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Complete reviews
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Recently Added

nabanItA debsener shreShTa kabitA by nabanItA debsen (1989)

যদি আমি ফের ফিরতে চাই, বন্ধু, তোমার ডুমুর গাছটি কি আমাকে ছায়া দেবে? ...

Indian love poems by Meena Alexander (ed.) (2005)

Her lips are like leaves. Mine are full-blown coral. Don't bite too hard. ...

june 26, 2010

• I can, but why should I go by Sakti Chattopadhyay and Jayanta Mahapatra (tr) (1994)
  

  এখন গঙ্গার তীরে ঘুমন্ত দাঁড়ালে Now, when I stand, drowsy on the Ganga's bank
  চিতা কাঠ ডাকে আয়, আয়, আয়। The wood of the pyre calls: Come!
  ...

• padyasamagra 1 by Shakti Chattopadhyay (1989)
  
• Recipes worth their lack of salt by Michael E. deBakey and Antonio M. Gotto, Lynne W. Scott and John P. Foreyt (1984)
  

june 22, 2010

the past month i've been bicycling in the himalayas. had rented some rooms in a village overlooking the snows across a vast valley - so wasn't connected, and some patches of reading had accumulated... incidentally, we rode a total of 890 km including some rather steep slopes (birthi-kalamuni-munshiyari, joshimath-badrinath-mana, bageshwar-song, gagas-ranikhet, kosi-almora, etc).

• The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India by Zaheer Baber (1996)
  

  The dominant "colonialist" perspective was articulated by Grant, Mill, and Macaulay... conceived the pre-British India as a veritable tabula rasa onto which modern science and technology had to be inscribed as part of the ...

• Science, technology, and medicine in colonial India by David Arnold (2000)
  

  Although the history of science, technology and medicine continues to be presented in general histories as a record of Western discovery and dissemination, it has become more widely acknowledged than a generation or two ago that not all such histories can be conflated into a single story of European achievement or saga of European enterprise overseas. p.1 ...

• A 2nd Helping of Chicken Soup For the Soul by Jack (eds) Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen and Raksha Bharadia ()
  
• The book of general ignorance by John Lloyd and and John Mitchinson (2006)
  

  Most dangerous animal: 45 bn people - half the humans that ever lived - may have been killed by diseases borne by mosquitoes. Today, one person dies every 12 seconds ...

• Learning Syntactic Structure by Yoav Seginer (2007)
  

  While Amit was washing the dishes crashed to the floor. ...

• Introduction to Design by Morris Asimow (1962)
  

  Engineering design is a purposeful activity directed toward the goal of fulfilling human needs, particularly those that can be met by the technological factors of our culture. p. 1 ...

• From Scott to Fuchs by Gerald Bowman (1960)
  
• Great plays of Kalidasa by Kamlesh Pandey and D.H. Doongaji and AK Lavangia and Kamala Chandrakant and Anant Pai (ed.) and P.B. Kavadi (ill) and Pratap Mulick (ill.) ()
  
• Great Sanskrit plays by Kamala Chandrakant and Subba Rao and Anant Pai (ed.) and H.S. Chavan (ill) and G.R. Naik (ill.) and Pratap Mulick (ill.) ()
  
• The Sacred beetle and other great essays in science by Martin Gardner (ed.) (1986)
  

  If physicists reduce all existence to a finite number of particles or waves, one can always ask, "Why those particles?' or "Why those waves?' There necessarily must remain a basic substratum-a "dark abyss," as Santayana once described it, "before which intelligence must be silent for fear of going mad." It is the Unknowable of Spencer, the Noumena of Kant, ...

• The Oxford India Ramanujan by A. K. Ramanujan (2003)
  

  It's terrible. I grow lean / in loneliness,/ like a water lily / gnawed by a beetle. ...

• Subtext: making body language work in the workplace by Julius Fast (1991)
  

  how do you send out a subtext of confidence? Smile, was his first suggestion. ...

• The Routledge companion to aesthetics by Berys Nigel (eds) Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (2001)
  
• How Language Comes to Children: From Birth to Two Years by Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies and Malcolm B. DeBevoise (tr.) (2001)
  

  He would have responded the same if yes was uttered in the same tone. So separating the phonetic component from the prosody remains a challenge for studies of word recognition. ...

