Jay Griffith from the UK writes about time and wilderness. “I write about the politics of culture,” said the author, sipping her coffee at a five-star hotel lobby.
For her last book Wild, An Elemental Journey, Griffith spent seven years travelling. “Actually, I was in the midst of a depression when an anthropologist invited me to travel to the Amazon,” said Griffith. So she went to the shamans in the Amazon “in search of their hallucinogenic medicine, the ayahuasca that cured me” and to the freedom fighters of West Papua “to sing my head off in their highlands”.
While travelling she met “cannibals infinitely kinder than the murderous missionaries who evangelise them”. She anchored her boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept, ate witchetty grub and visited sea gypsies.
Her first book Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time was the winner of Barnes and Nobel Discoverer Award for the best new non-fiction writer in the US in 2003.
Griffith was in India to give a talk on wilderness arranged by the British Council at the Sacred Arts Festival. She visited Santiniketan to research for a book “that will be on childhood, freedom and nature”. She also wanted to study Tagore’s experiment with education and nature. “I was shocked by the fences all around. It’s a telling symbol of the times,” said the author.
Sonia factor
Meghnad Desai loves a good controversy. He stirred one while he was in Calcutta addressing a CII meet where he said the Trinamul chief Mamata Banerjee was “incompetent and a liar”. The silver-maned Desai was in the city to talk about his latest book The Rediscovery of India, published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin.
The Rediscovery of India is “a book on the history of India written by an economist. It took 50 years of research, though I wrote it in 18 months,” says Desai.
He begins with Vasco Da Gama’s arrival and traces the idea of India till contemporary times. Desai stresses on the plurality of Indian politics with no single-party hegemony. His introduction has a long eulogy to Sonia Gandhi. “It’s a classic Harvard Business School case study as to how she turned the fortunes of the Congress around,” he says.
Talking of the economic success of India and the 8-9 per cent economic growth that has become the norm, Desai says: “The Chinese are ahead of us because they didn’t have an imperial rule to fight and consequently started much earlier. Besides, economic equality is better in India than China.” The author feels the 2014 elections are going to be crucial for this country that is firmly on the road to development.
Regional foray
SAGE, the international academic publishing house, completes 45 years of publishing. The Indian arm of SAGE was started by the late Tejeshwar Singh, better known as the DD newscaster with the rich baritone. Singh helped SAGE to become what it is today: a leading academic publishing house with strong lists in sociology, education and management.
It is set to make forays into Marathi, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam. For its Bengali publishing programme SAGE has tied up with local publisher Gangchil, said Vivek Mehra, managing director & CEO, SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd.
Source: telegraphindia.com
