Book Review of the Week

The Congress has won political freedom, but it has yet to win economic freedom, social freedom, and moral freedom. These freedoms are harder than the political, if only because they are constructive, less exciting and not spectacular -Mahatma Gandhi The opening quote of Oral History of Indian Freedom Movement by Mahatma Gandhi sums up the true […]

  Reading The Zoo in My Backyard, the first thought that comes to mind is how apt the title is. In just the first few chapters, a black monkey, a baby elephant, a mouse deer, and numerous birds and rabbits have pranced through the pages, kindling amusement, occasional bouts of trepidation, and a heavy dose of nostalgia.

In approximately 5 weeks the United States will hold the most important Presidential election in its short and violent history. Bookmakers and Psephologists alike think of it as a 50-50 proposition. The incumbent Donald Trump has been hinting that the election, whatever the result, will be tainted, rigged and that, as such, he would not

  Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India. Michael Levien. Oxford University Press. Reviewed by Dr. Nikhil Deb in the LSE Review of Books blog; used here by permission. In Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India, Michael Levien examines how the shift from state-directed capitalism to neoliberalism in India from the 1990s has led to

Review of Breaking Through by Vinay Sitapati at Scroll A financial journalist, the story goes, called up the residence of Montek Singh Ahluwalia, at the centre stage of economic policy from the 1980s to 2014. These were, not coincidentally, the growth years of the Indian economy, and Ahluwalia was the go to person for businessmen,

The Gated Republic Review by Rama Bijapurkar Why we are the way we are. The stark commentary is an inquiry into India’s history and politics of public policy, and the anatomy of failure A European anthropologist observed in the 1990s that in India, people are thought of first as consumers and second as citizens and