From yoga teacher to zoo girl

THE RUMBLING ISLAND: TRUE STORIES FROM THE FORESTS OF INDIA (Puffin, Rs 175) edited by Zai Whitaker is a richly engaging collection of wildlife writings for young adults. Beautifully illustrated by Uma Krishnaswamy, it includes articles by some of the most distinguished environmental scientists, activists and conservationists covering a range of interests. The tone is delicately poised between the anecdotal and the scholarly. Some of the contributors reveal how they came to know the birds and the beasts by sheer chance or coincidence. Sally Walker, for instance, writes of her journey to India to learn yoga and how, along the way, she found herself making friends with tiger cubs in the Mysore Zoo. Ashish Chandola describes the chilling experience of spending time in a tiger cave, while Ramachandra Guha provides a warm introduction to M. Krishnan and his sterling work on Indian wildlife. George Schaller’s breathtaking account of his encounters with tigers and the editor’s own discussion of Salim Ali stand out for their intimate appeal.

KEEP OFF TKE GRASS by Karan Bajaj (HarperCollins, Rs 195) follows in the footsteps of the ‘corporate novel’ à la Chetan Bhagat. However, Bajaj is definitely a few notches above Bhagat in terms of literary flair and a singularly wry sense of humour. Instead of fake dazzle, what you get here is genuine mirth. Destiny strikes Samrat Ratan, a successful young investment banker on Wall Street, when he decides to quit and enrol in a B-School in India. Predictably, desi life entraps him with its endless distractions and array of weird characters. Soon, Ratan is doing things that he would not have done in a million years had he stayed on in America — getting high with a sexy Danish hippie on the Himalayas, keeping the company of a cannibal by the Ganges, and peddling soap in Benaras. Things get worse, with Ratan weeping profusely in an Indian prison, fearing for his life and chastity.

RUDRA:THE IDEA OF SHIVA by Nilima Chitgopekar(Penguin, Rs 250) might appear at first glance to be a potted history of the various schools of thought on Shiva, the fearsome god, who nurtures and destroys with equal caprice. However, the scope of the narrative goes beyond purely historiography into the terrain of ‘ficto-facts’ — a subtle merging of facts with fiction. Chitgopekar, an authority on Sivaism, culls strands of information from mythological and classical texts on Shiva, then presents them through different voices. Vishnu, Sati, Dakhsa, Parvati and Ganesha — all of them intimately related to Shiva — give first-person accounts of their perception of the immensely potent god. Interspersed with these narratives are scholarly notes and comments which give a long perspective to the different sources of knowledge, both apocryphal and canonical.

THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF HINDU NATIONALISM :AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNT by Shubh Mathur(Three Essays, Rs 275) is a detailed study of the emergence of Hindutva in Rajasthan in the period 1990-94. This work deserves serious attention for two reasons. First, it demystifies militant Hinduism by placing it in a cultural rather than an economic or a political context. Second, and more important, it emphasizes an understanding of the Hindu far-Right, not in isolation from daily life in India, but as a phenomenon that grows directly out of it. Mathur tries to make sense of the RSS, and its enterprise of ‘character-building’ through exemplary violence. The concluding section looks at the ‘cultural amnesia’ that is created by contemporary media and academic discourse.