Category Archives: Books

Books

In My Hands Today…

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Age of Anger: A History of the Present – Pankaj Mishra

Modernity, secularism, development, and progress have long been viewed by the powerful few as benign ideals for the many. Today, however, botched experiments in nation-building, democracy, industrialization, and urbanization visibly scar much of the world.

As once happened in Europe, the wider embrace of revolutionary politics, mass movements, technology, the pursuit of wealth, and individualism has cast billions adrift in a literally demoralized world.

It was from among the ranks of the disaffected and the spiritually disorientated, that the militants of the nineteenth century arose—angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally.

Many more people today, unable to fulfill the promises—freedom, stability, and prosperity—of a globalized economy, are increasingly susceptible to demagogues and their simplifications. A common reaction among them is intense hatred of supposed villains, the invention of enemies, attempts to recapture a lost golden age, unfocused fury and self-empowerment through spectacular violence.

In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra explores the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world—from American “shooters” and ISIS to Trump, Modi, and racism and misogyny on social media.

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Bombay after Ayodhya : A City in Flux – Jitendra Dixit

The demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 was followed by riots across India. Mumbai had always been susceptible to communal violence, but the violence in December 1992 and then again in January 1993 was unprecedented. Two months later, in March, serial blasts rocked the city, killing over 250 and injuring 700. Communal strife was followed by gang wars and natural calamities, all of which changed the city forever.

Bombay after Ayodhya chronicles how the past three decades have been a period of unprecedented flux in Mumbai. In the aftermath of the riots, a split in the Mumbai underworld led to new equations in politics, which changed the demography of the city and led to the rise of new townships. After a brief lull, blasts and terrorist attacks rocked it once more in 2002, a cycle of violence that culminated in the horrific 26/11 attacks in 2008.

Jitendra Dixit grew up in Mumbai and has reported from the city for much of the three decades he writes about in this book. This is a deeply felt biography of a city, which has transformed from a city of mills to one of malls, where the number of skyscrapers has multiplied along with their height, where local trains have become longer and yet remained overcrowded. It is the city of Bollywood, yet constraints of producing films in the city have led filmmakers to move out. Its iconic festivals, such as Ganesh Utsav and Govinda, once primarily celebrated by the poor and the middle class, have become commercialized. Along with key events and people that have shaped the evolution of present-day Mumbai, Bombay after Ayodhya also documents the change in the city’s character, from its physical appearance and civic issues, to real estate and politics.

In My Hands Today…

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Beyond the Border: An Indian in Pakistan – Yoginder Sikand

Beyond the border, based on two journeys that yoginder sikand undertook to pakistan, covering lahore, multan, hyderabad (sindh), moenjo daro, bhit shah, and Islamabad, among others, is a strikingly unconventional account of what life is like for ordinary pakistanis the pakistan he discovers only remotely resembles the stereotypical muslim nation of the hindu imagination from shiela, the daughter of a feudal lord, named after her mother’s Indian best friend, to a rundown, local eatery owner who offers the author free food because sikand is the first indian to visit his stall, encounters with pakistanis from all walks of life draw up a very different picture: Pakistan is a country as diverse, paradoxical and rich in narratives as india departing from the fiercely polemical rhetoric common in indian and pakistani accounts of each other, yoginder Sikand not only gives lie to the strategist s view of the India-Pakistan divide but also dispels the myths that have filtered into the indian psyche about pakistan being the terrible other in this brilliantly perceptive and quirky travelogue, he illuminates the pakistani side of the story, while telling his own tale of exploration and self-discovery

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Portable Magic: A History of Books and their Readers – Emma Smith

Most of what we say about books is really about the words inside the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, ‘a uniquely portable magic’. Here, Emma Smith shows us why.

Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Gathering together a millennium’s worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books’ physical form – their ‘bookhood’ – that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper’s Riders , to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways.

Exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books, Portable Magic hails the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; it reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes new definitions of a ‘classic’-and even of the book itself. Ultimately, it illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal – and more turbulent – than we tend to imagine.

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What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian – Shailey Hingorani, Varsha Sivaram

A celebration of the slippages, strife and secret histories that make us—for better or worse—who we are.

A woman faces off against a xenophobic stranger across a supermarket turnstile.

A young girl mistakes her first period for strawberry yoghurt and endures an embarrassing puberty ceremony.

At the funeral of her cruel and prejudiced dadhi, a granddaughter reflects on the confusions of grief and the trauma passed through family lines.

A follow-up to the best-selling anthology Growing Up Perempuan (AWARE, 2018), What We Inherit tells the stories of Indian women (and a few men) in Singapore entirely in their own words. They question the expectations foisted upon them, discover new avenues into old traditions and carve out spaces for joy amid anger and sorrow. At a time when the bonds between us seem at constant risk of breaking, What We Inherit turns our attention towards community in all its complexities. It’s a reminder of how we honour, betray and ultimately bear witness to each other… and ourselves.