Poetry Pick
The strange sacredness of ordinary life
For Everything Left Unspoken cherishes the silence of becoming: the selves we inherit and the selves we perform. Uma Shukla writes from the subtle border between memory and myth, body and belief, intimacy and distance. These poems move through longing, cultural inheritance, silence, contradiction, and the strange sacredness of ordinary life. They do not try to resolve pain neatly. Instead, they sit with what remains unsaid, with the ache of belonging to more than one world at once, and with the private histories that shape a person before she fully understands them.*
Design from the desert and beyond
A rich tradition of constructed, stitched and draped clothing is concentrated in Gujarat and Rajasthan. The region has witnessed the arrival of many people of varied cultures and costume traditions that has resulted in a synthesis of these diverse influences. While there are several studies on traditional textiles by historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers, the same attention has not been given from the design perspective. This book attempts to address this lacuna and provides a rich resource for designers and students of design. An in-depth analysis studies the cultural, design-centric and technical aspects of the clothes, further complemented by a profuse use of photographs, colour illustrations and line drawings demonstrating the transformation of flat fabric into a three-dimensional mapping of the body.
The author, Madhurima Patni, is a practising textile designer and teacher. She led a research project on the textiles and garments of Rajasthan and Gujarat and was one of the chief architects of the programmes in Textile and Apparel design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, where she worked for over 20 years.This publication that is a valuable design resource of traditional stitched and draped clothing of the region is the outcome of her extensive research and is for both students and practitioners of design.*
{{/usCountry}}The author, Madhurima Patni, is a practising textile designer and teacher. She led a research project on the textiles and garments of Rajasthan and Gujarat and was one of the chief architects of the programmes in Textile and Apparel design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, where she worked for over 20 years.This publication that is a valuable design resource of traditional stitched and draped clothing of the region is the outcome of her extensive research and is for both students and practitioners of design.*
{{/usCountry}}From The Beatles to Beirut
With few correspondents overseas, independent India’s newspapers have mostly depended on agencies and publications in London or Washington. The world, in other words, was not their story. Saeed Naqvi has spent his 60-year career trying to make it one. His journey began at The Statesman in the 1960s, where he made his name with an exclusive on the Beatles in Rishikesh and won Jayaprakash Narayan’s confidence while reporting the Bihar movement. Later, at The Indian Express, his association with Ramnath Goenka drew him into the paper’s battles and politics, especially during the Emergency.
After leaving The Indian Express in 1984, Naqvi founded the news agency World Report to put Indian journalists at the scene of global events. His reporting took him to 110 countries, often as the only Indian journalist there. He covered the 1971 JVP insurrection in Sri Lanka, the Sino-Vietnamese War and the TWA 847 hijacking in Beirut; saw Nelson Mandela walk free; interviewed Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev, Muammar Gaddafi and Israeli prime ministers; and reported from Iran during the Islamic revolution and Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. From Rwanda, Sudan, Haiti and Kosovo to Gaza, Kabul, Nicaragua and Northern Ireland, he went where Indian newspapers rarely sent their reporters. In the years before mobile phones, every such assignment was shaped by constraints beyond the reporter’s control, demanding resourcefulness and a fair measure of luck.
The World Was Not Their Story is candid about the bargains and accidents of life in the news. It offers vivid glimpses of world history as old political orders collapsed and new ones took shape — history witnessed at close quarters by a pioneering Indian reporter determined to see the world for himself, and to free journalism from the biases of the West.*
*All copy from book flap.