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HT Picks; New Reads
On the reading list this week is a volume on India’s precarious relationship with antibiotics, another on transcontinental human trafficking involving India and the US, and a superbly produced book that’s an exploration of taste
The costs of our overreliance on antibiotics
The discovery of antibiotics was one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, dramatically increasing human lifespans. Yet today, with antibiotic-resistant superbugs implicated in as many deaths as HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, the limits of these miracle drugs have become alarmingly clear.
At ground zero of the growing crisis is India, one of the world’s largest consumers of antibiotics and a powerhouse in pharmaceutical manufacturing. In A World of Resistance, Assa Doron and Alex Broom draw on years of fieldwork in hospitals, pharmacies, and on factory farms to examine the enormous social and environmental costs of overreliance on antibiotics. They show how an overtaxed healthcare system with limited oversight, widespread use of antibiotics in industrial agriculture, and the incessant dumping of pharmaceutical waste into waterways have created the ideal conditions for antibiotic-resistant microbes to grow.
As resistance spreads across India and beyond, Doron and Broom argue that the solution isn’t to restrict access to antibiotics but to embrace culturally relevant forms of health education, indigenous practices, and policies grounded in social solidarity. Only then, the authors contend, is it possible to turn the page on India’s precarious relationship with antibiotics and to address resistance globally before it is too late.
Uncovering a scam of dizzying proportions
This is the story of three men — Kumar Pandruvada, Virgil Bierschwale and Manu Mitra — ravaged by the vagaries of the H-1B visa programme. It is also the story of two nations, of transcontinental human trafficking, of corporate and immigration fraud, of wage violations so enormous that their official amount over the last two decades reaches at least $121.48 million. The real figure must be a hundred times more, at a conservative estimate.
Wild Wild East unveils a scam that affects millions of American and Indian workers. A scam sustained and abetted — directly or indirectly — by thousands of firms, American politicians, think tanks, mainstream media, accrediting organisations, universities. Tanul Thakur, an ex-H-1B worker, spent eight years investigating byzantine connections to unearth a story of dizzying depth and scope.
This exposé — spanning Big Tech giants, outsourcing behemoths, mom-and-pop body shops, educational consultancies, visa mills and federal agencies — dismantles long-held myths about the Indian IT boom and American exceptionalism. It spotlights survivors, dissects data, probes history, parses court records and questions the law. Shunning simplistic notions underpinning high-skilled immigration, which frame migrant and domestic workers as adversaries, this trailblazing book has the mind of a muckraker and the heart of a novel.
Of Boney M and the hotel aesthetic
Part art object and part literary magazine, Taste is entirely its own world. Lavishly produced and featuring original essays by some of India’s finest writers, it includes Aatish Taseer on the new style of living rooms and what it says about the nation, a conversation between Vivek Shanbhag and Parul Sehgal on how taste shapes the act of writing itself, and Srinath Perur’s meditation on Boney M. and their enduring Indian afterlife.
Designed with extraordinary flair by graphic designer Kriti Monga, Taste explores what taste is, who decides it and how it reveals itself — in our homes, our travels, our music, our books and our lives.
Presented in an exquisite box with multiple components and printed in a strictly limited edition of 300 copies, this, the first of an annual imprint, aims to be a cultural classic.*
*All copy from book flap and promotional material.
