Book Review: Civil Society : History And Possibilities
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Book Review: Civil Society : History And Possibilities
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Do you ever wonder why someone opt for reading. Here is a list of top 100 reasons to read. This list has been compiled by a real survey conducted among people who are either avid readers OR casual readers OR people who have experienced reading lately. Credit goes to Penguin India to compile such a wonderful list and sharing with us !!
1. Best Way of Relaxation.
2. It makes you smarter.
3. It develops the mind.
4. It helps young kids learn language skills.
5. It is how we discover new things.
6. Reading develops imagination.
7. Reading develops the creative side of people.
8. It helps in developing a good self image.
9. Reading expands vocabulary.
10. It is important to development.
11. Reading helps to know other people’s perspective.
12. Enhances social’s skills.
13. Enriches oneself in all aspects.
14. Reading results in fruitful usage of time.
15. Reading takes us to a new world where we forget our sorrows and fears.
16. It helps us get rid of anxieties.
17. Reading helps us from boredom and monotony.
18. Reading before going to bed helps a child feel secure and comfortable during sleep.
19. Youngsters emulate the behaviors of their favorite story heroes.
20. Reading helps shape a person’s character.
21. Reading helps shape a person’s life.
22. Emotions can be best understood through other people’s stories.
23. Reading can provide plenty of fun for children.
24. Reading gives us power and understanding.
25. Reading different varieties of books gives us solutions for our daily-life problems.
26. It creates awareness.
27. It encourages to be a thinker.
28. Reading gives us various topics to be the center of attraction in gatherings.
29. Reading at least 20 minutes a day means you read 4800 minutes in one year! Imagine how many books you would have read in 4800 minutes which is 80 hours. And 20 minutes a day is just 1.38th part of a day!
30. Reading is the companions for life.
31. Reading inspires you to do great things in life
32. A fondness for reading changes the inevitable dull hours of our life into exquisite hours of delight – Charles de Montesquieu.
33. Life transforming ideas have always come to me through books-Oliver Wendall Holmes
34. Reading is not to contradict or confute, or to believe and take for granted, but to weigh and consider. Take the good from reading. –Source from a proverb by Francis Bacon.
35. Reading helps increase attention span.
36. Reading regularly keeps the brain young and healthy.
37. It lets us explore those that we cannot physically see. Example: Space, Far-off cities and continents.
38. Reading allows children to do role play.
39. Reading gets one out of depression.
40. It lets you gain knowledge without having to ask or find someone.
41. It lets you continue to keep motivated and not loose track.
42. Reading gives you an edge over someone who does not read as much.
43. In the least, read a newspaper. It is one continuous form of fiction.
44. Reading good books helps you move toward your dream. Example: Alchemist, The Man Who Sold his Ferrari etc
45. A Novel points out that the world consists entirely of exceptions.
46. Books open your mind.
47. Books strengthen your mind.
48. Reading excites the reader to self-activity.-Thomas Carlyle.
49. Voracious reading makes you an all-rounder.
50. Reading creates and strengthens synapses in the brain.
51. Reading regularly helps you learn to pick the correct information.
52. Reading relieves stress.
53. Routine reading expands our mind tremendously.
54. Reading keeps the mind cool.
55. It helps you be fresh through the day.
56. Regular habit of reading keeps you and your mind occupied even in old age.
57. Reading makes us self-assured.
58. It makes you keep focused for long periods.
59. Improves concentration.
60. It also improves memory.
61. It improves the discipline.
62. Reading is inexpensive entertainment.
63. Discover surprises.
64. Reading lets you learn from the experience and knowledge of the authors.
65. Reading lets you weigh things from a different perspective.
66. One gets to experience the story by reading it.
67. Reading emphasizes hierarchical thinking.
68. Reading to your child encourages conversations.
69. Reading encourages questions.
70. It makes you a good person.
71. When reading, the imagination has no visual limits.
72. Reading non-fiction helps you read and understand the other important things of life – insurance policies, contracts etc.
73. Reading on every day topics helps you learn the advantages and disadvantages of the topics and lets you make an informed decision.
74. Reading to your child solidifies the bond.
75. Reading lets you take an immediate break from the daily grind. Does not need any planning.
76. Reading helps overcome social anxiety. Books and the topics provide an instant ice-breaker.
77. Reading takes you on a wondrous journey.
78. It opens new possibilities.
79. Reading nourishes your soul.
80. Regular reading keeps you steady even during trouble time.
81. Enjoyable reading is a deeply satisfying pursuit.
82. Reading is exercising the mind. Otherwise the mind gets dumb.
83. It challenges your core beliefs.
84. Reading on varied topics gives you a bigger perspective of the world.
85. Reading improves the grammar and sentence making skills.
86. It helps increase fluency in communication.
87. Reading helps shape your child’s character.
88. Reading aloud to your baby is an important form of stimulation.
89. Reading aloud to the babies increases their listening skills.
90. It allows the child to look, touch, feel and ask questions.
91. Reading increases your literacy levels.
92. Improved deduction skills.
93. It also improves writing skills.
94. One can learn from characters in a story and learn to apply in our daily lives.
95. Reading rejuvenates your mind.
96. It helps you to think from a different angle.
97. Reading books exercises your creativity.
98. Reading motivates you.
99. Reading may prevent old age memory loss.
100.Reading is the best hobby one can have with at least 100 advantages.
