By Bhagwan Chowdhry and Anas Ahmed

For the past one decade in particular, we have started expecting digital and technological solutions to become massively adopted by the masses for doing their day-to-day financial work through mobiles, apps, calls, internet, messages, IVR, touch screens, machine voices, et al. But we are hugely disappointed that people are not adopting. Why are people not doing online transactions? Why are people not paying online? Why are people not selling online? Why are people not receiving and sending money among their peers, and trusted relationships?


Reviewed by: Osama Manzar
Rubani Yumkhaibam

Nandi and Saria speak of contexts of proximity and blurring between Hindus and Muslims in the Hijra universe that are similar and yet clearly distinct. In Odisha for instance, Saria observes that ‘their beliefs and practices would often adhere to one while being claimed as characteristic of the other’, necessitating the ethnographer’s ‘fidelity to the way the crossovers between Hindu and Muslim theologies were lived—that is, both as an instantiation and a limit of the notion of religious syncretism’ (Saria, p. 14). Nandi suggests that the kinship hijras in her study in Bengal feel with Muslims is based on the Islamic practice of circumcision—with several hijras converting to Islam after their ritual initiation and constructing the hijra identity within a spiritual framework marked by celibacy and asceticism.


Reviewed by: Kalpana Kannabiran
By Kiran Manral

Each chapter posits a clue in the form of a tag line to the name. A short introduction to the individual is followed by the reason for choosing her story. The rest of the chapter is divided into sections that mark the twists and turns of that journey. The stories end by focusing on one dominant norm/stereotype of that life and the ‘hacks’ that the individual exercised to overcome or storm that norm.


Reviewed by: Bhashwati Sengupta
By Rajan Mehta

Mehta writes in one of the chapters that breaking a problem into parts helps not only in understanding the problem but also in developing solutions for it (p. 178); he follows a similar design by breaking down his thesis into short, concise chapters. These chapters find their thematic basis in the scientific knowledge of climate change present in the introductory chapters where Mehta provides fundamental information about the science behind environmental degradation. He highlights the causes of climate change and assesses the available data attributing these changes primarily to fossil fuels, industry, and land use changes


Reviewed by: Mir Wafa Rasheeq
By Swadesh Deepak. Translated from the original Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt and Sukant Deepak

In the stories, Deepak emerges as a master narrator who calibrates movements of his characters to generate necessary suspense. The names of the characters are often revealed only after two-three pages. And often anecdotes and sub-plots thicken the texture of the stories. The settings in the stories are functional, and dynamic in the sense that their details keep recurring in a haunting way.


Reviewed by: Akshaya Kumar
By Syed Mujtaba Ali. Translated from the original Bangla by Nazes Afroz

The dobhasi (bilingual) love tale of Shabnam, an Afghan girl, and Majnun, a teacher from ‘Bangla-land’, unfolds against the backdrop of the Afghan Civil War of 1928–29, in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan. These two lovers bond over their shared passion for poetry. As political upheaval shakes the country with the rise of Bachae-e-Saqao (Habibullah Kalakani) and his Saqqawists challenging Amanullah Khan


Reviewed by: Sanobar Hussaini