|
Making sense
of the urban maze
Reviewed by Meeta Rajivlochan
Urbanisation in India:
Challenges, Opportunities and the Way Forward
Ed: Isher Judge Ahluwalia, Ravi Kanbur and P K Mohanty
Sage. Pages 337. Rs 850.
THIS book focuses on the
prescription-side of urban planning to tell us of what all is wrong
with present-day urbanisation, the possible solutions and the way
forward. Unfortunately, it makes little effort to unravel the knots on
the implementation side that have kept similar prescriptions tied to
the wall for all these years while our cities rot.
No place for love
Reviewed by Deepti
Prem Nagar: Town Of Love
by Anne Ch. Ostby
Supernova Publishers.
Pages 274. Rs 295
DOES life exist without
love? Can a place thrive without love and compassion? Prem Nagar is
one such loveless town where lust and violence lurk in every house,
inside each room. The ironical title of the book speaks volumes about
a place which is devoid of love in any form, love between mothers and
daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.
Life comes full circle
Reviewed by Aditi Garg
I Robbed Your Diamonds
by Col. Malvinder Singh
Power Publishers. Pages
297. Rs 350
LOVE, passion, money,
power and deceit; these are elements that life is made of. All of
these are capable of hugely altering its course and while some break
down and lose everything in despair, others face the issues at hand
and tide the tribulations. Col. Malvinder Singh's I Robbed Your
Diamonds is a depiction of times gone.
Swami in Sonepat
Reviewed by Rajnish Wattas
Champs of Devgarh
by Ajay Sharma
Puffin. Pages 202. Rs
199
R K Narayan's lovable,
impish, school boy in Swami and Friends lingers on in the
hearts of his large legion of fans. Aditya Sharma is obviously one of
them. His own Narayansque small-town tale of school boys and their
tryst with the national passion of cricket in Champs of Devgarh echoes
a similar strand.
King of spook
Reviewed by Priyanka Singh
Doctor Sleep
by Stephen King.
Hodder&Stoughton
Pages 485. Rs 599
a small boy who sees
creatures in his bathroom; a little girl who across time and space
sees visions of children being tortured and killed; her desperate cry
for help, to reach out to the small boy's mind who is now a grown man;
the "undead" True Knot who craves for the
"shining" in special children and will not stop at anything
for the "steam" they must inhale time and again to defy
mortality —all meet the checklist for an eerie tale.
|
