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What is it like to travel with others for adventure, lust and god? This delightful travelogue, in which Srinath Perur embarks upon ten conducted tours, is full of rich experiences: hanging on to a camel in the Thar Desert, joining thousands on a pilgrimage in Maharashtra, crossing living root bridges near Cherrapunji, rediscovering music while on the trail of Kabir, and a lot more. As much about people as it is about places, the book is also a reflection of the nature of popular travel today, which is marked by the packaging of experiences, the formation of tourist economies and compulsive picture-taking. How this influences tourists comes across vividly: in their creation of a mini India on a bus as they race through treasured sights in Europe; in their perfunctory devotion as they hop from temple to temple in Tamil Nadu; and in their ‘enjoying’ with sex workers far away from home. Ironic, and often comic, If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai is an idiosyncratic portrait of India and her people.
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOKS OF 2017 ONE OF VULTURE'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY FINALIST FOR THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN FICTION “A modern classic.” —The New York Times Book Review A young man's close-knit family is nearly destitute when his uncle founds a successful spice company, changing their fortunes overnight. As they move from a cramped, ant-infested shack to a larger house on the other side of Bangalore, and try to adjust to a new way of life, the family dynamic begins to shift. Allegiances realign; marriages are arranged and begin to falter; and conflict brews ominously in the background. Things become “ghachar ghochar”—a nonsense phrase uttered...
Girish Karnad was one of modern India's greatest cultural figures: an accomplished actor, a path-breaking director, an innovative administrator, a clear-headed and erudite thinker, a public intellectual with an unwavering moral compass, and above all, the most extraordinarily gifted playwright of his times. This Life at Play, translated from the Kannada in part by Karnad himself and in part by Srinath Perur, covers the first half of his remarkable life - from his childhood in Sirsi and his early engagement with local theatre, his education in Dharwad, Bombay and Oxford, to his career in publishing, his successes and travails in the film industry, and his personal and writerly life. Moving and humorous, insightful and candid, these memoirs provide an unforgettable glimpse into the life-shaping experiences of a towering genius, and a unique window into the India in which he lived and worked.
Aesthetics and the Revolutionary City engages in alternative ways of reading foreign visual representations of Havana through analysis of advertising images, documentary films, and photographic texts. It explores key narratives relating to the projection of different Havana imaginaries and focuses on a range of themes including: pre-revolutionary Cuba; the dream of revolution; and the metaphor of the city “frozen-in-time.” The book also synthesizes contemporary debates regarding the notion of Havana as a real and imagined city space and fleshes out its theoretical insights with a series of stand-alone, important case studies linked to the representation of the Cuban capital in the Western imaginary. The interpretations in the book bring into focus a range of critical historical moments in Cuban history (including the Cuban Revolution and the “Special Period”) and consider the ways in which they have been projected in advertising, documentary film and photography outside the island.
This book constitutes the fully refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, ICDCN 2008 - formerly known as IWDC (International Workshop on Distributed Computing), held in Kolkata, India, in January 2008. The 30 revised full papers and 27 revised short papers presented together with 3 keynote talks and 1 invited lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from 185 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.
Winner of the Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology by the American Anthropological Association Corruption Plots illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban worlds, the authors reveal the ethical, spatial, and political stakes of storytelling and how vital it is to examine the corruption plot in all its contradictions.
Venkat answers urgent knocks on the door to his flat one evening to find two insolent young men claiming to have business with his daughter Rekha. He deals with them shortly, only to find his quiet, middle-class life upended by a bewildering set of events over the next few days. Even as Venkat is hurled into a world of street gangs and murky journalism, we see a parallel narrative unfold of a betrayal and disappearance from long ago. Could there be a connection? Set over four mostly sleepless days, we see Venkat lose grasp of the narrative even as he loses grasp of his wife and daughter. Exquisitely translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, Sakina’s Kiss is a delicate, precise meditation on the persistence of old biases—and a rattled masculinity—in India’s changing social and political landscape. Ingeniously crafted, Vivek Shanbhag interrogates the space between truth and perception in this unforgettable foray into the minefield of family life.
A sweeping history of the rise of personal choice in the modern world and how it became equated with freedom Choice touches virtually every aspect of our lives, from what to buy and where to live to whom to love, what profession to practice, and even what to believe. But the option to choose in such matters was not something we always possessed or even aspired to. At the same time, we have been warned by everybody from marketing gurus to psychologists about the negative consequences stemming from our current obsession with choice. It turns out that not only are we not very good at realizing our personal desires, we are also overwhelmed with too many possibilities and anxious about what best ...
Contemporary Performance and Political Economy examines haunting concepts, relations, and artworks that demand our attention. Under capitalism, political and ethical considerations are subordinated to economic ones, and this subordination creates ghost worlds. Performance works, however, can offer insights into alternative politico-economic models. In this major contribution to the fields of contemporary performance and political economy, Katerina Paramana proposes that the investigation of performance works as economies can make the insights performance works offer visible. She positions the examination in relation to contemporary critiques of capitalism, neo-feudalism, and their by-product...
This volume is the first comprehensive guide to current research on animals, animality, and human-animal relations in literature. To reflect the history of literary animal studies to date, its primary focus is literary prose and poetry in English, while also accommodating emergent discussions of the full range of media and contexts with which literary studies engages, especially film and critical theory. User-friendly language, references, even suggestions for further readings are included to help newcomers to the field understand how it has taken shape primarily through recent decades. To further aid teachers, sections are organized by conventions of periodization, and chapters address a range of canonical and popular texts. Bookended by sections devoted to the field’s conceptual foundations and new directions, the volume is designed to set an agenda for literary animal studies for decades to come.