Ashok Malik
A whodunnit, twice over
This book is a strange and happy mystery-within-a-mystery, where the actual plot and story of vengeance and crime almost doesn’t matter.
Head down, chin up
In assessing a book or a creative work, the term “straight from the heart” is often overused and reduced to a meaningless cliché.
How Ulysses got seduced by the Sirens
Sandipan Deb’s Fallen Angel: The Making and Unmaking of Rajat Gupta is a racy account of the rise and fall of a man who typified both Indian middle-class aspiration and the American dream. Till his October 2012 conviction and sentencing on charges of insider trading, Rajat Gupta was an iconic figure.
Unravelling the mystique of Delhi’s durbar
For all their access, political journalists in the capital are often the ultimate outsiders in Lutyens’ Delhi.
An Englishman in exile
Jug Suraiya is an exile many times over. He lives in Gurgaon but his heart is in Calcutta, the city he once called home but a city that has since disappeared. It’s been replaced by something called Kolkata, which one suspects has neither time nor space for the memories and the intellectual zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s that Suraiya describes in this breezy, enjoyable book.
Falling short of the Constitution
One of the worrying trends of public discourse in India is the regularity with which the political class and various governments — in the states and at the Centre — seem to hand over a veto to street mobs. Which books, films and ideas are kosher and which need to be banned is often decided by ugly, and sometimes violent, protests and political blackmail.
Some nostalgia, acute myopia
Monobina Gupta’s Left Politics In Bengal is a critique of the Left Front government — more specifically, of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) — in West Bengal by a (former) fellow traveller, a one-time activist and journalist who feels for Calcutta (never mind that new name) with a passion that is difficult to brush aside and who sees in the evolution of the organised Communist movement in India a sense of betrayal.
The man who invented discipline
It is appropriate that India’s best-known demographer uses a Census year to publish his memoirs.
