2017
History, notoriously, is not about the past.-Amitav Ghosh in The Man Behind the MosqueVishwajyoti’s Ghosh’s Delhi Calm reminds one of the daily calm that is being witnessed along with the daily alarm of scams, jams, inflation and general deflation of spirits. The phrase ‘India shining’ was the buzzword a few years back…
2012
Trickster City is an extraordinary collection of stories, anecdotes, observations, biographical fragments about arrival, about belonging, about identity and about the fragility of existence. It is about a Delhi that is known and yet unfamiliar. Moving away from the easily recognizable, historically rich and elitist neighbourhoods…
‘Delhi is whatever you make of it’, muses New Yorker Dave Prager in Delirious Delhi, the Capital’s latest travelogue-cum-survival guide. ‘Every person defines Delhi for his or her self, and no two Delhi struggles are the same. At any given point, your experience will be the exact oppo-site of my experience, and we’ll both be right.’..
Kitsch and homogenization have been two important techniques used in the reduction of the person to the mass man by the mass society of today.Kitsch means that products of mass culture in which the aesthetic and intellectual work is done for the recipient, making him a passive recipient rather than an active discoverer…
The book is meant as a case study of different modes of transport provided by different agencies, under public and private ownership, in the Calcutta metropolitan area, and the economic and operational efficiency of these modes and agencies. The Calcutta State Transport Corporation, being the principal agency responsible…
In the struggle-torn world of today, not only individuals try to better their lot, but even nations compete ferociously to overtake each other. Ever-growing competition has led to an almost unwholesome image-consciousness which manifests itself in organized showmanship by almost every country…
‘The humbug, the waste and the plain stupidity that constitute a distressingly large part of our educational scene today’. This is the basic theme of this provocative collection of essays. Though they relate mostly to higher education, Professor V.V John also makes trenchant comments throughout this book…