This comprehensive monograph chronicles the personal and professional journey of the Indian architect and urban conservationist Brinda Somaya from 1975 to the present. It explores Somaya's diverse typology of projects in challenging conditions that represent a unique non-stylistic grammar. The essays in this volume offer multiple perspectives on Brinda Somaya's accomplishments, while the dialogues outline the concerns central to her work.

Arun Shourie's writtings in The Indian Express packed with evidence, uncompromising, prophetic - on the issues that are consuming the country today: evaporation of governance and what it spells for internal security; developments in Pakistan, the breathing time they give us; what the achievements of China spell for us, and what we must do to face up to them; how the present Government has sown trouble with the nuclear deal for our security as well as relations with the US; the need for reforms and the real record of leftists and others who are blocking them; the CBI inquiry that was instituted against him, and an inquiry that should have been instituted against a Congress-I Government but was killed by the Central Government; the falsehoods with which budgets to which industrialists have been giving scores of "9 out of 10" ; how rulers try to dodge revelations in the media, and how those very dodges nail them; how their responses - to hide, to shield contrast with those of Gandhiji, and the consequences of that contrast; how today idealism in the only practical politics; the way leftists bury inconvenient facts under an avalanche of abuse; the vital similarity between and the vital difference between Hinduism and Islamic fundamentalism; the new journalism and how it is jeopardizing the interests of the country...

Why is the child suffering? It must be because of the childs karma, we are told. But how do we know he did some wrong? Because he is suffering, we are told as if that is anything except a mere circularity. No one is suffering, say the mystics, Everything is maya. Yet they eat, they teach, they pen books. If the world is all maya, why do they do all this? Or do they mean something else when they say, The world is unreal? We cannot escape suffering. How may we put it to work? A profound examination of these and other questions, questions that each of us has to face in life.

The result is an eminently readable book. Reservations in jobs and education have always been a contentious issue. Ever since Prime Minister V.P. Singh unleashed the Mandal Commission report in 1989, the issue of reservations has been hotly debated across India's social and political spectrum. But have reservations really served the purpose they were intended for? InFalling Over Backwards, Arun Shourie, with characteristic attention to detail and meticulous research, points to the truth about reservations: that they are a sleight of hand of the politician. He also takes apart pro-reservation judgements of the Supreme Court and, in the process, bares the larger danger they portend, the danger to the one dyke that has saved us thus far, the doctrine of the Basic Structure itself. Tracing the history of reservations from the Constituent Assembly debates to the latest judgements,Falling Over Backwardsis a stinging rejoinder to those who advocate reservations as the panacea for all the ills that plague the nation.

A decades-old cartoon of him in a textbook rocked Parliament for days recently, causing parties across the political spectrum to run for cover and call for the withdrawal of the offending cartoon. In Worshipping False Gods, Arun Shourie employs his scholarly rigour to cast a critical look at the legend of Ambedkar. With his distinctive eye for detail, Shourie delves into archival records to ask pertinent questions: Did Ambedkar coordinate his opposition to the freedom struggle with the British? How does his approach to social change contrast with that of Mahatma Gandhi's? Did the Constitution spring from him or did it grow as a dynamic living organism? Passionately argued and based on a mountain of facts that it presents, Worshipping False Gods compels us to go behind the myths on which discourse is built in India today.