Doctrine of dharma
Review by Vijay Tankha
The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma
By Gurcharan Das.
Penguin/Allen Lane. Pages 488. Rs 699.
DESPITE its many flaws, or perhaps because of them, Gurcharan Das’ new book is a welcome addition to the growing body of writing about the Mahabharata, boundless source of both traditional wisdom and its deconstruction. Longer than the Odyssey and the Iliad together, the Mahabharata has not found as many translators, though several summarisers, in the recent or even distant past. Yet, despite translations and studies running into the hundreds, most people are hazy about Agamemnon or Odysseus, while the Mahabharata’s stories have percolated into the soil of this country becoming the diet and display of wise men and fools.

Chaotic development
Review by Amarinder Sandhu
Welcome to the Urban Jungle: How Cities are Changing the World
BY Jeb Brugman.
HarperCollins.
Rs 399. Pages 330.
BASED on two decades of research, Brugman has analysed the challenges faced by the growing cities. He rightly argues that urbanisation is a revolutionary process. The increased concentration of the masses in the urban areas is changing the world. As people become homo urbanis, the earth is being organised into a global city, which is well connected but highly unstable.

Breathing new life into orphaned characters
Neely Tucker
IN bookstores these days, Arthur Dent is hitchhiking through the galaxy again, Dracula glides through the London fog once more, and Winnie the Pooh is back to toddling around the Hundred Acre Wood. This would not be remarkable were it not for the fact that the authors who created these literary icons—Douglas Adams, Bram Stoker, A.A. Milne—have been dead anywhere from eight years to nearly a century. But in the twilight world of officially sanctioned sequels, death is not an impediment to character development.

Peep into war-torn Lanka
Review by Ramesh Luthra
Sam’s Story
By Elmo Jayawardena.
Penguin/Viking.
Pages 173. Rs 299.
JaYAWARDENA ’s Sam’s Story is a sensitive and absorbing portrayal of the war-torn Sri Lanka. It is a very honest and down-to-earth account of the havoc the small island has gone through. Simple yet gripping description provides a very sad and grim picture of those affected by the war.

The first Moghul
Kuldip Dhiman
Empire of the Moghul: Raiders from the North
By Alex Rutherford.
Headline Review.
Pages 436. Rs 495.
WHEN Babur was barely 12, his father died in a freak accident. Hardly had Babur got over the shock, he had to prepare himself to take over the reigns of Ferghana or else he would be dethroned by his uncles or cousins. Just retaining Ferghana would not be enough, though. His father had told him on several occasions: "We owe Timur a debt. He was a great man, my son. His blood is your blood. Never forget it. Be like him, if you can. Live up to your destiny and let it be greater than mine."

Amused view
Review by Humra Quraishi
Fool’s Paradise — A Collection of Musings and Amusings
By Roswitha Joshi. UBSPD.
Pages 190. Rs 295.
If you are feeling down and out due to what all is going on around you, then there’s this antidote. Try to read these short and long musings by this German writer living in our midst. Marriage to an Indian economist-turned-businessman brought Roswitha Joshi all the way from Hamburg to India and thus began her rather "optimistic journey" here. For the past four decades she has lived in India travelling, mingling, interacting and writing.

NRI issues
Review by V. Eshwar Anand
India, NRIs and the Law
By Anil Malhotra. Universal Publishing Law Co.
Pages 381, Rs 595
When an NRI family visits India, it is celebration time for the relatives and friends. With awe and admiration, they hear their tales of the American dream, the high life of London, the German experience or the Australian escapades.

On the fringes of reality
Margaret Atwood’s new novel is another dystopian tale of environmental catastrophe, but in person she is far from gloomy, writes Arifa Akbar
Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Year of the Flood features a dystopia in which science has had cataclysmic consequences on the environment, and it represents Atwood’s call on "greenies" to mobilise.

Psyche of terrorism
There are very few books that try to understand the process and stages through which terrorism has spread in various parts of the world. We don’t have materials that tell you the distinguishing features that characterise the internationalisation of terrorism — from local to global. Terrorism-Patterns of Internationalization by Jaideep Saikia and Ekaterina Stepanova provides a systematic analysis of the concepts of internationalisation of terrorism.

Back of the book
Human Rights and Peace: Ideas, Laws, institutions and Movements
Ed. Ujjwal Kumar Singh. Sage.
Pages 345. Rs 420.
Human Rights and Peace: Ideas, Laws, institutions and Movements redefines the ambit of peace, presenting a radically different perspective of looking at its relationship with human rights. It deals with the transformation of both the definition and practice of peace, showing how it has now taken the domain of human rights into its fold.

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