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A
credit-worthy life
Vijay Jha
Banker to the Poor: The Story
of the Grameen Bank
by Muhammad Yunus with Alan Jolis. Penguin. Pages 336. Rs. 395.
Grameen Bank
and Muhammad Yunus are synonymous and both are institutions by
themselves. You cannot think of one without the other. And yet, very few
may be familiar with the travails and the ordeal that Muhammad Yunus
went through at a personal level in setting up the Grameen Bank, which
has till now loaned funds to at least 12 million poor people of
Bangladesh and has become an intrinsic part of the growth story of one
of the poorest countries in the world.
Autobiographical
history
Rumina Sethi
The River of Lost Footsteps:
Histories of Burma
by Thant Myint-U. Faber, London.
Pages 361. Rs 495.
I
had already left Trinity College when Thant Myint-U arrived there to
take up his research for a doctorate. But we as graduates had already
been keenly debating the future of democracy in Burma (now Myanmar) and
of course its history. I was to go on to Oxford where my interest in
Burmese politics received another fillip from the presence of Aung San
Suu Kyi’s husband, Michael Aris, who was a Fellow at the same
university.
Heritage
of the Fifth Guru
Roopinder Singh
Life and Work of Guru Arjan:
History, Memory,
and Biography in the Sikh Tradition
by Pashaura Singh. Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Pages 317. Rs
595.
Guru
Arjan Dev (1563-1606) became Guru at the age of 18. He was to remain the
fifth Guru of the Sikhs for the next 25 years, and he became the first
Guru to be martyred. His impact on the development of the Sikh religion
was very significant.
Maverick
film-maker
Himmat Singh Gill
Echoes and Eloquences: The Life
and Cinema of Gulzar
by Saibal Chatterjee. Rupa.
Pages 266. Rs 795.
Extremely
polite, dignified, reserved and standoffish to a point of being termed
shy by most, Sampooran Singh Kalra, better known as Gulzar the
film-maker and lyricist, is a man of few words as many of us his
colleagues at the Sahitya Akademi in New Delhi have discovered over the
years. It was, therefore, with a sense of expectation and curiosity that
I read Saibal Chatterjee’s biography of the man, to see whether
justice had been done to a good-looking man who could well have been a
leading actor in Bollywood himself.
Reality
of US imperialism
M. Rajivlochan
Masks of Empire
Ed. Achin Vanaik. Tulika Books, New Delhi.
Pages 293. Rs 595.zz
If you already know that the US
foreign policy serves only American interests and in the process the US
government has little hesitation in sacrificing the interests of other
nations of the world, then you need not read this collection of nine
essays.
The
case for local systems
J. Sri Raman
Economic Studies of Indigenous
and Traditional Knowledge
Ed. Nirmal Sengupta, Academic Foundation, New Delhi.
Pages 321. Rs 595
Neem,
basmati, jhum, and temple tanks-what is common to them all? They have
all figured in issues related to traditional knowledge. The issues,
which have recurred in developmental debates over decades, appear now to
matter more than ever before. In countries like India, traditional or
indigenous knowledge has raised issues of three kinds over three
historical periods. During the colonial period, foreign rulers were
perceived as proactively hostile to indigenous knowledge, their
perception leading often enough to a false pride in it without
subjecting such knowledge to systematic and scientific scrutiny.
View
from Istanbul’s fault line
Alev Adil
Other Colours
by Orhan Pamuk, trans. Maureen Freely. Faber. Pages 419. £20
No other
Turkish novelist has approached the international acclaim that Orhan
Pamuk, Turkey’s only Nobel laureate, has achieved. While his fame has
brought him a global community of readers, it has also dragged him into
the political arena, bringing controversy and political persecution at
home (for comments he made in an interview about the Armenian genocide)
and imposing the duty to speak for the nation abroad.
Law
of language
Scientists
have uncovered what might be called the law of language evolution: the
more a word is used, the less likely it is to change over time. Like
genes, words undergo ruthless survival-of-the- fittest pressure and
those which are less central to daily life are subject to mutation,
according to their study. Their research applies mathematical precision
to four very different Indo-European languages—but if it holds for
other languages as well, it would be a milestone in understanding one of
humanity's defining attributes.
SHORT TAKES
Issues of
identity and existence
Randeep Wadehra
-
The Bodos
by Sujit Choudhury
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Pages vi+166. Rs
300
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Globalisation and
Development
by Sunanda Sen
National Book Trust.Pages: xi+119. Rs 40
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How to get from
where you are to where you want to be
by Jack Canfield
Harper Element, London. Pages xv+335. Rs 275
Books
received
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