The Tao of Mathematics

Terence Tao is amazing. Of course he is extremely gifted- he was awarded the Fields Medal at the last ICM in Madrid in 2006- but in addition, he is articulate, prolific, and intellectually very generous. He can not only write at the most advanced level- we have his Analysis I and II listed in our Mathematics section (both a part of the superb TRIM series of books in mathematics from the HBA, New Delhi), but also for a less specialist audience.

Solving Mathematical Problems: A Personal Perspective has just appeared in an Indian edition (for sale only within the subcontinent, Sri Lanka and Myanmar) from OUP. First written when Tao was 15, this is ideal material for bright high school students- the blurb says 14 and older- as it tells you "various tactics involved in solving mathematical problems at the Mathematical Olympiad level." One could not have it from a more believable source: the book is a pleasure to read, with chapters on number theory, algebra, analysis, Euclidean geometry, and analytic geometry and numerous exercises and model solutions. This edition has a new introduction, but otherwise retains the freshness of teenage discovery. It is a slender book at 100 odd pages, and is now listed in our Publisher lists, under Oxford. Rs 195.

Two other OUP titles available for budding Olympiaders are The mathematical Olympiad Handbook and Challenges in Geometry. (Good additions to the other Olympiad books from Prism and from Universities Press that we wrote about in an earlier blog.)

Eclectic excellence

Navayana, the publishers based in Pondicherry, have always had something very fresh to offer. Chosen as the International Young Publisher of the year 2007 by the British Council- the books that they had showcased then were Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land (Kancha Ilaiah), Namdeo Dhasal's Poet of the Underworld, and Dilip Menon's The Blindness of Insight- their publications are, to say the least unusual.

And this year, they bring at least four new books. Gail Omvedt's Seeking Begumpura (which we feature multiply in our Dalit Studies, Religion and Sociology sections!) is on the "bhakti radical Ravidas (c 1450–1520), who was the first to envision an Indian utopia in his song “Begumpura”—a modern casteless, classless, tax-free city without sorrow! This was in contrast to the dystopia of the brahmanical kaliyuga. Anticaste intellectuals in India posited utopias much before Thomas More, in 1516, articulated a Renaissance humanist version. Gail Omvedt, in this study, focuses on the worldviews of subaltern visionaries spanning five centuries— Chokhamela, Janabai, Kabir, Ravidas, Tukaram, the Kartabhajas, Phule, Iyothee Thass, Pandita Ramabai, Periyar and Ambedkar. Omvedt the development of their utopian visions and the socioeconomic characteristics of the societies conceived through this long period in this book, the result of her research and writing as Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi over the past five years.

Three other books add to their series Other Headings. Slavoj Zizek's The Sublime object of Ideology, and Dan Hind's The Threat to Reason, and Jean Baudrillard's The System of Objects, one of the most important books on cultural criticism. Baudrillard, who died last year, was progenitor of seminal ideas such as hyperreality and the simulacrum (famously, he said "What I am I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself.") that are crucial in describing contemporary culture...

As Navayana state in their manifesto, "In the tradition of Siddharth Gautama, perhaps the first to introduce the culture of dialogue and debate with people who held diverse views in the subcontinent, these books will encourage dialogue and debate on issues the mainstream does not wish to address."

We agree.

The Magic of Being

K G Subramanyan. Artist of considerable repute and felicity, working in a wide range of media and materials. Writer, also of a wide range of books, mostly published by Seagull, Kolkata.

His most recent collection of essays, The Making of magic, a play on the title of the exhibition of his works that is on since yesterday at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, and which showed earlier in Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore, The Magic of Making. Either way, it works...

In the book, Subramanyan "expresses his concerns with a wide range of issues—art, aesthetics, visual perception and creativity; the importance of craft practice and its nurturing; the role and future of old traditions and cultural institutions in the contemporary world; the detrimental effects of the Industrial Revolution and high-technology societies; the constant depletion of the environment; our nation’s inability to cope with the education and employment of its divergent multitudes; and the present-day scenes in art, education and society. Acknowledging that globalization is an essential and inevitable feature of modern civilization with its inbuilt impulsions, Subramanyan emphasizes that an intelligent human being must negotiate them with insight and vigilance to ensure a space for himself (and for the community he has intimate ties with) to grow towards greater fulfilment. In turns questioning, critical, forewarning and instructive, these essays well from the artist’s own observations, readings, experiences and insights as artist, adviser, teacher, student and citizen of a world fast losing sight of its roots as its head struggles to keep par with the relentless pace of progress set by other worlds and other pressures."

Subramanyan has written a number of books for children- fabulous tales with whimsical illustrations, well worth collecting! He is also a poet, and has translated Chitrakar, a set of four pieces written by Benodebehari Mukherjee, one of the most influential and highly regarded artists in the history of modern Indian art, after he lost his eyesight. The sensitivity with which Subramanyan approaches the subject makes the translation unique.

A number of the fifteen or so Seagull Subramanyan titles are available on our site. And all Seagull titles can be ordered via Scholars (note that there are some territorial restrictions).

Borders...

The Sarai 07 reader, Frontiers considers limits, edges, borders and margins of all kinds as the sites for declarations, occasions for conversation, arguments, debates, recounting and reflection. LIke the other books in this great series from Sarai, New Delhi, the theme is one that lends itself to much interpretation from a variety of interesting points of view...