*Curtsy Penguin India
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Book Review: Duel
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Book Summary: Joker In The Pack
This is a story of dreaming the great Indian middle class dream, and of life shaped – accidentally or by design, only God knows – by the great Indian middle class values.
The joyride begins in the lap of two favourite pastimes of the nation – cricket and television – and after some shattered dreams, leads to the hallowed precincts of the venerated IIMs. It is a story of the life at the IIMs, and of life beyond. It is a story of how to play the IIM game successfully and beat the super distillation system refined by the IIMs to separate the chaff from the grain, the also-rans from the super achievers.
The story has bit of raw truth. It is also tongue-in-cheek. It is designed to whet the appetite of those aspiring. It will evoke nostalgia amongst the alumni; it will also anger a few.
Read on… you will either love it, or hate it, but will find it difficult to put down.
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Learn how to liberate the natural leadership potential of your child while creating a richer, more rewarding life for yourself in the process. Unlock the best talents and highest abilities of your child. Deepen the relationships between you and those you love. Inspire your children to be strong of character and wise of mind.
Teach your kids how to dream big dreams and find true success. Bring balance back into your life and live with greater simplicity, joy and peace. Get back to what is most important in life and enjoy its gifts.
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As Gurcharan das points out in India Unbound, Indian entrepreneurs and businesses haven’t got the right kind of press they deserved for a very long time in our own country. Rashmi Bansal’s latest work, “Connect the dots” and her earlier “Stay Hungry…” hold a candle to the Indian entrepreneurial community and its zeal and spirit in a very commendable manner by highlighting a wide gamut of startups.
‘CONNECT THE DOTS’ is a sequel to ‘Stay Hungry Stay Foolish’ and is the story of 20 enterprising individuals without an MBA, who started their own ventures. They were driven by the desire to prove themselves. To lead interesting, passionate, meaningful lives.
Some of the entrepreneurs featured in the book are:
Their stories say one thing loud and clear. You don’t need a fancy degree or a rich daddy to dream big and make it happen. It’s all in your head, your heart, your hands.
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It’s a stroy of Yale educated twenty five year old investment banker Samrat Ratan. Born in USA, to immigrant Indian parents, he would havebecome a millionaire by the age of thirty with his excellent job. Instead, he quit the job and enrolled in India, IIM Bangalore. He was tired of investment banking job. He had experienced all the good and bad parts of American culture and still had not the feeling of living a real life. Instead he thought by joining Indian business school, he can better understand his roots that will help him to accept his present.
His journey started in IIM Bangalore. He spent most of his time with marijuana, friends and he had to go to a prison, also for disobeying traffic rules, while his grades and self confidence dropped. At one point of time, he started rethinking about his decision to join the business school in India leaving a fantastic job that would have given him material pleasure.
He got the opportunity to go to Himalayas with his friend and did mediation which made him mentally very happy and gave him a lot of energy. For the summer internship, he got the chance to sell soap to the villagers in Benares for a company called Srushti Chemicals.That’s the turning point for his life and career.
The whole novel is really funny and one liners are really keep the adventure running.It’s a read at one night novel and Karan is able to create magic of words with his very first novel.
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The narrator of Sidwha’s ( The Bride ) timely novel about the violent 1947 partition of India is the extremely observant Lenny Sethi, whose family belongs to the Parsee community in Lahore.
As a child, a polio victim and a member of a minority, she is the perfect witness (though somewhat precocious) to the historic upheaval. Sidwha tempers Lenny’s hyper-awareness, however, by capturing the whole range of her fears and joys as her innocence becomes another casualty of the violence among Moslems, Sikhs and Hindus.
At one point Lenny declares: “Lying doesn’t become me. I can’t get away with the littlest thing.”
Persuasive, this statement reinforces earlier comments she lets slip about herself which display this artless candor: “the manipulative power of my limp”; “I place a hypocritical arm protectively round her shoulders.” Lenny’s honesty is compelling, and the reader, like many in the story, cannot help but trust her.
She is alternately thrilled and frightened by the events she dutifully records, and so, in the end, is the reader.
A Southern Harvest is a collection of 16 brilliant and evocative stories from contemporary sort fiction in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.
