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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Devdutt Patnaik has moved on from coaching management students and finding the links between management and mythology to mythology full time. This pair of books talks about the philosophies of the two most powerful gods in the Hindu pantheon, Vishnu and Shiva and the reasons why they are as they are in Hindu philosophy. Vishnu is referred to as the Preserver while Shiva is known as the Destroyer. Alternatively Vishnu is the householder, worshipped with sprigs of tulsi, a household plant, while Shiva is the hermit, worshipped with leaves of bilva, grown outside the house. Occasionally, however, they appear to change their roles – Vishnu in his Kalki avatar takes on the form of the destroyer, while Shiva, the most detached of gods is the only one with a wife and children.

Devdutt Patanaik

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Stories of disappearance told through different points of view can be found in films like Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Kurosawa’s Rashomon. What this different viewpoint technique does is to give us a take on human nature and to tell us that very often what we believe is not always correct. Roy-Bhattacharya sets his novel in the exotic Jemaa el Fna square of Marrakesh. A place that in the modern world truly approximates to a melting pot from A Thousand And One Nights. At the centre of this collection of jugglers, musicians and magicians is the storyteller Hassan who begins to tell his captivated audience the story of a disappearance, that of a foreign couple, a woman like a gazelle and man with skin ‘the colour of sand’ who vanished many years ago. Hassan’s brother Mustafa has been implicated in their disappearance, but without any real proof.

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya

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Reality shows are all the rage on television and even India is no immune. Sikandar by poet and novelist Binayak Banerjee takes an invented reality show called Sikandar as an excuse to bring ten very diverse people together. These include Bengal’s leading actor, a crooked industrialist, a revolutionary teacher, a hermit, a prostitute and several others. They are all on the show in an attempt to win the prize for being the most Bengali of Bengalis – and though two of the contestants are not Bengali, we are told that they are nonetheless eligible, since being a Bengali is a state of mind.

In Big Brother style these people are locked up in a house that takes its name from the Mahabharata, Jotugriha, the house of lac in which the Pandava brothers lived with their mother, a house that burnt like a torch when their enemies set fire to it.

Binayak Banerjee

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