POLITICS AFTER TELEVISION: HINDU NATIONALISM AND THE RESHAPING OF THE PUBLIC IN INDIA By Arvind Rajagopal (Cambridge, Rs 495) Arvind Rajagopal's politics after television: hindu nationalism and the reshaping of the public in india is about the work and influence of the media on the career of Hindu nationalist mobilization in India during the late Eighties and early Nineties. Rajagopal begins with the violation, in 1987, of a decades-old taboo on religious partisanship, when the state-run television began broadcasting Ramayana. This resulted in the largest political campaign after independence around the symbol of Ram, led by Hindu nationalists, which brought the Bharatiya Janata Party into prominence. Simultaneously, Hindu nationalist leaders were embracing the prospects of neoliberalism and globalization. Television was the device that hinged these processes together, reshaping the context in which politics was conceived, enacted and understood. Ending with the international context within which nationalist groups mobilize, this study highlights the differences between their expatriate and indigenous constituencies. This is a sophisticated study, but written in a language that may put off non-academic readers. In this it may be preaching to the converted. But perhaps this is too optimistic a view of the Indian academic readership. NUMEROLOGY MADE EASYBy Anupam V. Kapil (Penguin, Rs 200) Anupam V. Kapil's numerology made easy would manage to marshal little justification for being reviewed here, given the benighted triviality of its contents. The only justifiable reason for this condescension would be to point out the sad debasement of a prestigious and renowned brand name. Penguin packages this 'comprehensive introduction to numerology' as 'the one book that anyone interested in numbers absolutely must read'. Poor Wittgenstein - with his obsession with numbers - missed out on being taught how to calculate his karmic compound number, quickly. GEISHA By Liza Dalby(Vintage, £ 7.99) Liza Dalby's geisha is a delightful account of a famous Japanese institution. In the Seventies, the author - presumably driven by ethnographic rigour - went to Japan and turned into the geisha, Ichiguku, in Pantocho (Kyoto). This book is a personal, but anthropological, account of her experience. (One wonders though whether, as an American geisha, she got quite the authentic picture of the connoisseur Japonaise). As biographer of the great Japanese writer, Lady Murasaki, and as Spielberg's consultant on his film, Memoirs of a Geisha, Dalby would no doubt be the best person to go beyond the simplistic Western view of geisha as chattel in an 'egregiously male-dominated society'. But perhaps Dalby's most original contribution is in bringing to Berkeley, California, the immensely sophisticated geisha concept of iki, a certain type of chic, bold yet alluring, that implies an aesthetic of understatement and a whole philosophy of life.