Jhoomur Bose is a former journalist, blogger and full-time mother. She has written for various Indian magazines, newspapers and websites and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. She writes about stuff that happens and stuff she wishes would happen at http://twistingthetail.blogspot.com
Archives: Books
Rabbit Rap
In an age when rabbits live in happy freedom from their natural predators and are busy violently taming Nature, some of them seek to do away with warren dwelling, and liberate themselves from the old ways. They find a true believer in Rabbit Hab, an enterprising head rabbit. As the ambitious Hab presses forward with his futuristic vision, he must contend with opposition, sabotage, and dirty double-dealing from some unlikely quarters.
The Powder Room
Ever been intrigued by the Indian Fashion Industry—its stereotypes of drugged models, gay designers, and fascinating but unaffordable clothes?
Join Shefalee Vasudev, former editor of Marie Claire and an acclaimed fashion journalist, on a deep-sea dive into the gagging depths of Indian fashion. In Powder Room, she offers an insider’s view of people who make the industry what it is—from a lower middle class girl who sells global luxury for a living to a designer who fights the inner demons of child sexual abuse yet manages to survive and thrive in the business of fashion, or a Ludhiana housewife on a perpetual fashion high.
Besides candid interviews of known names in Indian fashion, Shefalee provides a commentary on new social behaviour, urban culture, generational differences, and the compulsions behind conspicuous consumption in a country splitting at the seams with inequalities of opportunity and wealth. From Nagaland to Patan, Mumbai, Delhi, and Punjab, Powder Room mirrors how and why India ‘does’ fashion.
Meddling Mooli And The Bully On Wheels
Murali Krishnan aka Mooli: a boy whose meddling ways get him into trouble all the time.
Supriya George aka Soups: a girl who loves reading and is full of super-smart ideas.
They are best friends on a mission.
To win a prize on the website WAYOUTS
[World’s As Yet Original Untried Tricks and Stunts]
So they try out many untried tricks and stunts. And mess up the house. And trouble their parents. And create confusion at a medical college.
But do they eventually win the prize?
Pick up this easy-to-read book and find out how Meddling Mooli and
Soups find new uses for toothpaste, outwit a bully and have some awesome, super cool adventures.
Manik And I
It is unusual to come across a life so rich in varied experiences as the one that Bijoya Ray, wife and constant companion to the renowned film-maker Satyajit Ray, has lived. Despite being closely related, Satyajit-‘Manik’ to his friends and family-and Bijoya fell in love and embarked on a life together years before Ray’s groundbreaking film Pather Panchali was made, and their long, happy married life lasted right until Ray’s death in 1992.
Bijoya Ray never felt the urge to write her memoirs, but was finally persuaded to pick up the pen when she was well into her eighties. Manik and I brims over with hitherto unknown stories of her life with Satyajit Ray, told in candid, vivid detail.
Days And Nights In The Heartland Of Rebellion
A report from the epicenter of the Naxalite war
In its war against the Maoists, it is the Indian state that usually gets to tell its side of story. But official explanations are not meant to convey truth. Most often they attempt to cover up the reality and obscure it. The claim that only one warring side has the right to propagate its views whereas the other does not because they are projected as ‘enemy’ is questionable when we know there are two sides to any conflict and where both sides comprise our own people.
In this situation of internal war, not satisfied with the knowledge offered by books and documents, Gautam Navlakha went into the heart of Bastar to get to know the Maoists first hand. This book is an account of the fortnight he spent in the guerilla zone where the Maoists run their people’s government, the Jantana Sarkar. His enquiry unflinching and his perspective critical but partisan, Navlakha succeeds in the difficult task of making the demonized human, laying bare the heartland of rebellion.
Book Of Destruction
Murder is committed for its own sake in the three fictional episodes of The Book of Destruction. In ‘The Gardener’, the narrator learns from the thug Seshadri that he has been selected for assassination for no reason but the pure purpose of killing. A discotheque is bombed out of existence in ‘The Hotelier and the Traveller’. In the third episode, leading the narrator to an elaborately staged orgy and sacrifice, stitched clothes escape from a tailor’s shop and soar down the streets to take over bodies.
The cruelty of killers and the wretchedness of victims are shifted to the margins as the novel focuses on the act of murder. In his inimitable style, Anand takes the mesmerized reader on a journey of three stages-the practice of killing, the sacrifice of the victim and the sacrifice of the sacrificer-before bringing the story of destruction to its finale.
Screwed
Love is never easy, and it’s playing a cruel prank on Karan
Nothing hassles Karan, the smooth-talking bad boy who enjoys a successful job as a copywriter in the work-hard-party-harder world of advertising. He can always depend on his bindaas attitude and incessant supply of wisecracks to get out of any tricky situation. Everything is perfect . . . until Sonia tumbles into his life. After an initial battle of egos, Karan falls hard and fast for Sonia, but he can never find the right moment to confess his feelings to her. Then he meets Anita. And that’s when things get really complicated.
Screwed follows Karan’s misadventures with hilarious zeal as he comes to realize that ignoring a problem is NOT the best way to deal with it, and making the right choice NEVER is ever easy.
Great Minds On India
Indian culture and spiritualism have exerted a strong hold over the world’s greatest intellectuals-from psychologists like Carl Jung to poets like T.S. Eliot, from orators like Swami Vivekananda to philosophers like Sri Aurobindo, from statesmen like Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to writers like H.G. Wells. Compiled by Salil Gewali, Great Minds on India is a remarkable collection of the thoughts and views of these world-renowned opinion-makers on India’s cultural inheritance and glorious legacy.
Indian culture and spiritualism have exerted a strong hold over the world’s greatest intellectuals-from psychologists like Carl Jung to poets like T.S. Eliot, from orators like Swami Vivekananda to philosophers like Sri Aurobindo, from statesmen like Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to writers like H.G. Wells. Compiled by Salil Gewali, Great Minds on India is a remarkable collection of the thoughts and views of these world-renowned opinion-makers on India’s cultural inheritance and glorious legacy.
Sunlight On The Garden
André Béteille’s memoir, spanning his childhood, his schooldays and his early years as a sociologist, encompasses many worlds-that of colonial Chandannagar, where he spent his early years; of Patna and Calcutta, where he went to Englishmedium as well as Bengali-medium schools; and of his college days, where he started off as a physicist and then turned to sociology-a fi eld in which he was to win international renown.
There are unforgettable descriptions of his colonial childhood and his two grandmothers, one French and the other Bengali; and of momentous events he lived through such as famine, communal riots and Partition. Equally compelling are his portraits of family members, his neighbourhood, school friends, teachers and Calcutta’s intellectual stars, among them Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen. With its lucid and eloquent prose infused with acute sociological observations and insights into family relationships, childhood and adolescence, caste, class and community, this is a book that illumines the evolution of a brilliant teacher and scholar, even as it deepens our understanding of universal human dilemmas and desires.