Category Archives: Books

Books

In My Hands Today…

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Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir – Yashica Dutt

Dalit student Rohith Vemula’s tragic suicide in January 2016 started many charged conversations around caste-based discrimination in universities in India. For Yashica Dutt, a journalist living in New York, this was the moment to stop living a lie, and admit to something that she had hidden from friends and colleagues for over a decade—that she was Dalit.

In Coming Out as Dalit, Dutt recounts the exhausting burden of living with the secret and how she was terrified of being found out. She talks about the tremendous feeling of empowerment she experienced when she finally stood up for herself and her community and shrugged off the fake upper-caste identity she’d had to construct for herself. As she began to understand the inequities of the caste system, she also had to deal with the crushing guilt of denying her history, the struggles of her grandparents, and the many Dalit reformers who fought for equal rights.

In this personal memoir that is also a narrative of the Dalits, she writes about the journey of coming to terms with her identity and takes us through the history of the Dalit movement, the consequences of her community’s lack of access to education and culture, the need for reservation, the paucity of Dalit voices in mainstream media, Dalit women’s movements and their ongoing contributions, and attempts to answer crucial questions about caste and privilege. Woven from personal narratives from her own life as well as that of other Dalits, this book forces us to confront the injustices of caste and also serves as a call to action.

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Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence – Shrayana Bhattacharya

In this pathbreaking work, Shrayana Bhattacharya maps the economic and personal trajectories—the jobs, desires, prayers, love affairs, and rivalries–of a diverse group of women. Divided by class but united in fandom, they remain steadfast in their search for intimacy, independence, and fun. Embracing Hindi film idol Shah Rukh Khan allows them a small respite from an oppressive culture, a fillip to their fantasies of a friendlier masculinity in Indian men. Most struggle to find the freedom—or income—to follow their favourite actor.

Bobbing along in this stream of multiple lives for more than a decade—from Manju’s boredom in ‘rurban’ Rampur and Gold’s anger at having to compete with Western women for male attention in Delhi’s nightclubs to Zahira’s break from domestic abuse in Ahmedabad—Bhattacharya gleans the details on what Indian women think about men, money, movies, beauty, helplessness, agency, and love. A most unusual and compelling book on the female gaze, this is the story of how women have experienced post-liberalization India.

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The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World – Tim Marshall

Spy satellites are orbiting the moon. Space metals are worth more than most countries’ GDPs.

People on Mars within the next ten years.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s astropolitics.

Humans are heading up and out, and we’re taking our power struggles with us. Soon, what happens in space will shape human history as much as the mountains, rivers and seas have on Earth. It’s no coincidence that Russia, China and the USA are leading the way. The next fifty years will change the face of global politics.

In this gripping book, bestselling author Tim Marshall lays bare the new geopolitical realities to show how we got here and where we’re going, covering the new space race, great-power rivalry, technology, economics, war, and what it means for all of us down here on Earth. Written with all the insight and wit that have made Marshall the UK’s most popular writer on geopolitics, this is an essential read on power, politics and the future of humanity.

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Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization – Ed Conway & Edmund Conway

Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future.

The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material.

In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth—traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates.

Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new the ground up.

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An Unsuitable Boy – Karan Johar and Poonam Saxena

Karan Johar is synonymous with success, panache, quick wit, and outspokenness, which sometimes inadvertently creates controversy and makes headlines. KJo, as he is popularly called, has been a much-loved Bollywood film director, producer, actor, and discoverer of new talent. With his flagship Dharma Productions, he has constantly challenged the norms, written and rewritten rules, and set trends. But who is the man behind the icon that we all know?

Baring all for the first time in his autobiography, An Unsuitable Boy, KJo reminisces about his childhood, the influence of his Sindhi mother and Punjabi father, obsession with Bollywood, foray into films, friendships with Aditya Chopra, SRK and Kajol, his love life, the AIB Roast, and much more.

This book is both the story of the life of an exceptional filmmaker at the peak of his powers and of an equally extraordinary human being who shows you how to survive and succeed in life.