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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.
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