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Road to nowhere
Himmat Singh Gill
Tibet: The Lost Frontier
by Claude Arpi.
Lancer Publishers, New Delhi.
Pages 338. Rs 795.
Tibet was indeed a lost frontier
during the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries. It was known
only to a few intrepid explorers who ventured out to this landlocked
Himalayan kingdom of the lamas and their cavernous monasteries, perched
precariously high on the snowy mountaintops.
Beyond
the scalpel
Rajdeep Bains
Bombay Rains, Bombay Girls
by Anirban Bose.
HarperCollins. Pages 453. Rs 195.
ANOTHER
point proven by doctors—in addition to being cerebral and possessing
the capacity of working inhuman hours, they can also write great novels!
Reminiscent of Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, Bose’s Bombay
Rains, Bombay Girls also has a college hostel as its setting, a
group of misfits as its cast, and their transformation, as the book
progresses, into adults who will become not just first-class
professionals, but also sensitive and caring individuals as its theme.
Fakelore
and folklore
Pat Kane
Being a Scot
by Sean Connery & Murray Grigor.
Weidenfeld. Pages 312. £20.
If
nothing else, Sean Connery has always been alive to the gloomy dualities
of Scottish culture, as these opening lines to his self-directed 1967
documentary, The Bowler and the Bunnet, confirm: "The
country of the extremes/ Love of life/ Hatred of life/ Poets and
murderers/ Rigid temperance and savage drinking/ John Knox and Johnny
Walker/ Sturdy democracy and savage class hatred/ Warm hearts and idiot
violence".
An
indigenous blend
Rachna Singh
Seeing is Believing: Selected
Writings on Cinema
by Chidananda Das Gupta.
Penguin. Pages 295. Rs 499.
AS
a student of cinema, I would wade through large amounts of research
material on cinema and film studies. I found that books on cinematic
greats like Eisenstein, Truffaunt, etc. were available in plenty and
easily outnumbered books on Indian greats like Satyajit Ray or Shyam
Benegal.
Anguish
of divided people
Kanwalpreet Kaur
The Long Partition and the
Making of Modern South Asia
by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar.
Penguin-Viking. Pages 288. £29.50.
A
growing number of researchers are delving into the history of the
partition of India. The studies are welcome as they help in
understanding Partition in a fresh perspective. With people in the
Indian subcontinent still divided over caste and religion, we need to be
aware of the mistakes of the past lest we repeat them.
Road
to better health
Randeep Wadehra
Challenges of Healthcare in
India
by Dr. R. Kumar. Deep & Deep, Delhi.
Pages: xxx+314. Rs 980.
India’s
healthcare superstructure is undergoing a makeover. But, right now it
does not present a pretty picture. Dr Kumar points out that India
records the largest number of oral cancer patients and diabetics in the
world.
The
magic of acting
Kanchan Mehta
The Bioscope Man
by Indrajit Hazra. Penguin.
Pages 308. Rs 299.
The
desultory, discursive narrative of the birth, infancy and evolution of
bioscope, set in the colonial Calcutta of early 20th century,
is held together by piquant, titillating tale of ‘ the bioscope
man’, Abani Chatterjee’s sudden rise in film world, his secret,
one-sided passion for his co actor Felicia Miller and his subsequent
downfall.
Dylan’s
diary
A diary offering a rare
insight into both sides of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s infamously rocky
marriage is up for sale. Caitlin
Macnamara, his wife, is famously said to have barged into hospital when
Thomas lay on his death bed and bellowed: “Is the bloody man dead
yet?”
Mum’s
the word
Salman
Rushdie says his mother’s gossip had a strong influence on his
literary career. Rushdie says his mother was a “world class gossip”
and that it was from her that he got a feel for talking about secrets.
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