Tag Archives: History

In My Hands Today…

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Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine – Kavitha Rao

At a time when medicine is a highly sought-after career for Indian women, it is hard to imagine what it was like for the pioneers. The story of how firmly they were bound in fetters of family, caste, and society and how fiercely they fought to escape needs to be told. In Lady Doctors, Kavitha Rao unearths the extraordinary stories of six women from the 1860s to the 1930s who defied the idea that they were unfit for medicine by virtue of their gender.

From Anandibai Joshi, who broke caste rules by crossing an ocean, to Rukhmabai Raut, who escaped a child marriage, divorced her husband, and studied to be a doctor; from Kadambini Ganguly, who took care of eight children while she worked, to child widow Haimabati Sen, who overcame poverty and hardship—these women had a profound and lasting impact. And in their forgotten lives lie many lessons for modern women.

In truth, the compelling stories of these radical women have been erased from our textbooks and memories because histories have mostly been written by men, about men. In an immensely readable narrative and with impeccable research, Lady Doctors rectifies this omission.

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The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts – Loren Grush

When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots—a group then made up exclusively of men—had the right stuff. It was an era in which women were steered away from jobs in science and deemed unqualified for space flight. Eventually, though, NASA recognized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000, six elite women were selected in 1978: Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, and Rhea Seddon.

In The Six , acclaimed journalist Loren Grush shows these brilliant and courageous women enduring claustrophobic—and sometimes deeply sexist—media attention, undergoing rigorous survival training, and preparing for years to take multi-million-dollar payloads into orbit. Together, the Six helped build the tools that made the space program run. One of the group, Judy Resnik, sacrificed her life when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded at 46,000 feet. Everyone knows of Sally Ride’s history-making first space ride, but each of the Six would make their mark.

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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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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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Bulls, Bears and Other Beasts – Santosh Nair

Lalchand Gupta takes you on an exciting journey through Dalal Street in this brief history of the Indian stock market post liberalization.

From tech booms and tax evasion to banks and money laundering; scams and crashes to fixers and investors, Lala has seen it all.

A comprehensive account of the stock market over the last 25 years, it tells you what to watch out for while investing. It also looks at policies that the government needs to revise if the country is to harness domestic capital more effectively.

This is a must-read for all interested in the financial health of the country as well as those who want to know about the sensational events that led up to the far more sterile stock-market operations of the present day.