The stories, by writers both new and established, have been translated into English especially for this volume. This collection is edited by Githa Hariharan, winner of the 1993 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book. The language sections are introduced by eminent literary figures in that language.
A Southern Harvest is an unforgettable voyage of discovery, taking the reader through the pain and poverty, humour and compassion in the lives of ordinary people.

This book was well written and I could not put it down, once I started reading it. It’s a tragic story of a young girl who uses her wit and determination to escape from her brutal husband and his sadistic family. It makes one question a culture which allows such heinous acts toward women and young girls, and our helplessness against abuse against women all over the world.
As a youth, Qasim leaves his tribal village in the remote Himalayas for the plains. Caught up in the strife surrounding the creation of Pakistan, he takes an orphaned girl for his daughter and brings her to the bustling, decadent city of Lahore. Amid the pungent bazaars and crowded streets, Qasim makes his fortune and a home for the two of them.
As the years pass, Qasim grows nostalgic about his life in the mountains while his hopelessly romantic teenage daughter, Zaitoon, imagines Qasim’s homeland as a region of tall, kindly men who roam the Himalayas like gods. Impulsively, Qasim promises his daughter in marriage to a tribesman, but Zaitoon’s fantasy soon becomes a grim reality of unquestioning obedience and unending labor. Bapsi Sidhwa’s acclaimed first novel is a robust, richly plotted story of colliding worlds straddled by a spirited girl for whom escape may not be an option.
Mulk Raj Anand is a great writer with lots of write-ups in his name. In 1930s and 1940s, Anand divided his time between London and India. He joined the struggle for independence, but also fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, he worked as a broadcaster and scriptwriter in the film division of the BBC in London.
This is a great novel.Its an eye opener on how indian’s treated their own people.
Bakha is a young man, proud and even attractive, yet none the less he is an outcast in India’s caste system: an Untouchable. In deceptively simple prose this groundbreaking novel describes a day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, as he searches for a meaning to the tragic existence he has been born into – and comes to an unexpected conclusion.
Mulk Raj Anand poured a vitality, fire and richness of detail into his controversial work, which led him to be acclaimed as his country’s Charles Dickens and one of the twentieth century’s most important Indian writers.
Gen X film-makers are brimming with ideas. Stories that were considered abstract, experimental and out of the box are finding an audience and most importantly, an outlet. Bheja Fry is one such film.
Ideally, the plotline of Bheja Fry is best suited for a stage play, but director Sagar Ballary makes an attempt to garnish it with interesting twists.
Ranjeet Thadani [Rajat Kapoor], a music company executive, hurts his back the night he has found a prize catch for a weekly bring-your-idiot talent dinner hosted by his friends and him. He ends up spending the evening with this idiot, Bharat Bhushan [Vinay Pathak], who tries to help him get his wife [Sarika] back, who left him earlier that day. The result is utter chaos let loose by the idiot, who cannot do a single thing without messing it up further.
n a nutshell, Bheja Fry is a time pass fare that doesn’t tax your bheja. It has its limitations since it caters to a select audience, but the film dares to push the envelope further.
Definitely recommended!!
From the internationally best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a superbly crafted new work of fiction: eight stories—longer and more emotionally complex than any she has yet written—that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.
In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father, who carefully tends the earth of her garden, where he and his grandson form a special bond. But he’s harboring a secret from his daughter, a love affair he’s keeping all to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a husband’s attempt to turn an old friend’s wedding into a romantic getaway weekend with his wife takes a dark, revealing turn as the party lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,” a sister eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish, and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories—a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love, and fate—we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.
Unaccustomed Earth is rich with Jhumpa Lahiri’s signature gifts: exquisite prose, emotional wisdom, and subtle renderings of the most intricate workings of the heart and mind. It is a masterful, dazzling work of a writer at the peak of her powers.
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The Namesake is a the cross-cultural, multigenerational story of a Hindu Bengali family’s journey to self-acceptance in Boston. Jhumpa masterfully explores the themes of the complexities of the immigrant experience and foreignness, the clash of lifestyles, cultural disorientation, the conflicts of assimilation, the tangled ties between generations… and paints a portait of an Indian family torn between the pull of respecting family traditions, and the American way of life. It’s a tale of love, solitude and emotional upheavals with an amazing eye for detail and ironic observation.
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Godan is a hindi word which can be interpreted as ‘charity of cow’.The cow in the book is symbolic for all Hori’s problems. He believes that the luxury of having a cow will solve everything, but it actually makes it all worse. At first everyone is excited about the cow, but soon problems arise; Hori’s brothers believe he bought the cow instead of helping his family; one of the brothers poisons the cow and it dies. From this moment, the Hori’s life changes. The cow that was suppose to bring goodness separates the family. Hori realizes that he cannot escape the life that has been given to him by birth. The cow equals Hori’s dream, but for a peasant in India the dream is not something achievable.
