India’s Olympic journey
Himmat Singh Gill
Olympics: The India Story
by Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta. HarperCollins. Pages 379. Rs 695.
THE Indian connection with the Olympics started way back in 1920 at the Antwerp Games, when Sir Dorabji Tata, president of Deccan Gymkhana, sent three runners to the Games at his own expense. This in a way heralded the birth of the Indian adventure with the world Games, which in the years to come saw the Maharajas and other wealthy patrons chip in to make possible the country’s entry to the sporting arena of the comity of world nations which had started to assemble at regular intervals at different locations to test their physical and mental prowess on the sports field.

The poor rich visionary
P.H. Vaishnav
A Passionate Humanitarian — V. K. R. V Rao
Ed. S.L. Rao, N.Jayaram, V.M. Rao, M.V. Nadkarni, R.S. Despande. Academic Foundation. Pages 288. Rs 695.
THIS is a commemorative volume brought out by the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bangalore, of which he was the founder. The ISEC Board of Governors deserves thanks for having arranged this publication to coincide with the 100th birth anniversary of Dr Rao in July this year. The book contains 31contributions from academics and others, including Dr Rao's nephew and daughter, who had worked with him and knew at first hand this noted economist.

Saga of guts, gore and glory
R. L. Singal
Empire’s First Soldiers
by D. P. Ramachandran. Lancer Publishers, New Delhi. Pages 316. Rs 695.
THE theme of this book is to explain how India has stood to benefit from professional soldiering during the last 250 years. This extremely engaging narrative is about battles, about men who fought them and about those who led them. The heroes, whether in the battle of Adyar in 1746 or that of Plassey in 1756 or in various theatres of combat during the First and Second World Wars in 1914-18 and 1939-45 across Asia, Africa and Europe, or as late as in 1999 during the Kargil conflict, were soldiers who fought heroically with the motto "Theirs is not to reason why" engraved on their breasts.

East meets West
Laxmi Kant Verma
The Coffer Dams
by Kamala Markandaya. Penguin Books. Pages 235. Rs 250.
FIRST published in 1969, The Coffer Dams is among one of the 10 novels written by noted writer and journalist Kamala Markandaya. In this novel, she has well defined the collaboration of Western and Indian engineers who were building a dam in southern India. She has also described the various activities of a British engineering firm, which had been invited to build the dam.

Homeless twice
Satinder K. Girgla
Hijrat
by Gurmukh Singh Sehgal. Unistar. Pages 167. Rs 395.
AFTER Partition, Khatrams (Hindus and Sikhs) living in Luarhgi, a village on the Indo-Afghan frontier prior to the great split, migrated in two different directions. Most of them reached India, but those who had their kin in Afghan cities like Jalalabad and Kabul preferred moving there. However, turbulence in Afghanistan forced them to migrate en masse once again.

Dynamics of Punjabi society
Arun Gaur
Reconstructing Identities: Society through Literature
Ed. Paramjit S. Judge and Gurpreet Bal. Rawat Publications, Jaipur. Pages X+214. Rs 525.
THERE are important texts available that give us a peep into the subtle changes in terms of religion, gender, class and caste that the Punjab’s social life has undergone. Based on some of these texts belonging to the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the present collection of essays by five university professors and one reader seeks to trace the evidence of the changes and their interactive roles in the dynamics of Punjabi society.

Writing for a cause
WHAT happens when 16 of India’s well-known writers, including Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Shobhaa De, Amit Chaudhuri and William Dalrymple, become investigative reporters? The outcome is they create a gripping picture of AIDS in India — who the killer disease is affecting, how and why.

Anti-Obama books are a hit
GOING negative against Democrat Barack Obama isn’t just a campaign strategy for Republican John McCain. It’s also a good formula for selling books. Three anti-Obama releases were in the top 20 of Amazon.com’s best-seller list in the first week of August, despite little critical attention or mainstream media coverage.

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