The Laughter

AFTER dealing with feminism and parenthood in her last book, ‘How to Raise a Feminist Son’, journalist Sonora Jha goes on an exploration of power and ‘otherisation’ in her latest book, ‘The Laughter’. It tells the story of a white male college professor who develops a dangerous obsession with his new Pakistani colleague. After protests break out demanding diversity across the university, Dr Oliver Harding finds himself and his beliefs under fire. As Ruhaba seems attainable yet not, and as the women of his past taunt his memory, Oliver reacts in waysboth shocking and devastating. ‘The Laughter’ is a portrait of privilege, radicalisation, class, and modern academia that forces us to confront the assumptions we make, as both readers and as citizens.

URBAN India has grown significantly over the last decade. In blindly following western models, our cities homogenise, losing their character, idea and soul. A typical city must now cope with extreme temperatures, both flooding and water shortage and abysmal air quality. What is our urbanisation model, going forward? How do we generate jobs? How can we make a walkable city with affordable public transport? How can we make cities more sustainable? In ‘The Indian Metropolis: Deconstructing India’s Urban Spaces’, BJP MP Feroze Varun Gandhi seeks to begin a national conversation on these issues. He also suggests ways to turn our cities into enabling, energising environments geared towards enhancing the daily life of the average city dweller.

FOR the Sami people, reindeers are not just animals, they are life. An international sensation and a Swedish bestseller, Ann-Helen Laestadius’ ‘Stolen’ tells the story of this bond threatened by the ways of the new world through the eyes of a nine-year-old girl Elsa, who lives north of the Arctic Circle. She and her family are Sámi — Scandinavia’s indigenous people — and make their living by herding reindeers. One morning when Elsa goes skiing alone, she witnesses a man brutally killing her reindeer calf. Elsa carries her secret as a dark weight on her heart. Years later, when she finds herself the target of the man who killed the calf, something inside of her finally breaks. It is the story of her coming of age, a powerful fable about family, identity and justice.

THIS is the story of Jagdish Prasad Bagarhatta’s journey — from neglect during his childhood and witnessing Partition, to perpetuating the spirit of competitive sports and then spreading the philosophy of care with the help of cardiac rehabilitation. ‘Well Played’ is a riveting account of the sports instructor who made it to a medical college and sought to apply his inherent curiosities and the basics of sports physiology to the principles of cardiac rehabilitation when it was still nascent in India in the 1970s. The book has been written by his son, Dr Rajeev Bagarhatta, a renowned cardiologist himself. The Foreword of the book has been written by Dr Naresh Trehan and has been endorsed by Abhinav Bindra, who calls the book “a fascinating journey of an extraordinary man and his inspiring career shift”.