Revisiting Nayantara
Rumina Sethi
Prison and Chocolate Cake
by Nayantara Sahgal. HarperCollins, New Delhi. Pages 216. Rs 295.
Mistaken Identity
by Nayantara Sahgal. HarperCollins, New Delhi. Pages 239. Rs 295.
IT was often said that the class of 1943 at Woodstock would go far. And so it happened with Nayantara Sahgal whose life has been entwined with India’s socio-political culture. Her method is thorough. The energy prodigious. And the ideas for freedom and liberation obvious in her writings which are deeply coherent to her emancipated family background.

Illuminating memoirs
Aditi Garg
About Me
by Panday Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’. Translated by Ruth Vanita. Penguin Books. Pages 162. Rs 250
THERE are few things in life that are more full of emotions than a walk down the memory lane, introspection. Just as a biographer is apt to let biases affect the making or breaking of another person’s life story, writing your own story, lays it bare for other people’s interpretations.

Humanity’s desired goals
Satyapal Anand
Peace and Development: Haksar Memorial-Volume IV
Ed. Subrata Banerjee. CRRID, Chandigarh. Pages 486. Rs 795.
SOME seminars do have presentations of a very high order, and if these are anthologised, the volume becomes a permanent source of information for scholars, social historians and laymen alike. Edited by the late Subrata Banerjee, Peace and Development is the title of Haksar Memorial Volume IV recently brought out by the Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID), Chandigarh.

For the cause of righteousness
Dharmendra Goel
The Philosophical Perspective on Sikh View of Martyrdom
by Nirbhai Singh. Singh Brothers, Amritsar. Pages XVI+411. Rs 650.
THE book, comprising 17 chapters, explores various aspects of martyrdom. It is not a narrative of martyrdoms in the Sikh epiphany of Sikh Gurus from Guru Nanak Dev to the times of the 10^th Guru Gobind Singh, his father Guru Teg Bahadur, his four sons, his great followers like Baba Deep Singh, Bhai Mani Singh or Banda Singh Bahadur, the story is immersed in religious and philosophical concepts.

A writer worth £3,000 an hour?
Arifa Akbar
MARTIN Amis is said to have once boasted that he never opens his bank statements. But if the novelist has since had a change of heart and checked his balance, he may be delighted to learn that he is earning close to £3,000-an-hour in his role as a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.

The bare truth
There’s no place for male grooming or fashion in Desmond Morris’s 1950s view of evolution, writes Mark Simpson
The Naked Man
by Desmond Morris. Jonathan Cape. Pages 280. £18.99
It’s a child’s dream to be a zoo-keeper: to run a place where everything is in its place, and has nothing to do. Maybe it’s a yen for revenge on the parents who brought them into the world without asking their permission first, or maybe it’s just because children are all little dictators with a peaked-cap fetish.

Banished within and without
The 45-year-old writer was forced to leave her ‘home’ Kolkata in November last. In a write-up, penned around the time she had to leave Kolkata, Taslima Nasreen shares her love for India
Although I was not born an Indian there is very little about my appearance, tastes and traditions to distinguish me from a daughter of the soil. In a village in what was then East Bengal, there once lived a poor farmer by the name of Haradhan Sarkar, one of whose sons, Komol, driven to fury by zamindari oppression, converted to Islam and became Kamal. I belong to this family.

Schooled differently
Frederick Noronha
Alternative schooling in India is "more vibrant than it seems but less dynamic than it should be", says the co-editor of a just-released book on the subject. Mainstream education "is too focused on securing a well-paying job, scoring high marks in examinations and outdoing the rest of the class...there is too little on nurturing the latent talent in each (unique) child", Neeraja Raghavan, a Bangalore-based writer and editorial consultant, told IANS.

SHORT TAKES
Bhairava cult and Sikhism
Randeep Wadehra

• The cult of Bhairava in Nepal
  by Milan Ratna Shakya Rupa & Co. Pages xv+289. Rs 495
  

• Relevance of Guru Granth Sahib
  by Shashi Bala Singh Brothers, Amritsar. Pages: 248. Rs 295
  

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