Importance of having faith

Islam and the Muslims of India (Penguin, Rs 299) by S.S Gill is not a book where a Muslim scholar is trying to clear the popular misconceptions regarding his faith. The author is a non-Muslim who takes up the common charges against Islam — it promotes violence, decrees women to be subordinate to men, and so on — and looks at them in the context of early social and religious developments in the Arab world and elsewhere. While Islam is derided for believing that women deserve only half a man’s share in the family property, Gill shows that this was quite a progressive move at a time when “most cultures did not give her anything”. The problem, Gill believes like many others, is with what happened to Islam later. The ulema’s “dogmatic reconstruction of the Islamic past...barred progress through cross-fertilization of ideas and innovative thinking”. The result is for everyone to see today.

Married But Available (HarperCollins, Rs 195) by Abhijit Bhaduri follows Mediocre but Arrogant and is likely to be followed by Middle-Aged but Active. It is the story of Abbey, or Abhijit, an MBA in the Eighties, when MBAs were just beginning to be accepted as god’s greatest gift to the corporate world. The prose is hardly of Booker quality, but the plot could interest a film maker wishing to capture on celluloid the pains and dilemmas of a man the rest of the world calls successful.

Talk of the Town (Puffin, Rs 199) by Jerry Pinto and Rahul Srivastava tells the “stories of twelve Indian cities”: Bangalore, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Calcutta, Lucknow, Mumbai, Patna, Shillong, and Thiruvananthapuram. The delightful and informative introduction to each is accompanied by a tiny piece (or excerpt from a larger work) by a well-known writer that unlocks a wondrous aspect of the city. Amit Chaudhuri writes about listening to the radio in Calcutta, Anita Nair about a Bangalore café and C.S. Lakshmi about the periodicals in the Madras (now Chennai) of her childhood. Shillong is a welcome inclusion in the Dazzling Dozen of Indian cities.

Age-Proof your Brain (HarperThorsons, Rs 295) by Tony Buzan shows the reader the way to “sharpen your memory in 7 days”. It begins with a quiz to test the fitness of your brain, and goes on to such things as mind makeover, memory toner, memory builder and logic booster. If you follow Buzan faithfully, you can even remap your brain, and that’s as good as having a new one.