India is an economic bright spot and one of the fastest growing economies in the world. India is also one of the most unequal economies. One third of world's poor live in India. It produces talents who can compete head to head with the talents anywhere in the world. At the same time Indian schools and colleges produce graduates who are unemployable due to poor quality of education. India is attracting people from far away countries for health care at the same time Indians in large number do not get basic health care facility. The expensive health care is single major factor which pushes people down the poverty line. Indian villages especially villages beyond 5 KM of district head quarters lack basic infrastructure very badly. The public schooling system has improved but the quality of education remains a challenge. These contradictions make India a land of paradoxes. Anirudh Krishna, in his book ‘The Broken Ladder’ diagnoses the causes and effects of economic dispari...
Warfare is as old as human civilization so is its history. Indian subcontinent has been witness to bloody conflict and clashes since ages. Epics such as Mahabharata, Ramayana, Alha- Udhal are masterpieces of South Asia's age old tradition of rendering and preserving conflicts in different literary and art forms. India inherited thorny issues left behind by colonial masters at the time of partition which led to altercation and conflict with neighbors. These issues are still pestering making understanding of military history an essential part of statecraft. India can ill afford to ignore the history of conflict in this part of the world. Still t here are few good books on this topic worth visiting. The academics have largely ignored this important area whereas one comes across account of military conflict in memoirs of politicians or retired soldiers. There is dearth of well researched accounts on military history of India. This gap has been filled by Arjun S...
The great Derangement: Climate change and unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh tells stories, history and politics of climate change in a single book. The deftness of storytelling of fiction giant of our time is at full display in this remarkable book on imminent crisis the planet earth is facing today. Amitav Ghosh, the celebrated author expiates or in other word introspects on behalf of fellow writers by writing this extraordinary non-fiction. Why the master story teller resorts to non-fiction? The answer comes from the author himself - “Yet, it is a striking fact that when novelists do chose to write about climate change it is always outside of fiction”. The author rues elsewhere in the book, “If certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they will have failed- and their failure will have to be counted as an aspect of broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of climate crisis”. This era of collective failure of art a...
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