Another tryst with destiny
Harbans Singh
Shaping India’s New Destiny
by Jagmohan. Allied Publishers Private Limited.
Pages 360.
IN his new book Shaping India’s New Destiny, Jagmohan, drawing upon his vast and varied experience, critically examines the ‘tryst with destiny’ exhortation made by the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Journey to self
Radhika Chandiramani
Our Bodies, Ourselves: A New Edition for a New Era.
Women Unlimited and The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 2008.
Pages 800. Rs 450.
OUR Bodies, Ourselves, a book that was first written in 1970 was the result of 12 women regularly meeting around their kitchen tables to discuss their bodies, health, and sexuality as a result of being fed up of being paternalised, spoken down to and treated as morons by doctors and by men.

Tales of fortitude
Humra Quraishi
The Women of The Mahabharata — The Question of Truth 
by Chaturvedi Badrinath. Orient Longman.
Pages 276. Rs 395.
THOSE of you who have read Chaturvedi Badrinath’s earlier books — The Mahabharata : An Inquiry In the Human Condition; Finding Jesus in Dharma —Christianity in India — would be well aware of the great flow and that story rendering style of his prose.

Story of a Ghadarite
Himmat Singh Gill
I Shall Never Ask for Pardon
by Savitri Sawhney. Penguin.
Pages 341. Rs 399.
THIS memoir of Pandurang Khankhoje, originally written in Marathi and now shaped in a book by his daughter Savitri Sawhney, is a tale of what the blurb calls a ‘proud nationalist’ who fled India during British rule because of his subversive activities, only to return after Independence to work as an agriculture scientist for the new Indian government, headed by Jawaharlal Nehru.

Feast for fantasy lovers
Kanchan Mehta
Around the Hearth — Khasi Legends
by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih. Penguin.
Pages 153. Rs 195.
HUMAN communities invariably make use of myths/legends to explain beliefs and natural phenomena. As a matter of fact, the Khasis, a tribe of North-East India, have a rich oral tradition of story-telling as story has always been their only route, to grasp the incomprehensible and to impart moral lessons, entertainingly, to the young Khasis "around the hearth", says the Prelude.

In Gurus’ court
M. Rajivlochan
The Darbar of the Sikh Gurus—The Court of God in the World of Men
by Louis E. Fenech. Oxford University Press.
Pages 326. Rs 695.
IN writing this book, Louis Fenech has bravely gone against the injunction that only Sikhs should do critical research on the Sikhs and their religion. The world of scholarship can only be thankful for his defiance since he has produced a useful book on a less-known aspect of Sikh history, society and culture.

Manners makyth man
Elspeth Barker
A Handbook on Good Manners for Children
by Erasmus of Rotterdam. Trs Eleanor Merchant.
WE live in an age of aspiration fraught with self-doubt. Help manuals proliferate, advice columns feature in every magazine, private schools flourish. From nine months onwards, children may spend all their waking time being educated or enhanced by classes, groups and clubs.

Milan Kundera under a cloud
The Czech novelist has been accused of betraying a spy to the communist regime
Anne Penketh
IN a sensational plot line that could have come straight from the pages of one of his own novels, the acclaimed Czech-born writer Milan Kundera has been accused of denouncing a Western spy to the Communist secret police when he was a student.

SHORT TAKES
Trends in philosophy
Randeep Wadehra
Thinking About The World
by Manidipa Sen. IIAS, Shimla. 
Pages x+108. Rs 290.

• Semblances
  by Brij Bhalla. Sanjay Prakashan.
  Pages 104. Rs 150.
  

• Divine Painter Sobha Singh
  by Dr. Kulwant Singh Khokkar. S. Sobha Singh Art Gallery, Andretta.
  Pages 104. Rs 195.