HT Picks; New Reads

On the reading list this week is a critical examination of street-based visual and performative practices, a memoir about a family and about the unmooring of Punjab, and a volume that traces the long history of monster-making

More than a thoroughfare

This week’s pick of interesting reads includes a critical examination of street art, a memoir about a Punjabi family, and a volume on monster-making. (Amit Sharma)

160PP, ₹500; Marg Magazine (Critically examining street-based visual and performative practices as articulations of identity and more.)

Deities on compound walls, political graffiti on flyovers, film posters layered across shop shutters, and processions with elaborately decorated tableaux create a visually saturated landscape on the Indian street. Festivals such as Ganesh Chaturthi, Kaawad Yatra and wedding baraats, as well as protest events like the 2019–20 anti-CAA sit-ins and the Gen Z mobilisations across the country in 2026, generate dense and immersive visual environments. Advertising apart, these visual archives contribute to the formation of collective urban memory and register shifting public sentiments, reimagining, each time, the possibilities of collectivity, dissent and resistance. The street is more than a thoroughfare; it is a space of negotiation and visual meaning-making, hosting rituals and protests, celebrations and performances. The boundaries between public and private, sacred and profane, often blur in this space. Governed by legal frameworks, the street is increasingly transformed by neoliberal forces such as privatisation, gentrification and surveillance. Yet it continues to serve as a crucial arena for countercultural expression and civic engagement. Within this context, street art and visual culture are not peripheral or decorative but constitutive elements of public life. Street Art critically examines street-based visual and performative practices as articulations of identity, collectivity, dissent and urban transformation through interdisciplinary approaches in art history, performance studies, cinema studies, visual anthropology and cultural studies.*

Piercing the soul of a culture

256pp, ₹599; HarperCollins (A memoir about a family and about the unmooring of Punjab)

Ranbir Sidhu’s searing new work opens with the death of his father and loops back, nine months earlier, to the loss of his mother-‘the gestation period for a human embryo’. Wanting to understand something of their lives, he finds himself on a journey from the working-class neighbourhoods of his London childhood to middle-class California and finally to rural Punjab.

Who were his parents, he asks, and as importantly, who might they have been were it not for the ugliness of Partition and the village’s stifling patriarchal grip?

In an innovative blend of memoir, essay, travelogue and history, Sidhu charts the geographical space where his parents were born and died, against its deep histories of violence and its demand for a masculinity that suffocates and deforms the lives of both women and men. And all of it tethered to one word that makes imagination impossible: sharam or shame.

Diving deep into the personal while piercing the soul of a culture, No one gets out of here alive achieves the incredible – it tells of family, and in doing so, it tells of the unmooring of Punjab.*

Monster making and control

320pp, ₹799; Westland (Tracing the long, volatile history of monster-making)

A history of how humans have created monsters out of one another — from our deepest fears — and what these monsters tell us about humanity’s present and future.

Monsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein’s monster and ET, Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal.

In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making and charts a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.*

*All copy from book flap.