The caste system is also at work in the book; Hori has a job that he was born with; Gobar disrespects his father by running away and getting a job outside his caste; even when Gobar returns with money, proving that he has made something of himself, Hori’s pride and belief in the caste makes him unwilling to forgive.
Hori believes in the old way of life, but still he wants the cow because he dreams that things can get better. Hori’s son leaves his family in search of a better life; he doesn’t care about abandoning his caste and furthering his heritage. The city equals a very different kind of life for Gobar,it’s a place where Muslim’s and Hindu’s work together and seems at first a place where one can succeed. Gobar, however, eventually realizes like his father that he cannot escape the hardship. Even in the city where dreams seemed achievable, Gobar fails.
There is little hope in future, but there is redemption in a character like Hori who does good, despite the expatiation to do bad. Premchand creates a character with Hori that is like thousands who had the same struggle but survived.
Dollar Bahu is a story about a woman named Gauramma and her greed for money which creates gap between people and almost tear her family apart.
This story tells that Gauramma has two sons. One of them is living with her and other one is settled in United States with his wife. Gauramma always compares her sons and has blind obsession fordollar and dollar Bahu (her son and daughter in law in US), which disrupts the harmony in the family.
Gauramma’s illusion about US crumbles when she visits there on the birth of her grand daughter. During her stay in US, she realizes that the Indians living there are selfish, hungry for prosperity, status and the green cards. She feels the callousness of people. When she returns to her country, she converts into a new Gauramma who now see her family in India with a new perception.
This is an English translation of Sudha Murthy’s most popular Kannad Novel which is already translated in four Indian languages. This novel dwells on the aspirations, dreams and struggle of traditional middle class Indian family. There are many people in India who have the same feeling like Gauramma about European countries.
This novel helps us to know about a not so bright reality of those countries and also some good characteristics of our own country that we hardly ever notice.
This is a fantastic read!!
It’s been years since violinist Michael Holme broke up with pianist Julia McNicholl, but a chance encounter in a London traffic jam sparks their emotionally destructive relationship into life again. How long will it be before bliss veers into catastrophe, and will it take their musical careers and their relationships with their families with it?
“Family” takes on a flexible meaning in this story. Though Michael and Julia are still very much the children of their aging parents, Vikram Seth equates Julia’s American husband and her young son with Michael’s surrogate family, his bickering but devoted fellow members of the Maggiore String Quartet — three wonderfully drawn characters whose company I began to miss whenever the action shifted to one of Michael and Julia’s tainted erotic interludes.
The story is told through Michael’s voice, and while he’s too selfish and oversensitive to be a likeable character, Seth’s artistry lies in making him a sympathetic character, one who resembles many of us a little too closely for comfort. If you’ve ever acted against your own best interests while chasing your heart’s desire, if you’ve ever done anything to screw up the lives of the people you love, you’ll understand why Michael makes the mess of his life that he does. As a child, Michael escapes having his life’s dream crushed only by grasping the slimmest lifeline of hope; the novel’s ambiguous ending leaves us wondering if he can, or will, do so again.
Seth’s descriptions of the process of music making are the glory of this book.
If you’re a player, they’ll seem drawn from life, and if you’re not, they’ll make you wish you wereFind exciting offers for Equal Music – Vikram Seth at :
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The dual stories of a one-armed Indian dentist and his German Jewish refugee wife, spanning most of the twentieth century.
This book is set mostly in London but with a very substantial story line occurring in Germany and lesser ones in India and America. This dual biography is told by the author, the couple’s grand-nephew, who had a deep familial relationship with them from the age of seventeen when he was sent to England to attend school.
V. Seth subsequently showed substantial academic promise and creativity while attending first Oxford and then Stanford Universities. Despite his achievements in several disciplines.
Give it a shot!!
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Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Amitav Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families — one English, one Bengali — as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways.
The narrator, Indian born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of World War II to the late twentieth century, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
good read!!
Coolie narrates the story of Munoo, a boy from the hills of Kangra. Being an orphan, he was brought up by his aunt. At the age of 14, he leaves the beautiful hills and river Beas at his native village to Shampur town to work as a servant. The novel now focusses on his life there. The novel takes us to different places and cities showing the inhuman and degrading treatment that the poor Munoo gets at the hands of the socially, economically, and politically affluent and higher classes of Indian society and how he copes with all circumstances alone.
Always always portrayed the real India, and more specifically the poor India.This novels deal with the underdog. Coolie is one classic example of the story of the underprevileged class of the society and of the oppressed people who cannot even make both ends meet.
A must read because from 1936 to 2010 ,for poor of India
nothing has changed at all.