Category: Books

  • Travelling In, Travelling Out

    edited by Namita Gokhale

    I haven’t read a travel book in a while, and there couldn’t have been a better book to welcome me back into the genre. I think it was the mention of Mishi Saran, whose Chasing The Monk’s Shadow I really liked, that made me aware of this book.

    What I loved about the book is its exploration of what travel could mean. That takes the book far beyond the standard travelogue writing. Journeys can be of different kinds – the simple physical movement from one place to another, to the exploration of the self within, “thought to thought”, to seeing things in a different light and so on. This book has all that, and more.

    Devdutt Pattanaik sets the tone well with the exploration of the idea of travel seen through the lens of Hindu mythology and civilisation and brings up the concept of parikrama – returning to the point from where we started. Ashok Ferrey throws in a fantastic light touch immediately after that – fortunes changing with time. This humour finds a neat continuation in Marie Brenner’s take on holy India for the 5 star set. The tinge of cynicism is given full throttle in Mayank Austen Soofi’s time travel in Nainital, but balanced beautifully with nostalgia and wistfulness.
    Bulbul Sharma’s journey to the hills is as much a journey within, and it talks of a place that almost stands still in time. This theme resonates in the detailing of Nobgang by Bhutan’s Queen Mother. A darker turn of places where light does not enter is Ipsita Roy Chakraverti’s exploration of the haunted fort of Bhangarh, and her writing forces one to acknowledge the limited understanding of forces unseen. Both MJ Akbar and Rahul Pandita throw light on yet another nuance of places in India that have remained outside of time, and people who continue to be exploited.
    Mishi Saran’s “A House for Mr.Tata” is a poignant tale of a place changing even as its memories remain firm in the minds of those who inhabited it. The closure missing in this is exactly what happens in Urvashi Butalia’s partition based “The Persistence of Memory”. Indeed, some journeys are for exploration, and some others, for closure. (more…)

  • This was a Man

    Jeffrey Archer

    I wasn’t really very happy with “Cometh the Hour” because I felt the author was stretching the series. I was afraid whether that would mean that the series would end with a whimper. Thankfully it didn’t. This was a fitting finale to The Clifton Chronicles.

    I think it’s only when you see the series as a whole do you understand the kind of changes that have happened in the world through the lifetime of Harry Clifton. In that sense, it is a great lens to see the changing nature of society – its behavior, consumption, worldview and so on. While the author has done his best to show a changing order and system of the world, the bias to an old world charm is obvious. Perhaps an indication of how he’d have liked it to be. (more…)

  • Blockchain : Blueprint for a new economy

    Melanie Swan

    As bitcoin and its ilk start becoming mainstream, I think the book would serve as a good primer for those who would like to learn about the underlying technology – blockchain. It also provides a catalog of existing projects across diverse domains.

    Without doing a lot of technical deep diving, it not only provides an understanding of the concepts and features of blockchain, and highlights the current uses of the technology, but also provides a broad view of the different kinds of applications that could be made possible in the near future.  (more…)

  • The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

    Rachel Joyce

    The book that I read just prior to this one was “Who’s in charge? Free Will & the Science of the Brain”. The author of that book summed it all up in the end when he said that beyond the machinations of the body and the brain that science has, or has the potential to explain fully, there lies an abstraction that we call mind or consciousness. The recognition of that is what makes us human. When Harold Fry went out to post a letter and unwittingly begins an absolutely unplanned walk from one end of the country to another, I thought the coincidence was fantastic.

    With no preparation – maps, travel gear, phone, or even proper shoes – Harold decides to walk to save a life. The life of a friend he feels he has wronged. The book itself is not just the interesting details of Harold’s travels and how various people and circumstances shape it, or his character and how it evolved our time, or even the events of his life that have led to the why and how of this journey. It is also about his wife Maureen, her perspective of the events that transpired in her life and their impact on her relationship with Harold.  (more…)

  • Who’s in charge?

    Michael S. Gazzaniga

    Our notion of the mind is a single “me” that consciously acts and reacts on/to stimuli. But a more accurate description would be several modules that work in tandem to define and dictate what we could call the mind/consciousness. A lot of this mind’s activities is dictated by factors that have been built into us by evolution and environment. I had just about been converted to biological determinism and started disbelieving the notion of free will! I think I’ll have to change my mind again!

    While the blurb might seem like a case for determinism, (and thus against ‘free will’) I thought the actual content of the book, especially towards the last third, swing more towards a “we don’t know yet”. The idea of it, though, starts earlier in the book – “Just as traffic emerges from cars, traffic does ultimately constrain cars, so doesn’t the mind constrain the brain that generated it?” (more…)