Winged beauties
Birds of Baramulla
By Lt Col Rohit Gupta.
Published by 19 Infantry Division.
Allied Marketing Services, New Delhi. Pages 147. Price not stated.
Reviewed by Lt-Gen (retd) Baljit Singh
Thomas Hardwicke was 19 years old when in 1778 he disembarked at the Princep Jetty, Calcutta, as an Artillery Cadet in the Bengal Presidency Army. Like the average British school boy, Hardwick may well have indulged in the hobby of collecting bird’s nests and eggs but nothing could have prepared him for the impact that the rich chorus of bird song and the gorgeously plumaged birds make on the first "arrivals".

Mighty emperor
Ashoka the Great
By Wytze Keuning. Trans. J. E. Steur.
Rupa. Pages 1,059. Rs 995.
Reviewed by M. Rajivlochan
India had been known to the world since the dawn of history. By the second half of the 18th century, many European scholars began to see it also as the cradle of civilisation. That image was soon dented by the occupation of the Indian subcontinent by the English East India Company. For almost 100 years, the lands of India remained the private property of the Company. After the rebellion of 1857, the British government took over these lands.

An unfinished agenda
My Kashmir: The Dying of the Light
By Wajahat Habibullah.
Penguin/Viking. Pages 236. Price not mentioned.
Reviewed by Ram Varma
Kashmir festers like a wound in`A0India`A0’s body politic. In 1947 British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan and the princely states were left free to accede to any of these newly carved out nation states. Jammu and Kashmir was a princely state ruled by a Dogra king, Hari Singh. He vacillated, but when tribal hordes from Pakistan attacked Kashmir, he sought India ’s help in defending his territories and signed the instrument of accession to India.

Extraordinary tales
An Evening in Lucknow
By K. A. Abbas.
HarperCollins. Pages 226. Rs 299.
Reviewed by Aradhika Sharma
K. A. Abbas’s stories, written years ago, are as relevant to this day and age as they were half a decade ago. He has written on the themes of poverty, sadness, rural issues, people beset with hunger and oppression. His are stories of the ordinary people, the aam adaami log who are always around us but (thanks to the globalised glitz we prefer to soak in) we are not really interested in. Neither do we like to read stories about them nor watch them in TV serials or even look at or acknowledge them when we pass them by.

Translation time
Nonika Singh
Trust the well-known UK-based poet Amarjit Chandan not to mince words. So, the man, who has only recently translated a biography, Sehaj Prakriti, on eminent painter Paramjit Singh, doesn’t wax eloquent over either the original book Prakrati Aur Prakratish: Paramjit Singh Ki Kala, penned by art critic Vinod Bhardwaj, or the artist. Sure, he hails it as a significant work and Paramjit, according to him, is one of the major artists of the country, the first to paint Punjab’s landscapes. Interestingly, the first ponytail Sikh, too, he adds.

Beyond boundaries
S. D. Sharma
Actor Girija Shanker talks of his journey into Bollywood and his latest foray into Hollywood
None of the religious epics have influenced the life of Indians the world over as the Ramayana and Mahabharata and I am certainly blessed to have been part of the mega TV serial Mahabharata," says Bollywood actor Girija Shanker, who immortalised the role of the blind emperor, Dhritrashtra, in this serial of B. R. Chopra.

China to Chandni Chowk
Madhusree Chatterjee
Never thought Mao's biography would be an expose, says the Chinese writer, Jung Chang, on a visit to India
Her book ripped the veil off Mao Zedong's regime and was described as a "bombshell of a devastating work" by the British media. But the biography of China's most well-known personality is not the only one that has made writer Jung Chang famous. London-based Chang is the co-author of Mao: The Unknown Story and also the generational saga, Wild Swans: The Three Daughters of China.

HOME