Strategies of survival
Rumina Sethi
Zealous Reformers, Deadly Laws: Battling Stereotypes
by Madhu Purnima Kishwar. Sage, Pages 419. Rs. 495.
MADHU Kishwar is one of the few women who brings theory into practice. Although she claims that she is not a feminist, her life revolves around writing about women’s issues and having their abuses redressed. Kishwar’s self-reflexive new book, recently launched by the Prime Minister’s wife, Gursharan Kaur, contains 25 essays written over the last many years and published mainly in Manushi, the well-known women’s journal pioneered by the author herself, on subjects relating to women’s rights—from their abject position in the family to their marginalisation in politics.

Focus on urban inequality
Subhakanta Mohapatra
Globalising Cities: Inequality and Segregation in Developing Countries
Eds. Ranvinder S. Sandhu and Jasmeet Sandhu.
Rawat Publications, Jaipur. Pages IX+422. Rs 850.
ACCORDING to the United Nations Centre for Human Settlement’s annual report, "Habitat 2006", currently half of the world’s population lives in towns and cities, and this figure will rise to two-thirds by 2030. Today, maximum growth in urban population has been taking place in developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This can be judged from the fact that out of 100 fastest growing cities in the world, 96 cities are located in these continents. This rising number posed many challenges for administrators, governments, social activists, academicians, etc.

PUNJABI REVIEW
Perspective on partition of the Punjab
Kanchan Mehta
Punjab da Batwara te Sikh Neta
by Dr Kirpal Singh.
Singh Brothers. Pages 104. Rs 80.
Dr. Kirpal Singh bears all the hallmarks of a true historian. He has the guts to call a spade a spade and to present the unpalatable facts without wrapping them in gold foil. Ripping into the exercise of partition of the Punjab from the Sikh viewpoint and evaluating role of contemporary Sikh leaders, he marks his book, Punjab da Batwara te Sikh Neta, off from the corpus of the partition holocaust. His forceful articulation of authentically proved arguments turns dry history into an absorbing, reading.

Insights into traditional history
J. N. Pandey and Nasreen Begum
Ancient Indian Dynasties
by V .S. Misra.
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Mumbai. Pages 413. Rs 350.
THE book discusses about the dynasties of ancient India from the thematic, geographic and temporal angle. The author has covered the distinctive features of ancient Indian dynasties from the earliest time to post-war dynasties by doing a thorough research on Vedic and Puranic literature.

How mankind will evolve
D. S. Cheema
Here Comes Everybody
by Clay Shirky.
Penguin Books. Pages 319. Price not stated.
New social forms, created and supported by upcoming technologies, are not only helpful to modern society, they are a challenge to it. New technology makes previously impossible things to happen and if many such things happen quickly, the change becomes a revolution. All around us, individuals are coming together, forming voluntary groups to share with one another, collaborate and take some public action.

A force for the future
Sridhar K Chari
Indian Army Vision 2020
By Gurmeet Kanwal
Harper Collins India, New Delhi, 2008, 342 pages, Rs 495
Calm, methodical and clear in tone, detail and argument, Gurmeet Kanwal lays out a vision for an Indian Army of the future, constrained only perhaps by a lingering, but never articulated, pessimism that the gap between reality and the ideal may remain large.

SHORT TAKES
About politics and poetry
Randeep Wadehra
Minoo Masani
by S.V. Raju
National Book Trust. Pages: xxi+99. Rs 40
Believe it or not there used to be a significant number of politicians in India who wouldn’t mould their conscience to fit into extant fashions. Minoo Masani was one such stalwart. A purist, he was upright and honest to a fault. No wonder he did not have a comfortable place in any political group.

Timeless tale of love
Tabish Khair
The Age of Shiva
by Manil Suri. Norton, W.W. &
Company, Inc. Pages 448. $24.95
Manil Suri's first novel was The Death of Vishnu; this one is The Age of Shiva. What next, I thought: The Birth of Brahma? Actually, Suri's next novel is to be called that, completing a literary sweep of the Hindu trinity.

When books reach scholars
Azera Rahman
For Dul Hussain, a student of Dibrugarh University in Assam who is preparing for his Civil Services exams, book hunting has become a regular feature. Most of the preparatory texts he needs are not available at bookstores or libraries there. But thanks to an initiative of a Delhi-based professor, his troubles might just come to an end. Scholars Without Borders, an initiative of Ram Ramaswamy, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) whose aim is to make books available to all, is now focusing its attention on the North-East.

The spirit of
Daphne du Maurier
Daphne du Maurier's son Christian Browning still lives in the family home, near Fowey, Cornwall, that was owned by his grandmother. This is where she wrote her first novel, The Loving Spirit, in 1931.

HOME