Politics of philosophy
Reviewed by Shelley Walia
Philosophy in the Present
By Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.
Edited by Peter Engelmann. Polity. Pages 104. £9.90.
ALAN Badiou and Slavoj Žižek are Europe’s two most eminent philosophers who have in their recent book brought philosophy out of the closet, bang into the arena of everyday affairs. Philosophy’s ethical and political intervention is so necessary to at least know what questions we are asking and to also face up to the fact that we are sometimes asking the wrong questions.

Sisters in arms
Reviewed by Amarinder Sandhu
How to Salsa in a Sari
By Dona Sarkar. HarperCollins. Pages 241. Rs 199.
THE two things which caught my attention when I picked up the book was the snazzy title and the cover with its leggy figures. The protagonist Issa Mazumder has a mixed parentage—her Indian mother, Alisha, eloped with her Afro-American father scandalising her conservative Bengali parents. Set in the US, the book takes the readers on a roller coaster ride through young Issa’s life.

Engrossing tales
Reviewed by Jyoti Singh
The Moments of Life: Short Stories
By Aju Mukhopadhyay. Frog Books. Pages 143. Rs 195.
THERE are stories worth sharing at every step of our life is what one feels after reading The Moments of life. The art of deft narration is better known to the author Aju Mukhopadhyay. Apart from being a master storyteller, he is a writer of poems, essays, features and has to his credit 12 books written in Bengali and 14 books in English.

Fab ideas
Reviewed by Harbans Singh
Making India Work
By William Nanda Bissell. Penguin/Viking. Pages 248. Rs 499.
LIKE many of us, William Nanda Bissell, Managing Director of the Fabindia chain, is deeply disturbed by the appalling poverty that afflicts India. Like many of us, he too attributes it to the abysmally poor management by the ruling class that has resulted in India becoming home of poverty, with 36 per cent of the world poor living here, hunger and degradation.

Elegant diva
Reviewed by Aradhika Sharma
Leela: A Patchwork Life
By Leela Naidu and Jerry Pinto. Penguin/Viking. Pages 180. Rs 450.
HOW lovely Leela Naidu was! What a fine-boned beauty, with the haunting smile and style quotient that would put any style diva of today to shame. No wonder that she was listed as one of the five most beautiful women in the world by the Vogue magazine. Just like Maharani Gayatri Devi and Nayantara Sehgal, Leela was a many splendored woman, fearlessly living life, breaking shackles, and experimenting with whatever took her fancy.

Salute to sepia songstress
Chetna Keer Banerjee
Much travelling and unravelling went into the penning of Vikram Sampath’s My Name is Gauhar Jaan!
WITH a degree in electronics and a master’s in mathematics, engineer and management professional Vikram Sampath turned writer with the Splendours of Royal Mysore: The Untold Story of the Wodeyars. Tracing the 600-year-long history of Mysore, its royal family and culture, this book has been widely acclaimed across India and termed as ‘one of the most definitive accounts on the Mysore royal family in recent times.’

Tete-a-tete
Distinctively Indian
Nonika Singh
IF he were not an artist, he would have been a cook. If he had to explain his works, he wouldn’t have been a visual artist but a writer. Upfront, unpretentious and, above all, hugely talented, that is Subodh Gupta. Internationally acclaimed, India’s leading contemporary artist, in whose hands mundane objects transform and translate into art, more precisely installations that he discovered for the first time with 29 Mornings, a work created out of peedhas (stools) to reinforce how religion is way of life in India.

SHORT TAKES
Space, selling and sterling qualities
Randeep Wadehra

• Issues & Views
  by Kiran Bedi
  Sterling. Pages: xi+372. Rs 299
  

• You Can Sell
  by Shiv Khera
  Rupa & Co. Pages: xi+300. Rs. 195
  

• Outer Space
  by Dr. G. S. Sachdeva
  KW Publishers. Pages: xvi+341. Rs 580
  

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