Making modernity popular

City flicks: Indian cinema and the urban experience (Seagull, Rs 300) edited by Preben Kaarsholm is a collection of academic essays on how Indian films ?have not only portrayed the process of urbanization as a struggle towards coming to terms with and formulating agendas for modernity, but also as reactions to and counter-programmes against this process?. There are pieces, among others, by Moinak Biswas on Nimai Ghosh?s Chinnamul and the Left Cultural Movement in the Forties, by Sudipta Kaviraj on images of the city in literature and films, by Ashish Rajadhyaksha on the ?Bollywoodization? of Indian cinema, and by Tejaswini Niranjana on masquerade in the Nineties Telugu vigilante films of Vijayasanthi. ?In conditions of widespread poverty and illiteracy, movie spectacles in India have fulfilled a role supplementing that of literature and print culture in making modernity popular.?

The love song of Alfred Hitchcock (Indialog, Rs 195) by Maythil Radhakrishnan is V.C. Harris?s translation of three Malayali novellas: ?Hitchcock?s Intervention? and ?Music is a Time-Art?, apart from the title piece, all written in the Nineties. ?The Love Song? explores questions of love and death, which are further complicated in the next one. The last novella is loaded with allusions: Browning, Bach, Mozart, fugues, structures. But there is also the plague and three sanitary inspectors. The translator?s introduction goes over the top with praise, and also has a ?theoretical go? at the stories. But there are things like, ?Maythil Radhakrishnan is a strange guy. Wonderfully strange. How else can you make sense of, and feel excited by, the strange and brilliant tales that he tells??

Great puffin bites (Puffin, Rs 275) by Margaret Clarke collects three international children?s bestsellers, illustrated by Terry Denton. ?S.N.A.G? is about thin and weedy Snag who faints at the sight of blood, but is sent to gladiator school. The eponymous ?Silent Knight? has two fears: meeting a fierce dragon and Rusting Up, both of which come true when his horse, Gallbladder, runs off into the dark night. In ?Mummy?s Boy?, Knot tries to make his mountain-of-blubber uncle, Pharaoh Gut, lose weight because their lives and stress levels depend upon it.