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Dispossessed by maps
Himmat Singh Gill
Partition and the South Asian Diaspora
by Papiya Ghosh. Routledge. Pages 285. Rs 650.
For many of us, Partition
begins and ends with the mass migration of the hapless in undivided
Punjab and to some extent of those stranded in the province of Sindh,
now a part of Pakistan. The movement of the Mohajirs at the time also
comes to mind, as also the tribulations of the Bihari community
post-1971 war when East Bengal became Bangladesh. However, the credit
goes to Papiya Ghosh to have centre-staged the story of the diaspora of
the sub-continent as it folded itself into the larger South Asian half
of its expanding nucleus.
Mom’s day out
Seema Sachdeva
The Motherhood Walk of Fame
by Shari Low. Avon. Pages 374. Rs 195.
Coming
after What If?, Why Not? and Double Trouble, Shari Low’s
latest book, The Motherhood Walk of Fame, has it all to
keep the reader glued from start to finish. Armed with elements of a
bestseller — love, drama, and humour — Shari Low’s book is a witty
observation of a modern-day mother struggling to realise her dreams.
Generation
Y biggest user of US libraries
More than half of Americans visited a library in the past year with many
of them drawn in by the computers rather than the books, according to a
recent survey. Of the 53 per cent
of US adults who said they visited a library in 2007, the biggest users
were young adults aged 18 to 30 in the tech-loving group known as
Generation Y, the survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project
said. "These findings turn our thinking about libraries upside
down," said Leigh Estabrook, a professor emeritus at the University
of Illinois and co-author of a report on the survey results.
All
sugar and spice
Shalini Rawat
Favourite Stories for Girls
Anthology of short stories from
Puffin Books of Penguin India.
Pages 142. Rs 150.
It’s all so pink and sweet and laced with emotions that you’d
mistake it for a birthday cake for your charming little darling, but
this collection of stories takes the cake (pun intended) for being as
true as it can be to the title. This volume indeed has all the right
ingredients to become a favourite with all the tweenies and the teenies.
But I would really not shoo away an adult from reading these by
describing them as merely ‘oh, so shweet!’
Spreading a universal message
Satinder K. Girgla
Education,
Environment and Sustainable Development
Ed. Prof M. K. Satapathy. Shipra Publications.
Pages 323. Price not stated.
Unplanned
human activities are inflicting harsh and irreversible damage on the
environment. In the mad race to consume more, mankind is using up the
earth’s finite resources such as topsoil, water and forests far faster
than the natural process can regenerate them.
Genius,
warts and all
Einstein: His life and
universe, by Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster £25
Albert Einstein’s scientific
prowess diminished as his fame grew, writes Doug
Johnstone
There is nothing new to be
discovered in physics now," claimed Lord Kelvin, a hugely respected
scientist, in 1900. Five years later, a flurry of scientific papers from
an unknown patent office clerk in Bern blew Lord Kelvin’s claim out of
the water and transformed the way we think about the world.
Breaking
the mould
Sidhu Damdami
The feeling that Punjabi poetry had been stuck in the Patar-Pash mode
for a long time was widespread in the Punjabi literary world. This mode,
generated by a lyrical progressivism couched in Patar’s traditional
romantic imagery and Pash’s revolutionary rhetoric laced survived the
last one and a half decade. This, despite the fact that quite a few new
poets tried to make a departure from it in form as well as content.
Contemporary poets like Manjit Tiwana, Lal Singh Dill, Amarjit Chandan ,
Jagtar and Minder remained sandwiched between the two towering ‘Ps’.
Love
and longing in blood-soaked Sri Lanka
M.R. Narayan Swamy
Serpent in Paradise
by Julian West. Atlantic Books,
London. £7.99
This is a gripping story of love and murder, raw passion and brutal
violence, an extraordinary portrayal of what has gone wrong with Sri
Lanka, otherwise an island nation of picture postcard beauty. Using as
the backdrop a second blood-soaked insurrection that the Sinhalese
Marxist group JVP launched and the state’s brutal response in 1989-90,
a period when Indian troops took on the Tamil Tigers elsewhere in Sri
Lanka, veteran war reporter Julian West unveils a captivating and racy
saga in her first work of fiction.
SHORT TAKES
Another Partition saga
Randeep Wadehra
The Partition: a
novel
by Sucha Nand
Information Institute Publishing,
Washington, D.C., Pages 211. Price not stated.
Like
the Holocaust related writings, the saga of India’s Partition too has
emerged as a full-fledged genre in its own right. The stories of blood
and gore, trust and betrayal, heroism and cowardice, uprooted humanity
and much else keep cropping up regularly in various forms, viz., essays,
dissertations, poems, fiction, documentaries, movies and TV series.
-
Changing India: an
economist’s autobiography &
Art of successful business, family and social life
both by VS Mahajan, Deep &
Deep, N. Delhi.
Pages: xxi+233. Rs 780, Pages ix+129. Rs 450
Decoding
officialspeak
Ever thought what a politician really means when he or she says
"let me finish" or "the real issue is." Well, now
you can decipher the actual meaning of politicians’ covert phrases,
for a dictionary translating the political jargons is up for online
sale. A Joke dictionary called 2008 Lexicon claims to decode
"the language of bureaucracy" that the politicians use to
cover up their actions. The Centre
for Policy Studies, which produced the 30-page book, hopes that it will
shame MPs into ending their covert language.
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