Sarai 07 asks you to "consider the frontier as the skin of our time and our world, and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary experience in order to generate a series of crucial (and frequently unsettling) narrative and analytical possibilities."

The space explored by this new Reader is the intellectual frontier. Sarai is circumspect, " we are not talking only of actual, physical borders (though of course we are interested in literal and political borders) that are usually the residues of war, but also of the borders between different temporal registers, between languages, between different modes of action, between different bodies of thought and conviction, between the exception and the rule. Looked at this way, a border is more a condition than a site, more a way of being and doing than a constellation of fixed markers circumscribing a domain. "

In our Media Section. And crossing boundaries, in Essays and Nonfiction as well. Rs 350.

Travels in the Red corridor

In Red Sun, Sudeep Chakravarti documents his travels and conversations with the Maoists who control the Red corridor, a swathe of land that stretches from Nepal to Kerala, sweeping across Orissa, Chattisgarh, Andhra and Karnataka.

The book is both political history and a voyage of discovery and self-discovery, as the author, Editor at large with The Rolling Stone and erstwhile journalist at the Asian Wall Street Journal, travels to the heart of the Maoist controlled regions of the country. At once informative, bleak, brilliant and rousing, the book has been termed a "disturbing examination" of the deep fissures of our fractured land.

Sudeep is also a futurist, and in that sense, this book is an expression of his projections as well. His documentation of the war that is "being fought in jungles and impoverished villages across India" gives a glimpse of his vision of the dangers that lie ahead.

A wake-up call, and one that our society should heed.

Hardcover, 320 pages, Rs 495. ISBN 9780670081332. In the Essays and Nonfiction section, and in Politics. Of course.

The Fifty percent Solution

The vibrant series Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism from Women Unlimited includes the edited books Gender & Caste (AnupamaRao), Feminism in India (Maitrayee Chaudhuri) Dowry & Inheritance (Srimati Basu), Gender & Censorship (Brinda Bose) and Sexualities (Nivedita Menon). And now, the sixth in the series, Reservations for Women, edited by Meena Dhanda.

"This collection of essays and excerpts brings together, for the first time, a range of writings on the issue of affirmative action for increasing the presence of women in Parliament and legislative assemblies in India. A comprehensive coverage of the debate from historical, theoretical, practical and political perspectives locates the discussions in India within the larger global context. The proposals discussed range from the reservation of seats in Parliament through quotas in party lists, to double-member constituencies. Analyses of women’s experience as policy-makers in local government following the 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Indian Constitution are an important argument for extending legal measures to ensure the greater participation of women in the parliament. This book is invaluable to all those interested in the cause of women’s enhanced representation in formal politics."

In our Gender Studies Section, Rs 600. ISBN: 81-88965-41-3. The other 5 have already been there for a while.

True Freedom

Sagari Chhabra's Asli Azaadi will be shown at the India Habitat Center on the 6th March, this coming Thursday, at 630 pm.

This is in connection with an illustrated talk, by Savitri Sawhney, on Pandurang Khankhoje, one of the founders of the Ghadar party. Dr Sawhney is writing a biography on Khankhoje. Sagari's documentary- an award winner- was among the first that we featured on our site, and one that started the diversification of the Scholars holdings... All invited, to the talk and to come see the documentaries we have on offer.

Many Tamils. And a great Ramayana.

In August 2006, a conference "Dialects in Tamil" was held at the French Institute of Pondicherry. The book Streams of Language: Dialects in Tamil, published by the IFP, Pondichery, is record of that meeting. How do dialects emerge? In any language, or in any tradition. The premise of the editor, M Kannan, is that they arise "from a configuration of the following elements shared by people: caste, region, landscape and the material culture which sustains them."

The book reflects the multidisciplinary nature of the meeting. The problematic of dialects in Tamil has been addressed in different contexts by scholars, linguists, and Tamil creative writers as well. In a very unusual arrangement, papers in Tamil contain English abstracts and vice versa, so that both Tamil and English readers can benefit from the volume.

Another book of related interest is Norman Cutler and Paula Richman's A Gift of Tamil from the American Institute of Indian Studies, published by Manohar quite some years ago, an anthology wherein the translators have tried to convey more than just the meanings of the originals - after all what is Tamil poetry without the rhetoric and and poetic effects.

And given the events this week in Delhi University, it is probably worth noting that of the many many Ramayanas that are part of our great literary, religious and philosophical heritage, one has frequently been singled out for its use of poetic and lyrical language. Writing in the Hindu, Arshia Sattar had this to say of the 2002 Penguin edition of The Kamba Ramayana, translated by P S Sundaram and edited by N S Jagannathan, "this magnificent Tamil text stands on its own, albeit within the larger Ramayana tradition. It also makes abundantly clear who Rama is. In Kamban's story, Rama-as-god is not simply a declaration, it is a leitmotif that runs through the text. Many raksasas and even Vali himself, are happy to die at Rama's hands because they are assured of salvation. In a sense, Kamban's story fits between the two major northern versions, Valmiki's and Tulsidas'. It does not carry the ambiguity of Valmiki's epic with regard to Rama's divinity, nor is it drenched in bhakti like Tulsidas'.

And thats just three of the many. We'd be happy to get you any of the others you want to see.... Click on the titles of the books mentioned here to go to their Scholars pages...