Sunday, July 28, 2002		Books

The pain of Gujarat, first hand
Harbans Singh
Lest We Forget—Gujarat 2002.
Edited by Amrita Kumar and Prashun Bhaumik. World Report in association with Rupa. Rs 195. Pages 154.
THE articles, when they were first published, were disturbing. Now in book form, they shake the consciousness and raise fundamental questions not just about the carnage in Godhra and genocide of Gujarat but also about Indian secularism and the State.

Fiction with factual backdrop
Rajdeep Bains
Time is a Fire
by Vikram Kapur. Srishti. Pages 265. Rs 250.
MEMORIES can often be painful, especially when they deal with an idyllic past gone sour. It was the night of October 31, 1984, a night of terror and blood, when the streets of Delhi were filled with murderous mobs out to teach the Sikhs a lesson—retaliation for the assassination of Indira Gandhi by two Sikh bodyguards.

Social fringes in spotlight
Ashutosh Kumar
Community and Identity: Contemporary Discourses on Culture and Politics in India
by Surinder S Jodhka. Sage Publications, New Delhi. Pages 269. Rs 300.
THE edited work under review receives attention for setting in motion a multi-disciplinary discourse concerning the ongoing "paradigmatic shift" in social sciences in India that has been the result of an upsurge of "new social movements" in the past two decades participated in by women, Dalits, adivasis, farmers, minorities and ethnic groups.

Critique of blood-soaked years
P. P. S. Gill
Violence as Political Discourse Sikh militancy confronts the Indian state
by Birinder Pal Singh, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Pages 244; Rs 350.
THE black jacket and a red streak in the middle of the cover is more loud than the book under review. For someone, who has been in the thick of 'that' phase of history in Punjab, hair-raising thoughts of which even today send a shiver down the spine, the book in hand revives memories of the time spent in Amritsar (1983-1990), as staffer of The Tribune.

At the heart of effective leadership
Prerana Trehan
The New Leaders Transforming the Art of Leadership into the Science of Results
by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee. Published by Little, Brown. Pages xvii+302. Rs 395.
THE little heart in the middle of a corporate ladder on the cover may look incongruent but is eloquent. It says it all. Technical skills are not enough to make outstanding leaders, what is needed is emotional intelligence, maintain Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee in The New Leaders. Carrying forward into the workplace the theory that Goleman enunciated in his international bestseller Emotional Intelligence, the authors postulate that effective leadership is a function of the heart.

Re-examining Indian polity
Indian Politics Since the Mutiny
by C.Y. Chintamani; published by Rupa and Co. Daryaganj New Delhi; printed in India by Rekha Printers Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi; Pages: 205. Rs 195.
FIRST a word about the author of the book, Indian Politics Since the Mutiny. C.Y. Chintamani, became an editor at the age of 18, a legislator at 36 and a minister at 41. While continuing to wield his pen like a sword, he dominated Indian journalism in the first three decades of the 20th century.

Punjabi literature
A critique of Punjabi criticism
Jaspal Singh
LITERARY criticism in Punjabi has undergone many changes in the past century. In the first half of the 20th century it was mostly biographical, eulogistic and didactic. However, the first notable event in critical discourse in Punjabi was the publication of Sant Singh Sekhon’s Sahitiarth, which leaned heavily on Christopher Candwell’s Illusion and Reality and some other texts of Marxist literature.

Short takes
On human rights
Jaswant Singh
Human rights: Perspective Plan for 21st Century
by Giriraj Shah and K.N. Gupta; Diamond Pocket Books, New Delhi; Pages 324; Rs 195.
HUMAN rights are universal but their violation is so widespread that it is impossible to limit them to any particular country or region. Nazi atrocities during the second world war prompted the United Nations to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Signs & Signatures
Shakespeare’s eternal truths
Darshan Singh Maini
A popular notion, nay a fallacy, often is in evidence where the question of writers and politics is concerned. Such a ‘romantic’ notion has in reality little validity, as we shall see. However, it’s not sufficiently realised, even by thinking men in general that it’s eventually this very desire that drives a great artist into the "heart of darkness", and, thus into the metaphysics of politics.