Can't get no satisfaction

Bollywood Melodies: A history of the Hindi Film Song (Penguin, Rs 295) by Ganesh Anantharaman is a delightful book that traces the evolution of India's 'cultural barometer' - Hindi film songs. Undoubtedly the most popular form of music in the country, songs in Hindi films have, according to Anantharaman, infiltrated every aspect of our social and personal lives - from festivals to funerals. They also represent collective hope, aspiration and despair. Anantharaman discusses the works of over 50 composers, singers and lyricists from the Thirties to the Nineties, chronicling the forces that shaped this genre, its momentary decline and, ultimately, its resurrection in the last decade. The interviews with idols, including the one with Lata Mangeshkar, could have been sharper. Mahesh Bhatt's foreword, typically, tells us more about the man than this genre of music and is entirely dispensable.

Lashkar: Into The Heart of Terror (HarperCollins, Rs 195) by Mukul Deva begins with the following lines: 'A plump...lady had just bent to pick up the bright red table cover...when the bomb...detonated.' What follows is a dreary tale of jihadi terror, proxy war, and an even more terrible reprisal. The troublemakers, if you haven't guessed already, hail from that 'evil State', Pakistan, while the avengers belong to a shadowy wing - 'the ultrasecret Force 22' - of the Indian army. The plot, a strange brew of exaggerated patriotism and misplaced confidence in an armed solution, will not endear Deva to the fastidious reader.

Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives (Earthcare, Rs 275) by Jeremy Seabrook focuses on the perils of consumerism, which, Seabrook argues, is an intrinsically iniquitous process. A consumerist society is not one which gives its members ample choice. On the contrary, it forces citizens to subscribe to a single norm - that of frenzied buying. Seabrook also furnishes evidence about the death of cultures and languages in the face of this global consumerist onslaught, but hastens to add that the values and principles that make up these cultures live on, mutating into newer forms, forming small pockets of resistance. Seabrook writes engagingly and, in his superb introduction to this Indian edition, shows how consumerism has impoverished, and not enriched, India.