Paresh Chandra  

Andrew Kolin, State Power and Democracy: Before and During the Presidency of George W. Bush, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

It is not hard to find texts that defy the lies of the state by presenting facts that contradict them. This method of 'uncovering' the status quo, which can be called Chomskyan (the political Chomsky, not the linguistic one), works by trying to shock its reader out of their ideological slumber. Unfortunately, the vast array of ugly facts that these texts bring out usually remains ungrounded in a unified, alternative perception of reality. The attempt is to falsify particular claims of the state, by producing facts to the contrary, without trying to understand the 'deep structure' that gives birth to this state of affairs. The reader, not drawn out into a critique of present-day life in its entirety, is able to go back to that life, as if what these books uncover is simply another aspect of reality that s/he need not be concerned with.

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 Ankit Sharma

Bharati Chaturvedi (ed.) Finding Delhi: Loss and Renewal in a Mega City, Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2010

Delhi is often thought of as the culturally best endowed city in the country. It has had a rich heritage, from the Walled City of the Mughals (presently called Old Delhi) to the Lutyens' capital of the British raj; now there are chains of multinational corporations working in the peripheral areas of the city, and the city has declared its "world-classiness", reshaping its infrastructure to host the grand spectacle that was the Commonwealth Games. Hence, most writings on the city stick to celebrating the warm-heartedness of the "dilliwallas," its ever increasing count of flyovers and shopping-malls. Weighed down by such images that flood the media Finding Delhi comes as a relief to its reader because it tries to engage with that part of Delhi that is left out in the sort of accounts mentioned above: the not too pretty underbelly of the Indian capital.  The book offers an account of the city culled out of the experiences of fourteen different writers, ranging from urban planners to informal-sector workers, concentrating on diverse urgent issues like public transport, women in the city, housing rights of the poor, problems faced by street vendors, and the situation of the homeless ahead of the Commonwealth Games. The writers try to represent the city from an unconventional angle, where they concentrate on the living conditions of the poor living in the city, and the damage done to their lives due to the infrastructural developments that have taken Delhi way "ahead" of cities like Mumbai and Kolkata. It can, in fact, be argued that the book aims to confront the middle class, whose India is "shining", with this "other angle" in an attempt to make them to realize that the actual cost of this accelerated drive toward "development" is being paid by the poor, in the form of ever deteriorating living conditions; presumably the monologues of a waste collector, a domestic worker, a dhobi and a fruit vendor are included in book to fulfill this end.

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