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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 of her works offers an unparalleled exploration of Goa. A central theme in these is the author’s upbringing in Konkani, Marathi and Kannada-speaking Dharwad, alongside Catholic and Hindu communities, before she moved to Delhi, London and Goa, enabling her to embody insider and outsider perspectives on her birthplace.
Verghese Kurien: The Man Who Brought Milk Revolution
by MS Meenakshi.
Niyogi Books.
Pages 174.
Rs 299
The credit for turning a milk-deficit country like India into the world’s largest producer of milk solely goes to Verghese Kurien. His commitment to overcoming challenges in the face of bureaucratic policies and profit-driven private companies makes him an enduring hero. He orchestrated a grid of small-scale cooperatives to make India a self-sufficient producer of milk in the 1970s. Its resounding success revolutionised dairy management in the country, along with bringing about changes in rural social milieus.
Tripping Down the Ganga
by Siddharth Kapila.
Speaking Tiger.
Pages 424.
Rs 799
The book is an account of the author’s journeys, or yatras, to seven major pilgrimage sites along the Ganga. As a schoolboy in the early 1990s, he began accompanying his devout mother on these yatras. In 2015, now a more sceptical young man, he decided to visit them on his own. And over the next seven years, as he journeyed from Gaumukh to Ganga Sagar, he realised that he wasn’t simply exploring his mother’s faith — the faith of tens of millions of Hindus — but also his own.
The Schoolyard Bet
by Manu Namboodiri.
Westland.
Pages 250.
Rs 299
Consumed with their communal rhetoric, do grown-ups ever wonder how it affects youngsters? “You come from a family of terrorists.” This taunt propels Afzal, a 16-year-old, to do something big enough to clear his family’s reputation. He concocts a hare-brained scheme to sneak into Pakistan, capture the dreaded terrorist Latif and drag him back to face justice in India. His best friends are roped into his quarter-baked plan. What unfolds once the three slip across the border into Pakistan isn’t something they had imagined.
