or a priori.


Reviewed by: AG Krishna Menon
By Amrita Saikia

The section on research methodology and methods is particularly engaging and insightful. Saikia has elaborately articulated how she accessed the field, which is far removed from her world. To inform herself about the Tibetans in exile before conducting her research, she referred to books, research articles, documentaries, and newspaper articles. She also identified and joined a week-long programme in Dharamshala (her field) to gain access to the community. This programme was run by a Tibetan NGO called Students for a Free Tibet (SFT).


Reviewed by: Juanita Kakoty
Edited by Meenakshi Malhotra, Krishna Menon, Rachana Johri Routledge

The themes the authors address represent different ways in which we seek to embody ourselves in the world, whether through negotiation, submission, dissent, protest or critique. We make the world what it is. The world no doubt exists out there with its structures and fixed meanings, through which we are viewed as embodied humans, but we too have the wherewithal to modify that fixity, and transform it to make our lives meaningful in the ways in which we seek to live. This brings agency to the foreground and emphasizes the role of the human subject in not merely living out a human life but in transforming that process in whatever way possible. Embodiment is therefore not fixed or unchangeable.


Reviewed by: Meenakshi Thapan
Edited by Ranu Uniyal and Fatima Rizvi

Gaele Sobott’s essay titled ‘I Can Hear Her Breathing: Disabled Writers Writing Disability’ explores possibilities for widening intellectual and aesthetic horizons through the disruption of dominant disablist narratives by writers with disabilities writing for themselves and telling their own authentic stories. Sobott herself is admittedly more interested in writing that supports a world with diversity, like works by disabled writers of colour and works translated into English rather than writing that strives to make the experience of disability more palatable to a non-disabled audience.


Reviewed by: Vedamini Vikram
By Jennifer Nandi

Specializing in customized tours to help the knowledgeable and discerning traveller ‘make connections with the soul of India’, Nandi says: ‘I use Nature, a central principle of human lives, which is not only beautiful but also good for us, that helps us regain our equanimity, that tunes our brain’s attention network, that keeps us so very happy; for this has made me who I am.’
No Half Measures describes a rambunctious excursion of several weeks in 2010 to the wildest reaches of the North East: parts of the country known for insurgency and instability, but which appealed to Nandi’s non-conformism and derring-do as much as that of her client’s.


Reviewed by: Govindan Nair
Edited by Harish Trivedi

The first section presents A Passage to India through translations in various languages, and film and stage adaptations, thereby building a memorable montage that the novel inspires. The opening essay is by a novelist, Anjum Hasan, and begins delightfully with Forsterian language that a child heard from a Forster-devotee father and didn’t know what it meant! The personal and the political merge over time and the book gains complex meaning for Anjum even as the heavily marked pages are, by then, being carried around the parental home in a plastic bag (p.
12). From that, we move swiftly to a bilingual essay by Rupert Snell ‘On Translating A Passage into Hindi’ based on an experiment with six Indian translators that yielded an astonishing variety of ‘equivalent terminology’ even with the title of the book.


Reviewed by: Malashri Lal