Tag Archives: Biography

It is unfortunate, but not totally surprising, therefore that some jealous people strove to create a rift between Islam and Tagore. In the poem ‘Kandari Hushiar’, which we have mentioned earlier, Islam used the word ‘khoon’ for blood. This was objected to by a number of writers associated with the magazine Shanibarer Chithi. In this context Tagore also critiqued Islam’s frequent use of Arabic and Persian words in Bengali poetry. He was deeply hurt and reacting to this controversy, wrote the essay, ‘Borar Piriti Balir Bandh’.

The book under review is a sweet interaction between the past and the present. The book takes the reader through the cultural and historical on sweets popular in various parts of India. The diversity of sweets in their varied shapes and textures together prepare each chapter with a historical base topped with its present understanding and existence and then generously sprinkled with the recipe towards the conclusion of the chapter.

Homeless, a memoir, is a book about a young woman struggling with coming to terms with the complexity of her life. Although how much of it is autobiographical has not been clearly mentioned in the book,

Imagine one morning you find a spacecraft (belonging to 3023) landing in your back garden. What would you do? You may start with some hypothesis and try to figure out what this is. You may try to open the doors with the tools you have. Understanding Autism is also like that.

India has just finished its campaign at the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, with a total of 107 medals, its biggest-ever haul at a single edition. Out of the 28 gold medals won, 9 were bagged by women/women’s teams and 1 mixed team. Similarly, out of the 38 silver medals won by Indian players, 17 were won by women (teams) and 2 mixed teams and among the players winning the 41 bronze medals 19 were women or women’s teams and 2 mixed teams.

Meera Mukherjee was a sculptor from India who was known for her innovative bronze casting technique which she learnt from the Bastar sculpting tradition of Chhattisgarh. The book traces her journey from her childhood days and presents a glimpse of the artist’s life and pursuit for sculpting.

This book gives wings to a child’s wishes. They imagine themselves to be a number of things apart from what they already are. We see quite a range in these imaginations, for instance, a cup of tea, atwelve-armed octopus, a sneeze, a tadpole’s tongue, a question mark, a smelly sock…and many many more.

This is a good introduction to the celebrated vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar and a story about how her recording of Raga Bhairavi ‘Jaat Kahan Ho’ was included in a disc that was sent into space.

Biography is an evergreen genre. The urge to know about famous people’s lives seems fairly insatiable as can be seen from any major publisher’s list. And yet, these slim books by Lavanya Karthik manage to stand out, for they deal not with the great glories of the famous persons they are about but with small occasions from their childhood that sowed the seeds for the direction their lives would take in the future. Each story is crafted from the perspective of the child that was.

When the list of books for review for TBR 2023 was shared, the title of this book attracted me, as this is a biography and I love reading them! Secondly, there are many books written on the life of Milkha Singh and I was curious to see how one written for children would present the life of this iconic athlete.

Humour with Mario Miranda is a picture book thick in board page format. The text focuses on Mario’s growing up years and the themes in his art. Mario was fascinated by the everyday characters he encountered, life and its traits, families and cityscapes. Like other texts from the Learning to Be series, this book is a biography in fragments.

What can a single woman do on her own? The question can also be posed as ‘can a single human do anything significant by themselves after all.’ The story of Jamuna Tudu is one such tale. Lavanya Karthik has presented Jamuna’s story in a very interesting manner.

The 39 chapters of the book cover Sreenivasan’s experiences as a family man and administrator, from his selection for the Mysore Civil Service in January 1918 to his tenure as a Minister in the Princely State of Mysore in 1943, and Dewan of Gwalior in 1946.

Scott R Stroud succeeds in arguing a Deweyan Ambedkar: Did Ambedkar have one intellectual interlocutor throughout his life? Was Ambedkar’s world mediated through Dewey? It is however a well-argued book, theoretically rigorous which systematically conceptualizes Ambedkar’s pragmatism.

As is well known, after his return to India in 1915, Gandhi launched the noncooperation movement in the 1920s and the civil disobedience satyagraha in the 1930s.  These were the decades when the loin cloth-clad Gandhi was viewed as a bit of a rustic rockstar by the people of Tamil Nadu.  Wherever Gandhi travelled in the old Madras State, people would get wind of his whereabouts and proceed to mob him in hundreds or thousands.

Despite several biographical works on Azad, a definitive biography was still awaited because the previous biographers had not explored adequately the Urdu writings of Azad and other such sources. This new biography by S Irfan Habib, a Delhi-based historian with a firm grasp on the Urdu language attempts to fill the gap by uncovering some of the enigmatic aspects of Azad’s life, thought and politics. In doing so, he has made extensive use of Azad’s works in Urdu and brought to the fore the enriching and curious facts associated with him.

What picture comes to your mind when you think of a scientist? Well, when children are presented with this question and asked to draw a scientist at work, more often than not, they draw an elderly or middle-aged man wearing a lab coat and spectacles, mixing chemicals in fancy glassware. Alarmingly, the proportion of children who hold such a stereotypical mental image of a scientist seems quite large: 86.5% in a study done in 1998[1] and 78% in a more recent study[2]!

Whenever I imagine about war, images of the aftermath of war come to my mind. Everything is scattered around. I can see only those people and things that have somehow escaped from the bombings. I can see the ominous silence spread out after the heart-rending blasts. I can see the school which has nothing left now. I can see the children who had come to school with dreams in their eyes, with the belief that everything will be alright if they study.

B.R. Ambedkar: A Life in Books, is a very imaginative and accessible introduction to one of the tallest leaders India has ever had. The book, without being pedantic, provides a young reader a bird’s eye view of life and times of Babasaheb.  It does a fabulous job of introducing young minds to difficult themes such as caste-based discrimination, equity and justice.

The Puffin Book of 100 Extraordinary Indians, 100 inspiring stories of outstanding achievements, is a compilation of stories of different Indians across diverse fields from various eras.Arranged alphabetically, and seemingly written by different authors (no author has been credited), the book feels random.