The Ganges is not for Sale
Rumina Sethi
Globalization’s New Wars: Seed, Water and Life Forms.
Vandana Shiva. Women Unlimited, New Delhi. Pages 129. Rs 250.
THE horror of 9/11 initiated a war on "terrorism" with global economics at base. Globalisation works on the rationale that it must have a permanent war economy. Its arsenal includes mainly coercive free-trade treaties and technologies of production. Globalisation wars are far more damaging than combat warfare because the ambit and arena of these wars is vast: the entire world is the enemy, which has to be vanquished.

Showy business
by Priyanka Singh
Bling by Erica Kennedy William Heinemann (distributed by Rupa). Pages 504. £ 9.99.
BLING is a literal page 3 take on the dynamic culture of hip-hop and dependence on social dexterity to stay afloat. In a world of manic competition, ruthless competitors, motivated promoters and unsparing critics to boot, originality is compromised and much else.

Queen of Dreams
by Cookie Maini
The warp of immigrant’s lives
by Chitra Divakaruni. Abacus, London. Pages 307. £ 5.50.
IN an immigrant’s repertoire of dreams, the scenario "back home" bobs up the most. The familiar whiffs of seasonal breezes they grew up in, the authentic flavours of the cuisine and a topography, which was a part of early consciousness, remain an integrated part of the immigrants’ being, no matter where they go. This part of their persona may get submerged in the subconscious, yet it inevitably surfaces in their dreams or in their writing, whereas for their progeny, "back home" is merely a parental construction for them to conjure up in the hues they are depicted to them.

Understanding wars that are called clashes
by Rakesh Datta
Low Intensity Conflicts in India: An Analysis
by Lt Col Vivek Chadha.
Sage Publications, New Delhi. Pages 513. Rs 495.
LOW-intensity conflicts (LICs) are often misunderstood as law and order problem and a routine role performed by the police. On the other extreme, such conflicts are seen as full-fledged wars best left to the Army to resolve. Instead, LICs represent an amalgam of low-intensity simmering fires, which have the potential to climb the intensity ladder, and further, given the cost-effective option.

Eastern adventure
Shantaram
by Gregory David Roberts.
Abacus. Pages 933. £ 4.99
THE curiously titled Shantaram is an adventure story par excellence. It could be called an Eastern as the locales for the story are Bombay and the mountains of Afghanistan. It is a tough guy story, which just gets tougher as it goes along. But it is also a love story. The love for a city, for reasons which are never quite fully explained and the love for a woman.

‘There is astonishing freedom in Bombay’
Harsh A. Desai talks to Gregory David Roberts and reviews his novel Shantaram
How did you land up in Bombay after you escaped from a prison in Australia? Was it just happenstance?

The clues within
by Minna Zutshi
Dreams and their Interpretation Made Easy
By Dr Francis A. Menezes. Roli Books. Pages 261. Rs 195
SELF-help books usually come with a baggage of promise and expectation. More often than not they turn out to be either facile or deceptively difficult. But Dreams and their Interpretation Made Easy by Francis A. Menezes is a book that has none of the appendages of "made easy" books.

Locked impressions
by Aradhika Sekhon
Shadows in Cages by Ruzbeh Nari Bharucha.
Fusion Books. Pages 250. Rs 225.
IN 1994, Ruzbeh Nari Bharucha read a press clipping about mothers and their children in Yerwada prison: "For a while I thought it was a printing error. I couldn’t believe that children stayed in prison and had to obey all the rules and regulations that were applicable to their mothers.

Man with the Midas touch
HE is that genius who turns everything he touches into gold. Madath Thekkepat Vasudevan Nair is the most famous Malayalam writer, who has set benchmarks in many fields — short story and novel writing, film scripting, film direction and journalism.

Great drama is great questions
Nibir K. Ghosh
IT is perhaps a strange coincidence that Arthur Miller died exactly 56 years to the day that his immortal classic Death of a Salesman began its life on Broadway. Death of a Salesman brought Miller not only the Pulitzer Prize but also international acclaim.

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