Sunday, November 11, 2001		Books

India’s Kashmir is Pakistan’s Sind
Review by Harbans Singh
Kashmir and Sindh — Nation-Building, Ethnicity and Regional Politics in South Asia
by Suranjan Das. K.P. Bagchi & Company, Kolkata. Pages 197. Rs 380.
MANY Third World countries, in the post-colonial era have, because of their multi-ethnicity and the compulsions of ethnic politics, failed one after the other to accommodate regional feelings within the broader national agenda. India and Pakistan have both shown this singular failure in the process of nation-building and have consequently suffered prolonged periods of internal turmoil and hostile relationship with each other.

WRITE VIEW
Living is harder than you think
Review by Randeep Wadehra
The Act of Living
by Anita Duhan. APH Publishing Corp. New Delhi. Pages 300. Rs 200.
ABOUT a decade ago I had penned this poem, titled "Life" that The Tribune was kind enough to carry in its now discontinued Sunday Magazine "Poet’s Corner" column. It was written in moments of deep agony. Dark thoughts, however, could not prevent an optimistic ending to the verse. But then we all go through introspection once in a while when overwhelmed by vagaries of life.

BOOK EXTRACT
Population billion: what went wrong
This is excerpted from the book "A Billion is Enough"
by Ashok Gupta and published by I.M.H., New Delhi.
BRITAIN in the 18th and 19th centuries faced the prospect of a population explosion. Malthus in "An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improve-ment of Society" conjectured, "There would be an ever greater gap between the people’s food demands and the land’s capacity to meet them. The result would be increasing starvation and deprivation, mass deaths through famine and disease and a rending of the social fabric."

It is not a women’s world and hence the trouble
Review by Rumina Sethi
Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development
by Vandana Shiva.. : Zed Books, London. Pages xx + 234. £ 9. 95.
THIS book review was initiated by a personal experience. I "adopted" a tree around which the "educated" residents would previously dump garbage. It was a sheesham tree in front of my neighbour’s house, not mine, but I would cross it everyday on my way out. The garbage did not bother my neighbour who often added inches to it, but I decided to do what I could. I pasted ‘No Garbage’ signs. It made little difference.

Not the end of history, but a new turn
Review by D.R. Chaudhry
Spectres of Capitalism — A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions
by Samir Amin. Rainbow Publishers, Delhi. Page 132 Rs 75.
THE spectre of communism has been haunting the world for a century and a half. But with the demise of Soviet Union many are of the view that this spectre has been finally buried and the humanity has reached the "End of History" marking the final triumph of capitalism, with no challenge to it from any quarter.

Beyond Marx and Gramci
Review by G.V. Gupta
Margin of Margin — Profile of an Unrepentant Post-Colonial Collaborator
by Ajit Choudhury, Dipankar Das and Anjan Chakrabarti. Anustup, Kolkata. Pages 306. Rs 300.
THIS is post-Derrida as also post-Foucault. It takes forward Gramsci. It re-reads Marx to re-establish his theory of surplus value, debunking western over-determination of the master. It also re-reads Ramayana locating the unreason within the reason of dharma. Challenge comes from the three self-confessed bastards of Macaulay from the city of "Job Charnock".