The exploration of the unknown has fascinated writers since time immemorial, wanderings, encounters with a new culture and the induction into it. This has been seen in popular fiction as well as literary – the latter starting perhaps with Marco Polo, who was accused of manufacturing much of his information. What is also curious is that people have been fascinated by encounters between the west and the orient – one could number books like Lord Jim, Shogun, River of Smoke and most recently The Yellow Emperor’s Cure, the last two written by Indian authors. Amitabh Ghosh and Kunal Basu. In fact, the last two have hit the public gaze within a year of each other. Ghosh’s is specifically about the opium trade with China during Britain’s reign while Basu’s pinpoints the encounter of a Portuguese doctor with Chinese medicine. Specifically a son’s quest to find a remedy for syphilis, the plague that was for 400 years or more the world’s forerunner to AIDs and that was similarly regarded by society and the Church, and save his father, ironically a respected physician who is helpless in the face of the scourge.

Kunal Basu

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that self help books are the trend of the day because they encourage others to dream. Rashmi Bansal has put together a handy collection of the realized dreams of 20 social entrepreneurs to serve as examples for others to follow. The entrepreneurs are clubbed in 3 groups: “rainmakers”, “changemakers”, and “the spiritual capitalist”, with individual chapters which have admittedly intriguing titles like ‘The Girl in the Mirror’, “Soul Food’ and ‘Lead Kindly Light’, to mention a few.

Bansal takes Martin Luther King’s famous speech of August 1963 as the starting point for her book, though she is quick to point out that the people she has chosen ‘are …not Mother Teresa.

Rashmi Bansal

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Balasaraswati was unique in that she was one of the few lightbearers for her community of dancers and represented a form that was almost lost after Independence took Bharat Natyam over and brought it within strict, almost sanitized guidelines. Balasaraswati along with Rukmini Devi Arundale belonged to the form’s renaissance. She came from the matrilineal devidasi tradition of South India, which like Indian classical music performed by the courtesans of Delhi and Lucknow, has a long heritage of artistic practices. Before she turned thirty, this dancer had become a legend in her own time. However she and her family relocated to the United States in an attempt to preserve what had been handed down to them through the generations, which was gradually being sidelined in the post 1950’s since it was seen as being very far from the mainstream.

Douglas M. Knight Jr

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They say the best way to get to know a city is to walk through it and there are many Delhis to walk through since it is like an onion, city within city, with the hallmarks of different conquerors, culminating in Lutyen’s city. A hundred years ago, Delhi had not spread beyond the protecting walls of Shahjahanabad, the city Shahjahan built as his capital in 1638 and the population was just about one lakh. Now that area is known as Old Delhi and lacks the grandeur of the city that the British built but it had its own quirky character, tastes and alleyways.

On the anniversary of Delhi’s centenary as India’s capital, came this book on Delhi’s historic walks.

Swapna Liddle

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The book is an accumulation of the columns that Mehta wrote for various papers, including HT Brunch. A compendium of some of the road trips that he took across India. Mehta’s chosen to group them according to all the chai stalls that he met on the road. ‘There’s not a highway, road or dirt track in India where you can’t find a cup of chai whenever you want it’ he writes and so he sets out to write about travelling down India’s rickety or mountainous roads fuelled by a passion for seeing new places and cups of tea. To begin with the chaiwala is a constant factor along with odd or touching encounters over cups of tea, like the saffron tea that he shares with a Kashmiri shepherd, but along the way tea gets overtaken by a love for Enfield Bullets.

Rishad Saam Mehta

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Ad woman turned writer, Judy Balan takes her readers on a romp through a two state marriage with a nod at Chetan Bhagat and a twist of the title. Deepika is a Tamilian married to a Punjabi Rishab and it was a love marriage. Their odd assortment of relatives from the north and south have more less accustomed themselves to the mingling of cultures, since it’s been four years anyway, but Deepika is convinced that she and Rishab have fallen out of love. Both of them are fed up with their every day lives – Deepika wants to quit advertising; Rishab wants to leave the executive perks that his IIM status entitle him to and become a writer. Sex is fleeting though passionate and Deepika thinks that’s another problem.

Judy Balan

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I remember a friend’s mother teaching me how to make a kadhi with mango juice and cumin seeds. She was a Gujarati and a great cook – whenever I went to visit her son, a small plateful of snacks would appear like magic or an invitation to lunch. And thanks to her, I grew to appreciate the wonderful variety of vegetarian dishes that her westernised son occasionally sniffed at.

Bhanu Hajratwala’s treasure trove of Gujarati fare was originally learnt from her family in Fiji and then taken with her to the US after her marriage.

Bhanu Hajratwala

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It goes up and down, hits the lows and then just when you think that it’s stopping it begins shooting up on the upward track. Rajorshi Chakorborti’s first young adults’ book, Mumbai Rollercoaster is set in the city in which he spent the formative years of his life. Of course, Mumbai has a lot going for it apart from this – the very size makes it a great sprawling landscape for cops and robbers chases. And it has an active underworld. According to Rajorshi, in Mumbai, ‘You get the feeling that at any moment, an adventure could begin’. There are streets to be explored on foot and on bicycle and interesting twists and turns of road. And this is the philosophy that he follows in his novel. With every chapter a new adventure begins.

Rajorshi Chakraborti

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The Indian parent spends more and more time racking his or her brain as to how the child’s grades can be improved. With marks getting impossibly high in the school system and so much riding on them, it is of course imperative that children be given some sort of brain headstart in the exams race. Aside from brain enhancers like almonds, there are always exercises that help enhance the mind and the memory through various time tested tricks. That’s where Dilip Mukerjea’s set of books come in, published at an invaluable time as far as the Indian school system is concerned.

Dilip Mukerjea

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Like its title, Muddy River is a very muddy indeed, a murky tale of a kidnapping and bureaucrat Ramesh Chandran’s quest to have the victim released from a group of terrorists with politicians and policemen clouding the issue even further. Chandran turns his quest into a novel – which is presented to the reader in typewriter font and this is occasionally commented on by his two friends, one a Bengali and the other a British lecturer based in Ampleforth and reviewed by his wife, Sukanya who also occasionally enters the story.

Chandran and Sukanya have a tragic history – they have lost their five year old daughter Priya which has created divisions between husband and wife.

P A Krishnan

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I started with an article by Professor P Lal, a rejoinder to Jyotirmoy Datta, on why he wrote in English, ‘We do not write in English because it is a pan-Indian language of the educated; we write because we cannot write as well in any other language’, revisiting the incisive words of the man who was the doyen of Indian Writing in English, or Indo Anglian literature. Then I went onto Khushwant Singh at his vigorous best writing about Delhi, in a collating of some of his columns. There was a piece about the notorious Sashtibrata, writing letters in English for Delhi’s shoeshine boys and turning up in rags at tatters at the Delhi offices of The Statesman.

And of course, there were the usual subjects, s review of Nirad C Chaudhuri’s Continent of Circe, an interview of Naipaul by Adrian Rowe-Evans, a review by Saleem Peeradina on Satyajit Ray’s films.

Achal Prabhala, Arshia Sattar, Laeeq Futehally

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