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Exhaustive peep into Malwa’s past
Reviewed by Harbans Singh
The City and the Country in Early India – A Study of Malwa
By P.K. Basant. Primus Books.
Pages 369. Rs 342
The effort is stupendous, the
sweep is vast, the study exhaustive, and the impact enlightening. The
City and the Country in Early India – A Study of Malwa by P.K.
Basant is primarily about understanding the growth and development of
urban centres of Malwa – a region in present-day Madhya Pradesh and
not to be confused with the region in Punjab – in the context of its
long history of agriculture. It is also, as the first part of the
title suggests, the history of the city and the country in early
India. Both the subjects are interwoven and the study of Malwa would
have been inadequate in the absence of the larger context.
Indictment of globalisation
Reviewed by Shelley Walia
Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India
By Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari. Penguin.
Pages 394. Rs 699
Every piece of earth, every
natural resource, and every working hand is now the raw material for
the capitalist world. But the time has come when the oppression
of globalisation has to be countered for which we need a new language
of resistance. In this grand globalisation debate, we have to ask the
relevant question: "Who rules, and in whose interests and to what
ends?"
Treading the path of peace
Reviewed by M.M. Goel
Quran ka Shanti Sandesh
By Mohamad Ibraham Sazaad Tammi.
Alhikmah Foundation, New Delhi. Pages 190. Rs 110.
For world peace in the present
times of materialist miseries, we need citizen-based organisations
like the Alhikmah Foundation for multi-track diplomacy for preventing
conflict of any kind at any level of operation in any economy of the
world, including India with Global Peace Index based on 23 indicators.
The measurement of the level of peace as an index of progress and
happiness in every nation, state, district, village and city is
the need of the day. We need to place peace above everything which is
the sermon of all religions in the world.
Citizenship and hardship
Reviewed by Balwinder Kaur
Homesick
By Roshi Fernando. Bloomsbury. Pages 291. Rs 499
People’s lives cross over; they
are interconnected and interrelated with varying degrees of intimacy.
They forge ties that wind and bind. Such is the case for a group of
Sri Lankan families living in south London. Their location is the
same, origins are similar but destinations different. But for one
brief moment, they all occupy the same space, Victor and Nandini’s
party ushering in the year 1983 with common hopes and dreams. And
their lives and stories veer off from this point, sometimes converging
at occasions and celebrations.
Nitty-gritty of boardrooms
Reviewed by B.B Goel
Corporate Governance : A Global Perspective
By R.K. Mishra, Stuart Locke, D. Geeta Rani
Academic Foundation.
Pages 238. Rs 895
Corporate governance is indispensable
for a vibrant capital market. It is the blood that fills veins of
transparent disclosures and accounting practices. It is no longer
confined to the halls of academia and is increasingly finding
acceptance for its relevance in the industry. There is no single model
of good governance. But common to all governance regimes, it aims at
enhancing shareholders’ value along with interests of stakeholders,
improving economic efficiency of enterprises and thereby overall the
country’s economy.
Tete-a-tete
When words
become visuals
Nonika Singh
As a rule, filmmakers are in
the habit of making visuals out of words. Only writer-director Piyush
Jha, who has made three movies including the much-acclaimed Sikandar,
exudes excitement after having made words speak in the language of
images. Fresh from writing Mumbaistan, a compilation of three
novellas that shall soon be released, he says, "While through my
movies I care to stimulate the intellectual quotient of audiences,
with my books I hope to entertain my readers." So he was as
pleased as punch when the queen of entertainment Ekta Kapoor, who has
written the blurb called it a potboiler page turner with the major
ingredient of entertainment in abundance.
A labour of love for the Bard’s sake
Shakespeare: The Indian Icon
By Vikram Chopra. Readers Paradise.
Pages xxvi, 836. Col. Illustrations. Rs 1,995
There were two Englands, one of
the penal code and the other of Shakespeare and Milton, as Jawaharlal
Nehru mentioned in the Discovery of India. The world of
Shakespeare defined literature and it was with diligence and rigour
that Indian scholars taught, researched and engaged with the Bard. In
fact, research on the Bard was a sunshine sector before Independence.
Multifaceted writer
Puneetinder Kaur Sidhu
The writer of over a dozen books, KJS Chatrath is a reluctant bureaucrat, staunch Francophile or irrepressible itinerant and blogger
He worked for the Indian
Administrative Service before retiring as the Director General of
Odisha’s Administrative Officers’ Training Academy in 2003. He
also holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris for his thesis on
"Indo-French Diplomatic Relations". An admirer of
France since his schooldays, it was his initial fascination with the
nation’s postage stamps that eventually led to his "long love
affair with all things French". This affair has left the literary
world richer by a number of books, mostly on Indo-French interface: The
Foreign Policy of France, India in the Debates of the French
Parliament: 1945-1988, Ver la Lumiere: A Study of the French School
System, France - A Brief Bibliography, A Glance at
France and The French Collection.
Short
takes
Cricket’s
deity, Dalai Lama and encyclopaedia
Randeep Wadehra
Sachin: A Hundred Hundreds
Now
by V. Krishnaswamy
Harper Sport. Pages: xiv+261. Rs 250
Arguably
the greatest cricketer ever to wield the willow, Sachin Tendulkar –
often referred to as the God of Cricket – remains a favourite
subject for various academic, intellectual and casual discourses. So,
another book on the cricketing legend comes as no surprise, especially
when it celebrates his century of centuries. On his debut in Karachi
he gave sufficient evidence of what he was capable of. Cricket experts
described him as the embodiment the Sunil Gavaskar style.
Beyond Religion
by The Dalai Lama
Harper Collins-India Today. Pages: xv+188. Rs 399
International Encyclopaedia of Abbreviations
by IB Verma
BP Publishers and Distributors. Pages: viii+831 (two volumes). Rs 1995
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