Tag Archives: politics

In My Hands Today…

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Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India – Suchitra Vijayan

The first true people’s history of modern India is told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey across its many contested borders.

Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world’s largest democracy and second-most populous country. Yet most of us don’t understand it, or the violent history still playing out there. In fact, India as we know it didn’t exist until the map of the subcontinent was redrawn in the middle of the 20th century, the powerful repercussions of which are still being felt across South Asia.

To tell the story of political borders in the subcontinent, Suchitra Vijayan spent seven years travelling India’s 9,000-mile land border. Now, in this stunning work of narrative reportage, she shares what she learned on that groundbreaking journey. With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan shows us the forgotten people and places in the borderlands and brings us face-to-face with the legacy of colonialism and the stain of extreme violence and corruption. The result is the ground-level portrait of modern India we’ve been missing.

In My Hands Today…

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All the Single Ladies – Rebecca Traister

In 2009, award-winning journalist Rebecca Traister started All the Single Ladies about the twenty-first century phenomenon of the American single woman. It was the year the proportion of American women who were married dropped below fifty percent; and the median age of first marriages, which had remained between twenty and twenty-two years old for nearly a century (1890–1980), had risen dramatically to twenty-seven.

But over the course of her vast research and more than a hundred interviews with academics and social scientists and prominent single women, Traister discovered a startling truth: the phenomenon of the single woman in America is not a new one. And historically, when women were given options beyond early heterosexual marriage, the results were massive social change—temperance, abolition, secondary education, and more. Today, only twenty percent of Americans are married by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960.

In My Hands Today…

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Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain – Sathnam Sanghera

In his brilliantly illuminating new book, Sathnam Sanghera demonstrates how so much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in our imperial past.

In prose that is, at once, both clear-eyed and full of acerbic wit, Sanghera shows how our past is everywhere: from how we live to how we think, from the foundation of the NHS to the nature of our racism, from our distrust of intellectuals in public life to the exceptionalism that imbued the campaign for Brexit and the government’s early response to the COVID crisis. And yet empire is a subject, weirdly hidden from view.

The British Empire ran for centuries and covered vast swathes of the world. It is, as Sanghera reveals, fundamental to understanding Britain. However, even among those who celebrate the empire, there seems to be a desire not to look at it too closely – not to include the subject in our school history books, not to emphasize it too much in our favourite museums.

At a time of great division, when we are arguing about what it means to be British, Sanghera’s book urges us to address this bewildering contradiction. It is only by stepping back and seeing where we really come from, that we can begin to understand who we are, and what unites us.

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The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World – Tim Marshall

In this revelatory new book, Marshall explores ten regions that are set to shape global politics in a new age of great-power rivalry: Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Greece, Turkey, the Sahel, Ethiopia, Spain and Space.

Find out why Europe’s next refugee crisis is closer than it thinks as trouble brews in the Sahel; why the Middle East must look beyond oil and sand to secure its future; why the eastern Mediterranean is one of the most volatile flashpoints of the twenty-first century; and why the Earth’s atmosphere is set to become the world’s next battleground.

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RAW: A History of India’s Covert Operations – Yatish Yadav

The Research and Analysis Wing, India’s shadowy external intelligence agency, is one of the country’s least understood institutions—at least in part by design. Perhaps fittingly for a spy agency, there is very little information about R&AW in the public domain.

What is this organisation, its structure, its role, and its vision? Why was it set up? Who are the people who run it? Set up in 1968 as a reaction to India’s massive intelligence failure during the war with China, R&AW played a crucial role in the formation of Bangladesh. It has since carried out highly successful covert operations in Fiji, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka and has countered and foiled Pakistani spy agency ISI’s machinations in the subcontinent.

R&AW has operations in other parts of the globe too; it played an important role during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance. No country can increase its global reach without intelligence support. That India has made enormous strides in its stature and influence is testimony to R&AW’s success. Yet, public accounts of its work exist only in highly romanticised fictional stories. Investigative journalist Yatish Yadav follows the lives of real agents and maps their actions in real situations. His conversations with Indian spies provide insight into how covert operations actually work. A History of India’s Covert Operations is the first comprehensive account of Indian spy networks, their intelligence gathering, and their role in securing and advancing Indian interests.