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Her many
lives and loves
A.J. Philip
From Kippers to Karimeen: A
Life
by Psyche Abraham. Lotus Roli. Pages 214. Rs 295.
SOON
after I joined The Tribune five years ago, I got a call from
Psyche Abraham. Her husband Abu Abraham who died a few months earlier
used to do a column for the paper. She had received some cheques which
were in his name. She wanted us to cancel those cheques and send new
ones in her name. This was the least I could do for Abu who was one of
India’s greatest cartoonists.
Enduring bonds
Roopinder Singh
My Other Two Daughters
by Surjit Singh Barnala. Vetri Publishers, New Delhi. Pages 118. Rs 200.
MANY
of us have, at some time or another in our lives, met a child who has
struck a chord in our hearts. Often, as we travel, we come across people
who have a spark, visible even under the grime of their daily grind,
especially among those who are not as well placed as we are.
Nitty-gritty
of modern life
Kanchan Mehta
Kamandal
by Jaswant Deed. Lokdeep Parkashan. Pages 118. Rs 100.
The
spirit is restless, anxious and melancholic and the flesh is
weak, weary that sums up the modern man. "I have no interest
anywhere/ `85 no direction is befitting `85 I silently ruminate for
nothing/ but always without rest." For its excellent treatment of
modern man’s predicament, Jaswant Deed’s five-verse anthology has
deservedly won the Sahitya Akademi Award for 2007. With its wide-ranging
scope, this collection of cerebral, experimental, complex and variegated
poems makes a substantial contribution to contemporary Punjabi poetry.
Action-packed
thriller
Rajdeep Bains
Lashkar
by Mukul Deva. HarperCollins. Pages 365. Rs 195.
THERE
is a new kind of warfare—without rules, without apparent battlefields,
without any clear-cut boundaries. It’s the war of terror, which has
the whole world as its arena, with its epicentre somewhere in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan belt. Mukul Deva’s Lashkar talks about
just such a war, enacted between India and Pakistan, neighbours carved
out of hatred and disillusionment, and with religion as the sole reason
for their separate identities.
Sensitive
and contemporary
Manmeet Sodhi
The Disappearances
by Vijay Seshadri. HarperCollins. Pages 141. Rs 295.
HERE
is a voice ‘gracefully contemporary’ looking into and through our
troubled world with the best of a rare sensibility. Startlingly
original, one can see Vijay Seshadri’s The Disappearances as a
combination of wit, creative use of language and his unbridled
intelligence. This extraordinary collection is a compilation of two
books, Wild Kingdom (1996) and The Long Meadow (2004),
exploring diverse aspects of human existence.
Bestselling
memoir a pack of lies
Rachel Shields
AT
just six years old, Misha Defonseca trudged across three countries to
try to find her Jewish parents who had been carted off to Auschwitz by
the Nazis. She collapsed in a forest but was rescued by pack of wolves
who adopted her as their cub. Her story became the best-selling
Holocaust autobiography, Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years.
The only problem? It was not fact, but fiction.
Glorious
past, blighted present
B.S. Thaur
The Changing Face of
Bureaucracy
by Sanjoy Bagchi. Rupa. Pages 592. Rs 795.
THE
Indian Administrative Service (IAS) has its roots in the East
India Company’s Covenanted Civil Service. After the enactment of the
Indian Civil Service Act, 1861, the Indian Civil Service came into being
with the supremacy of overall other services, even up to governors. The
IAS was formally constituted in trying times as most of the British and
Muslim civil servants had left the country leaving few ICS officers
behind.
The
comeback kid
When Bidisha took herself
off to Venice for a year, she thought a spell in the city would make
writing her third novel, Venetian Masters, a breeze. But
her stay in La Serenissima was different, reports Suzi Feay
So
whatever did happen to Bidisha, the beautifully belligerent,
fiercely intelligent, mono-monikered teenage author who burst brashly on
to the literary scene with Seahorses, the novel she’d written
at the age of just 16?
Net
of knowledge
Alister Doyle
About
30,000 species of creatures and plants have been listed in a
draft Encyclopedia of Life that may aid understanding of issues
from human ageing to disease, scientists said on Monday. The free
Internet encyclopedia (www.eol.org) aims to eventually list all 1.8
million known species of life in a $100 million, 10-year project begun
in 2007. The first draft, with 25 fully completed entries including
text, pictures and video, was launched at a conference in Monterey,
California, recently. A further 30,000 have less detailed information.
BACK
OF THE BOOK
The 7th Sense: Primordial
strategies for personal and corporate success
by Kalyan Sagar Nippani. Viva. Pages 169. Rs 195.
The
modern world is a jungle of sorts. Beneath the patina of civility
and decorum, it is a world where primordial and immutable laws of nature
operate in silent, subtle and ruthless precision. It is verily a
predator-prey world where one must go back to the bosom of nature and
seek guidance in life’s game of survival and success. It is time to
relearn what civilisation has made us forget.
Publish
& prosper
Indian
Publishing Business process outsourcing has bright prospects as
it is expected to register 35 per cent growth per annum,a recent survey
by Confederation of Indian Industry’s southern regional office has
said. The survey also estimated
that the publishing BPO industry would become a $1.46 billion industry
if the current trend continued till 2010.
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