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For two years, Saurabh Mukherjea and Nandita Rajhansa criss-crossed the country and interviewed over 50 leading minds in business, policymaking, media and academia. The result is this book, which portrays how 1.5 billion Indians are creating a range of unprecedented...

Stephen Alter is no newcomer to nature, wildlife and mountains of India as a writer, but this is a tour de force by any stretch. While much of wildlife writing is focused on the mega fauna, such as the tiger,...

Blending fiction, non-fiction and verse, ‘Our Stories, Our Struggle’ celebrates women’s resilience and their capacity to transcend victimhood. It amplifies voices of women across South Asia — from India to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka — and challenges deep-rooted...

Manto’s writing has a conspicuous unfinishedness, as if he was reluctant to clean up after the act. The images have an unassimilated excess, a kind of subconscious overspill. Perhaps it is a sign of cultivated negligence, maybe a trace of...

The master storyteller that he is, Dalrymple is able to fit together pieces of a vast puzzle and create a wonderful narrative

IPS officer Vijay Raman was a legendary figure in Indian policing, celebrated for spearheading the elimination of dacoit Paan Singh Tomar and his gang in Chambal, and later leading operations that liquidated the dreaded terrorist Ghazi Baba. This first-hand account...

At Home in Two Worlds by Maria Aurora Couto. Speaking Tiger. Pages 214. Rs 499 Cultural historian and literary critic Maria Aurora Couto bore witness to histories that inform Goa’s cosmopolitan, multireligious and multi-ethnic fabric in her writings. This compilation...

In his new book, Shashi Tharoor takes readers on a tour of the words, concepts and particularities that constitute the wonderland of the English language. He demystifies punctuation, guides through the arcane rules of spelling and grammar, and explains a...

The wonderful new book by violin maestro L Subramaniam may be titled ‘Raga Harmony: Harmonic Structures and Tonalities in Indian Classical Music’, but it is as much about the differences between western and Indian classical music. The most prominent difference...

Reading Avinash Shrestha’s poetry is a mixed experience. The poet clamours to express the ineffable, yet he falters to redeem poetry from the black hole of metaphysics or theology. The inordinate desire to speak without making sounds is inherently impossible....

Three years at Aligarh Muslim University and addressing a senior as Aapa (elder sister) becomes a cultivated habit. One that continued when I shifted to Jamia Millia Islamia. So, the suffix even with a Jewish name like Gerda would not...

AT the reading of his play ‘Sabse Udaas Kavita’, organised by the Sahitya Akademi in New Delhi in 2002, Swadesh Deepak asked his audience, “If a play doesn’t relate to society, what use is it?” Only a few weeks earlier,...