HISTORIAN and food critic Pushpesh Pant, in ‘From the King’s Table to Street Food’, embarks on an appetising voyage through the historical and cultural influences that define Delhi’s culinary landscape. This delectable trip starts in the Indraprastha of yore, makes...
Dehejia takes a critical view of the western-trained art historians
Rajiv Dogra, who was an accomplished professional diplomat, has after his retirement become a successful author focusing on India-Pakistan relations, among other subjects. His latest offering — ‘Autocrats: Charisma, Power, and Their Lives’ — is essentially an essay on the...
Anurupa Devi’s ‘Maa’ is a period piece on the private world of Bengali women as viewed through the unique lens of a writer who belonged to and knew that society intimately.
Society Girl by Saba Imtiaz & Tooba Masood-Khan. Roli Books. Pages 331. Rs 595 It was October 1970. Poet and former civil servant Mustafa Zaidi had been found dead in his bedroom. In the next room, Shahnaz Gul, a married...
The ‘Pioneers of Modern India’ series by Niyogi Books has been bringing to readers monographs of legendary Indians. While in the past it has published books on personalities such as Charu Majumdar, Homi J Bhabha, Jamini Roy, RK Laxman and...
The Israeli Defence Forces’ ongoing heartless and meticulous detonation of every house in entire villages in Lebanon and Gaza and the flattening of multi-storeyed buildings with civilians still inside have been beamed worldwide, thanks to the social media. But this...
It can’t be this or that when it comes to Kashmir, which remains a conundrum. Journalist Rohin Kumar’s ‘Lal Chowk’, translated into English by Dharmesh Chaubey, unravels the complex layers of history, politics and human emotions tied to the Kashmir...
A book written by a distinguished educationist and thinker like Krishna Kumar is bound to arouse my interest and curiosity. And as I begin to read it, I realise that unlike his other works, such as ‘Political Agenda of Education’...
A legendary port, a dangerous secret and a deadly oath — Hamish Morjaria’s ‘The Curse of Muziris’ weaves a historical thriller a la ‘The Da Vinci Code’. It tells the story of Jayesh, a trader from the fabled city of...
A coffee table book, ‘Tigers and Tribes: A Silent Conversation’ is born out of a three-day art exhibition in Delhi, organised by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Sankala Foundation to commemorate 50 years of Project Tiger. These...
The blurb of Samyukta Bhowmick’s book promises a complex, fast-paced, high-society murder mystery. The story begins promisingly at a Chattarpur guest house, where a crime novel by first-time author Kajal Puri is being launched. The theme of the event is...
Set in the Heartstopper universe, the LGBTQ+ young adult graphic novel, ‘This Winter’, covers the events of a particular Christmas with the Spring family. It’s a tastefully done emotional roller-coaster, a story of being a teenager, of being hurt, all...
In 1950, Saadat Hasan Manto, the man who gave voice to the traumatic realities of Partition, wrote thus: “The partition of the country and the changes that followed left feelings of revolt in me... when I sat down to write,...
A constant theme of Dinesh Sharma’s book is the visionary role played by the political class, from the Nizams to the CMs, in guiding the development of science and technology in the region
We all love underdog stories, be it on screen or off screen. When Sergio Scapagnini puts his pen to paper to tell the tale of an 11-year-old Indian boy, you can only root for this protagonist with all your heart....
There is a world inside the parentheses. There is a small town where the universe lives. This place, a poetic somewhere, is our beloved Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla’s address. When Shukla is writing a poem called ‘Writing A Poem’,...
Few can doubt that Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was extraordinary to the core. She went from being a widow at a young age to a woman who married for love and also divorced her husband, upholding a woman’s right in a most...
Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Hachette. Pages 352. Rs 799 The author traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of LA to meet the world’s most...
Nehru’s Bandung by Andrea Benvenuti. Speaking Tiger. Pages 384. Rs 750 Drawing on Indian, western and Chinese archival sources, ‘Nehru’s Bandung’ sheds light on a neglected aspect of India’s Cold War diplomacy. It starts with the role of Prime Minister...
Popular interest in Delhi’s rich historical remains continues to grow, leading to a lively market for books on monuments and their histories. Not surprisingly, this has led to a steady stream of such publications over the last few years. The...
Memories, heart-wrenching and happy, of the dead and of the living, of the mundane and the sublime, criss-cross Neha Bansal’s latest bunch of poems, ‘Six of Cups’. Like travellers traversing familiar terrain, the readers recognise the places she takes us...
‘Missy’ presents the convoluted reality of a migrant, whose every struggle is not merely a challenge, but a formative experience that contributes to a richer but complex, multifaceted new identity — it is a story of her ‘being’ and ‘becoming’....
She picked the skull nearest her and held it up like Hamlet. “Logic and reason don’t belong to any particular group of people either,” she said out aloud. ‘Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve’ by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago...
For two years, Saurabh Mukherjea and Nandita Rajhansa criss-crossed the country and interviewed over 50 leading minds in business, policymaking, media and academia. The result is this book, which portrays how 1.5 billion Indians are creating a range of unprecedented...
Stephen Alter is no newcomer to nature, wildlife and mountains of India as a writer, but this is a tour de force by any stretch. While much of wildlife writing is focused on the mega fauna, such as the tiger,...
Blending fiction, non-fiction and verse, ‘Our Stories, Our Struggle’ celebrates women’s resilience and their capacity to transcend victimhood. It amplifies voices of women across South Asia — from India to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka — and challenges deep-rooted...
Manto’s writing has a conspicuous unfinishedness, as if he was reluctant to clean up after the act. The images have an unassimilated excess, a kind of subconscious overspill. Perhaps it is a sign of cultivated negligence, maybe a trace of...
The master storyteller that he is, Dalrymple is able to fit together pieces of a vast puzzle and create a wonderful narrative
All empires in human history have been formed and sustained by conquest, violence and bloodshed. They can survive only by expansion. After some time, the same expansion becomes a liability for the empire and a catalyst for its decline and...