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For an engineer, getting a job at PCI was like getting admission into IIT. But now these same engineers were fleeing this once mighty company, competitors were swallowing its market share and profits were falling to an all-time low. Meanwhile, a small band of “Patriots’ within the organization come together to try and save their beloved company. But for this, they will have to take on the ‘boogeyman’—their suave, sharp-tongued and narcissistic CMD who had the board in his pocket and the mandarins in Delhi on his payroll. Could they face down this formidable opponent and turn the company around? Or would they have to go down with the sinking ship?
Why does Indian Cinema look different, sound different and is so lengthy? Why are the dialogues so long winding? Why are our costumes so gaudy and garish? Why do we have so many songs in our films? Why do our actors burst into songs and dances for no reason? Are we a society that is exactly like our Cinema? Why are films directed by Saytyajit Ray great and not so great by some other Directors. Have you ever called your spouse ‘Sajni or Sajna’ or ‘Saiyan’ or ‘Balam’ ? Perhaps no, then why does our Cinema use these words? Why does Hindi language Cinema use words or the language that no one uses in real life? Why is it that a Cinema that is almost part of life for millions of Indians and now even foreigners has been dubbed mindless and silly? How many language Cinemas does Indian Cinema comprise of ? Do people who dismiss Indian Cinema as ‘Bollywood’ even understand that 30% of our feature films at least belong to the globally termed ‘art-house cinema class’. Find all answers in the book.
Poor people confront the state on an everyday basis all over the world. But how do they see the state, and how are these engagements conducted? This book considers the Indian case where people's accounts, in particular in the countryside, are shaped by a series of encounters that are staged at the local level, and which are also informed by ideas that are circulated by the government and the broader development community. Drawing extensively on fieldwork conducted in eastern India and their broad range of expertise, the authors review a series of key debates in development studies on participation, good governance, and the structuring of political society. They do so with particular reference to the Employment Assurance Scheme and primary education provision. Seeing the State engages with the work of James Scott, James Ferguson and Partha Chatterjee, and offers a new interpretation of the formation of citizenship in South Asia.
The Politics of the Near offers a novel approach to social unrest in post-apartheid South Africa. Keeping the noise of demonstrations, barricades, and clashes with the police at a distance, this ethnography of a poor people’s movement traces individual commitments and the mainsprings of mobilization in the ordinary social and intimate life of activists, their relatives, and other township residents. Tournadre’s approach picks up on aspects of activists lives that are often neglected in the study of social movements that help us better understand the dynamics of protest and the attachment of activists to their organization and its cause. What Tournadre calls a “politics of the near” takes shape, through sometimes innocuous actions and beyond the separation between public and domestic spheres. By mapping the daily life of Black and low-income neighborhoods and the intimate domain where expectations and disappointments surface, The Politics of the Near offers a different perspective on the “rainbow nation”—a perspective more sensitive to the fact that, three decades after the end of apartheid, poverty and race are still as tightly interwoven as ever.
Market Menagerie examines technological advance and market regulation in the health industries of nations such as India, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, and Japan. Pharmaceutical and life science industries can reinforce economic development and industry growth, but not necessarily positive health outcomes. Yet well-crafted industrial and health policies can strengthen each other and reconcile economic and social goals. This book advocates moving beyond traditional market failure to bring together three uncommonly paired themes: the growth of industrial capabilities, the politics of health access, and the geography of production and redistribution.
This book asks why some governments improve public services more effectively than others. Through the investigation of a new era of administrative reform, in which digital technologies may be used to facilitate citizens' access to the state, Jennifer Bussell's analysis provides unanticipated insights into this fundamental question. In contrast to factors such as economic development or electoral competition, this study highlights the importance of access to rents, which can dramatically shape the opportunities and threats of reform to political elites. Drawing on a sub-national analysis of twenty Indian states, a field experiment, statistical modeling, case studies, interviews of citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians, and comparative data from South Africa and Brazil, Bussell shows that the extent to which politicians rely on income from petty and grand corruption is closely linked to variation in the timing, management, and comprehensiveness of reforms. The book also illuminates the importance of electoral constituencies and coalition politics in shaping policy outcomes.
This book addresses the on-going crisis of informality in rapidly growing cities of the global South. The authors offer a Southern perspective on planning theory, explaining how the concept of conflicting rationalities complements and expands upon a theoretical tradition which still primarily speaks to global ‘Northern’ audiences. De Satgé and Watson posit that a significant change is needed in the makeup of urban planning theory and practice – requiring an understanding of the ‘conflict of rationalities’ between state planning and those struggling to survive in urban informal settlements – for social conditions to improve in the global South. Ethnography, as illustrated in the book’s case study – Langa, a township in Cape Town, South Africa – is used to arrive at this conclusion. The authors are thus able to demonstrate how power and conflict between the ambitions of state planners and shack-dwellers, attempting to survive in a resource-poor context, have permeated and shaped all state–society engagement in this planning process.
"For many years, China and India have been powerfully shaped by both transnational and subnational circulatory forces. This edited volume explores these local and global influences as they play out in the contemporary era. The analysis focuses on four intersecting topics: labor relations; legal reform and rights protest; public goods provision; and transnational migration and investment. The eight substantive chapters and introduction share a common perspective in arguing that distinctions in regime type (“democracy” versus “dictatorship”) alone offer little insight into critical differences and similarities between these Asian giants in terms of either policies or performance. A wid...
This volume has as its focus the role of the Marshall Plan as both a force in the transformation of European Economic practices and a stimulus to political integration in Europe. This organizing theme is framed in terms of two other issues that are central to contemporary debates in international political economy and geopolitical studies: the origins and development of the Cold War, and the growing globalisation of the world economy. In relating the Marshall Plan to these issues, this book goes beyond the typical diplomatic history approach to place the Plan in the context of both the political economy of late twentieth-century Europe, and the impact of American models of business and government that came with the Plan.
Over the past decade India has witnessed a number of land wars that have centred crucially on the often forcible transfer of land from small farmers or indigenous groups to private companies. Among these, the land war that erupted in Singur, West Bengal, in 2006, went on to make national headlines and become paradigmatic of many of the challenges and social conflicts that arise when a state-led policy of swiftly transferring land to private sector companies encounters resistance on the ground. Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India analyses the movement by Singur’s so-called unwilling farmers to retain and reclaim their farmland. By foregrounding the everyday politics of popular mobilization, the book sheds new light on the movement’s internal politics as well as on contentious issues rooted in everyday caste, class and gender relations.