Tag Archives: Environment

Through the two Vikram-Aditya stories, Deepak Dalal showed me a glimpse of the beauty of Snow Leopards of the Himalayas and the coral reefs near south Indian Islands. Vikram and Aditya are two adolescent friends, who find themselves in adventures dealing with men involved in illegal work during their trips away from their school in the Nilgiris. The travel adventure does more than just telling suspenseful tales. Though the books are committed to a nail-biting plot to hand over the criminal mastermind and bring them to justice, in doing so the author makes use of descriptions of the locations that takes the reader through the geography of the places…

The Antarctic Mission is the 13th book in the series Aditi Adventures by the well known feminist, fabulist and writer Suniti Namjoshi. Aditi is a young girl (inspired by Namjoshi’s niece—her namesake) who sets out on the most amazing adventures across the world along with her three companions: a monkey, an ant, an elephant named Beautiful and sundry dragons. Originally published as a twelve book series dealing with diverse themes, the stories blend adventure and fantasy, the tech savvy world of today and the magical…

We live in a world that is messy and complicated. Technology has escalated it. Are children untouched by it? Hardly. Their sense of good and bad, right and wrong are no longer simple. Ask a child if good begets good, and in all probability you will hear a ‘no’! How Earth Got its Beauty by Sudha Murty for children is a story that is from another time—innocent and uncomplicated…

Climatic change has become a global concern over the last few decades. It refers to the change in the environmental conditions of the earth. This happens due to many internal and external factors. Isn’t it interesting that knowingly or unknowingly we observe various things such as trees, vehicles, garbage and so much more? What are all these things? They’re nothing but a part of our environment. Bijal Vachharajani discusses climate through a series of letters from the animal kingdom and has interestingly and skilfully entwined two valuable learnings…

The Braided River is an ambitious project, an account of the journey that the journalist took tracing the river Brahmaputra from its Indian origin in Arunachal to Bangladesh where it takes a new name and merges with the Ganga.Divided into three broad sections, the book gives a detailed account of not only the route that the longest river of India follows, but also the lives it makes and breaks…

Climate change is one of the most pressing crises facing humanity today, regardless of geographical boundaries. While the science of the crisis has been proliferating in journals and public forums for several decades now, it is only recently that scholars have begun to pay serious attention to the implications of this crisis for social sciences and humanities…

Leopard Diaries: The Rosette in India is a 360o view of the life of one of the four big cats of India’s wildlife seen through the eyes of conservation biologist Dr Sanjay Gubbi. Passionate about his pet subject, Panthera pardus or the leopard, the book is written in an autobiographical style and captures a decade of untiring work that involved a tedious amount of field activity with all the trappings of modern technology-driven analysis. ..

For an unduly long period of time, envronment asi a field of study had been classified as distinct from ‘core’ disciplines such as Political Science and History. In and of itself, it has been considered important, but bringing in lessons from the study of environment…

In a day and age where a lot is published about pushing the limits of physical endurance and creating new records, Kailash: Jewel of the Snows  by Rajinder Arora, mountaineer and creative entrepreneur, is a wonderful narrative that focuses on the wonder and beauty of nature in Mt. Kailash…

Who is TR Shankar Raman, the author of The Wild Heart of India? This is not a question I ask, it is a question that the author himself is confronted with as he chances upon an old essay written as a schoolboy while visiting his childhood home in Mylapore, Chennai.

Amita Baviskar brings her careful and serious considerations to the city of Delhi, and its environs, including Gurgaon, giving us interesting insights into an urban constellation we know so well. She looks at the way a city is constructed in terms of experiences and events.

Two very different books on the incomparable river Ganga: one, linking the river to a cultural continuity threading centuries into the past; the other, seeking personal inspiration and civic lessons from stories of hope and despair encountered along the river.

The elephant in India is an iconic animal writ large in our experience, culture and civilization. Several books have been written about it for centuries and they can fairly fill a book cabinet. The present offering is by the author, an environmental scientist.

If we think that climate change is only the melting of glaciers in the polar regions, decreasing numbers of polar bears, wild fires in Australia or the Amazons, sea level rise and hurricanes in the US, we are in denial! The average temperature in India.

In the Rig Veda the rishi-poets reserved the sun and moon, the sacred fire, thunder and lightning for the macho male gods and only gave the forests to a goddess—Aranyani.  In a beautiful hymn she is described as an elusive and very beautiful.

Splendid is not the word. Finally, an exemplary work of research that consciously blurs the boundary between the human and the non-human. In Animal Intimacies: Beastly Love in the Himalayas, Radhika Govindrajan attempts and successfully manages to show the reader.

The Unquiet River, by a historian who has chronicled several aspects of the history of modern Assam, comes adorned with weighty academic endorsements which recommend it as an unparalleled environmental and social history of the Brahmaputra, singular in its historical depth and magisterial sweep.

The Himalaya over millennia has hosted deities, rishis, hunters, shepherds, cultivators, pilgrims, and mountaineers, but in our heavily polluted age today, its overarching benevolence is almost narrowing to the last gasp, as the luxury of breathing.