Indira Gandhi - A Life in Nature
Jairam Ramesh
While reading the “unconventional” biography of Indira Gandhi — Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature — one cannot help but wonder if the mantle of her father and India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was thrust upon her after all. For, in more than one instance, the author of the yet-to-be-released book, Congress leader and former Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh presents private correspondences of Mrs. Gandhi with her friends to show how the ‘Iron Lady of India’ had a softer side to her personality that yearned for the mountains and proximity to nature. Read the review here
Reporting Pakistan
Meena Menon
In 2014, Meena Menon, who was then The Hindu ’s correspondent in Pakistan, did something only a few had done. After having covered Pakistan mainly from the capital, she broke a taboo and reported on the issue of Balochistan. Read the review here
Dialogue of the deaf: The government and the RBI
TCA Srinivasa Raghavan
At the end of 2016, the reputation of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) — one of India’s few public institutions of integrity and professionalism — was in tatters. Used by the Narendra Modi government to implement the demonetisation programme, India’s central bank became a household name for the wrong reasons. The shortage of cash and the frequent modifications in regulations saw the RBI become the subject of public debate. Read the review here
Rupture, Loss and Living: Minority Women Speak about Post-conflict Life
K. Lalita, Deepa Dhanraj
How does violence, communal or otherwise, impact ordinary people? What happens after the conflict, when the spotlight shifts elsewhere? How do victims pick up the pieces? Now direct all these questions at marginalised groups, especially poorer women, who anyways live in areas of darkness. What could have been their experience? Between 2006 and 2009 -- after some of the worst communal clashes our country had seen -- a scholar and a film-maker/researcher decided to investigate. Working with local researchers and activists in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and several cities of Gujarat, they began gathering stories from women survivors of collective violence. Read the review here
