Reviewer, The

The problem with these kind of books in a fast-changing world and a country where Prime Ministers come and go is that while the perceptions of the past remain unchanged, the conclusions part become hopelessly outdated and irrelevant. VP Dutt, with his new volume on India's foreign policy, will remain on safe ground for the moment - the just-concluded polls ensuring that there is no change of guard at New Delhi.Dutt does delve into the past, but he devotes more space and words to the developments...

The politics of fertility control is all about power and control exerted by various stakeholders over individual lives and limited resources. It is about the role of the state in regulating individual behaviour. Its starts with the specification of the rationale for government involvement in policies to alter human behaviour related to reproduction and sexuality. These policies also seek to justify the means adopted by the government to influence fertility behaviour. Anrudh Jain starts of with...

There are more young people alive today than ever before-over a billion between the ages of 15 and 24-and with more of them sexually active, countries are increasingly grappling with the controversial issue of sexual and reproductive health education. According to the just-released report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), nearly half of all countries have taken new measures to address the reproductive health needs of adolescents, as they were urged to do at the 1994 International...

1921. America was preparing for Armageddon against the British. In the Congress, Great Britain was dubbed "a red pox spreading across the Pacific". There were calls for the United States to "seize maritime control of the world". " As war frenzy mounted, someone said, "We were Britain's colony once. She will be our colony before she is done." For the uninitiated, it may sound confounding, unbelievable. But this Anglophobia was a reality in the US between the two wars. The deadlock did break and...

Few short-fought wars have evoked so much of heat, debate and self-criticism (read, justified criticism of the party/parties at the helm of affairs) as the Kargil War did this summer. That too in the very country that ostensibly won the war. The facts are there for all to acknowledge: Pakistan-backed fundamentalist-terrorists had indeed intruded into Indian territory; many of these intruders were Pakistan army regulars in the guise of plain-clothed militants; the Indian authorities had been...

The past two decades have seen two potent but disparate movements - those of gender and participation. Each has generated writings and major implications for each other. Yet, ironically, as Robert Chambers (widely recognised as one of the main driving forces behind the great surge of interest in the use of participatory rural appraisals the globe over) contends, this is perhaps the first book to thoroughly explore the overlaps, linkages, contradictions and synergies between the two. The two...

Cinema plays a powerful role in implicating the way in which an audience begins to think about the 'reality' that each film supposedly depicts. Ananda Mitra investigates the representation of Indians in Western films and locates this analysis within the context of the larger issue of the manner in which Indian immigrants are viewed in the West today. Mitra covers a large spectrum of films made over several decades and critiques the issue by identifying and analysing how those narrative and...

After 30 years of reporting on France for Reuters and The Economist and marriage to a Frenchwoman, Jonathan Fenby comes out with an informative, insightful and critical study of France, his "home, away from home". Fenby, now the editor of South China Morning Post, weaves reportage, anecdotes and analyses into a fascinating presentation of contemporary France. He is thorough with French politics, society and history and sees today's state of affairs from the backdrop of the French Revolution, the...

An autobiographical sojourn of a philosopher to explain his moorings in philosophy is fraught with its intrinsic perils - that of becoming a self-indulgent, subjective rambling of personal notions and prejudices. For those brought up on Bertrand Russel's "History of Philosophy" or Will Durant's "The Story of "Philosophy" or, for that matter, T.Z. Lavine's "From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest", this volume is sure to come as a let-down.But then, Bryan Magee does not make such...

Till taught by pain, man knows not water's worth.- Byron If you say "water" to an engineer, he thinks drainage, pipes, money, energy - but not life. - Hermann KnoflacherIn modern societies, water is taken for granted because it comes out when one turns on the tap and is drained away after use.. It is only when a water crisis hits one that people become aware of the maxim that "water is life." Human beings are becoming thirstier by the day, consuming five times the amount of water today than 40...