Bat-ball book
THE NEWS is that cricket is back in our lives. With the Sri Lanka tour turning out to be a breeze , it makes perfect sense to keep The Cricinfo Guide to International Cricket 2009 (Penguin, Rs.350) handy. Apart from giving a detailed lowdown of pretty much all international players in the playing ground, it has laid down stats at your disposal. Edited by Steven Lynch, the guide also gives you those pop quiz answers (Who hit the first ball he received in international cricket for six?). Just don’t depend on the international schedule at the end. Contemporary cricket – in the contemporary world – keeps shifting schedules. But that apart, a healthy reckoner for the cricket nut.
Forbidden fruits
IT’S ONE thing to keep moping about how every second Indian is slighted by some act or display that seems to ‘hurt his sensibilities’. It’s quite another to investigate how we came to be like this. Girja kumar does exactly this by tracking key cases in Censorship in India (Har-Anand, Rs.495). Interestingly, as the subtitle, ‘Studies in fundamentalism, obscenity and law’, hint’s at, it is government (over-enthusiasm) that makes things easy for foam-in-the-mouthers. The second half of the book correctly avoids the ‘one man’s freedom of action is another man’s obscenity’ (mostly pertaining to women, actually) line. Instead, the author moulds the idea of ‘obscenity’ by exploring judicial judgements in India and abroad.
School’s up
IT WAS an idea waiting to be turned into a book-considering everyone starts looking dreamily into the distance while talking about their ‘good ole school days’. Recess: The Penguin Book of Schooldays (Rs.450) taps into that soft, mushy spot. Edited deftly and creatively by Palash Krishna Mehrotra, the anthology contains extracts from the writings of Ismat Chugtai, Rohinton Mistry, P.T.Usha, Amit Chaudhuri, Satyajit Ray, Premchand, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vikram Seth and Harivansh Rai Bachchan. Irreverence and nostalgia are lined up one after the other in honour of when grown-ups were not grown-ups and were under the thrall of people who made the rules. Delightful collection.
Spiritual hip hop
THIS BOOK should be a backpacker’s delight. It spirals in unpredictable directions as it follows its free-spirited and soul-searching protagonist. A Grasshopper’s Pilgrimage (Rupa, Rs.150), is host to a mighty spiritual bunch-sufi babas, smoking hippies, freedom fighters and foreigners without visas. It also has a woman whose ‘inner journey’ begins as she circles the feet of her beloved mountain. Gopika is single, pretty and a spiritual seeker. While working for a television channel in Mumbai, she hears an inner call. Like a grasshopper, she flits from guru to guru, from prospective groom to boyfriend. Why jump about so much? Ah, therein hangs the tale.