• ShrinkLits: Seventy of the World's Towering Classics Cut Down to Size by Maurice Sagoff and Roslyn Schwartz (ill.) (1980)
  

may 15, 2010

• Modern Indian drama: an anthology by G.P. Deshpande (ed.) (2004)
  

  Leader: What is the purpose of staging the play?
  Sutradhar: The purpose is to earn my bread, Sir.
  L: Tchi! Tchi! What a petty concern!
  ...

• Contemporary Indian short stories v.II by Bhabani Bhattacharya (2006)
  
• A Certain Sense by Jibananda Das and Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed) and Sumita Chakrabarti (ed) (2006)
  

may 10, 2010

• Climbing on the Himalaya and other mountain ranges by Norman Collie (1902)
  

  A sport like mountaineering needs no apology. 51 ...

• Indira: the life of Indira Nehru Gandhi by Katherine Frank (2002)
  

  Indira's affair with Nehru secretary M.O. Mathai-- Mathai boasted openly of his liaison with Nehru's daughter, both at the time and for many years after. There is no q that Indira and M were very ...

• When God Is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others by A.K. (tr.) Ramanujan and Velcheru Narayana Rao (tr.) and David Shulman (tr.) and Ksetrayya (1994)
  

  What's there
  to be jealous about?
  When youth passes,
  nothing will go your way,
  
  so grab the cash
  ...

may 2, 2010

• Thunder Gods: The Kamikaze Pilots Tell Their Story by Hatsuho Naito (1989)
  

  I shall fall, smiling and singing songs. Please visit and worship at Yasukuni Shrine this spring. There I shall be a cherry blossom ...

• Kalidaser granthAbalI, v.2 by Kalidasa and Rajendranath Vidyabhushan (ed.) (1929)
  

  वर्णप्रकर्षे सति कर्णिकारं दुनोति निर्गन्धतया स्म चेतः ।
  प्रायेण सामग्र्यविधौ गुणानां पराङ्मुखी विश्वसृजः प्रवृत्तिः॥३.२८ ...

• Celebrating the best of Urdu Poetry by Khushwant (tr. ed.) Singh and Kamna Prasad (ed.) (2007)
  

  When my beloved raised her arms to gather up her tresses A million desires gathered in my heart and got tied up in a tangle ...

• The blacksmith and the carpenter by Sun Li and Sidney Shapiro (tr) and Gladys Yang (tr) and Yu Fanqin (tr) (1982)
  
• Ritusamhara by Kalidasa and Rajendra Tandon (tr.) (2008)
  

April 25, 2010

• The age of spiritual machines: when computers exceed human intelligence by Ray Kurzweil (2000)
  
• chhoToder biShay: Abritti by debdulAl (eds.) bandyopadhyAy and amiya chaTTopAdhyAy (2006)
  

  মায়েরা সব মায়ের মতন বাবারা সব বাবা-ই । ...

• The Cambridge Companion to Atheism by Michael Martin (ed.) (2007)
  

  A exclusively western treatment; considers Jainism, Buddhism and Confucianism only in the context of whether these religions, all of which reject a notion of a personal god, may be considered to be atheistic. "The ...

• Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again by Andy Clark (1998)
  

  Minds are not disembodied logical reasoning devices. This simple shift in ...

April 23, 2010

• Indian Mathematics and Astronomy: Some Landmarks by S. Balachandra Rao (1994)
  
• My Mother's Sari by Sandhya Rao and Nina Sabnani (ill.) (2006)
  
• nATak samagra by Bratya Basu (2004)
  

April 15, 2010

• Buddha v. 1: Kapilavastu by Osamu Tezuka (2006)
  
• The Indian mutiny and the British imagination by Gautam Chakravarty (2005)
  

March 5, 2010

• Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru by Jawaharlal Nehru (1951)
  

  What amazed me ... was our total ignorance in the cities of this great agrarian movement. No newspaper had contained a line about it; they were not ...

March 2, 2010

• Memoirs by Pablo Neruda and Hardie St. Martin (tr.) (1976)
  

  Veinte poemas is my love affair with Santiago, with its student-crowded streets, the university, and the honeysuckle fragrance of requited love. ...

• Twenty love poems and a song of despair by Pablo Neruda and Pablo Picasso (ill.) and William Stanley Merwin (tr.) (2004)
  
• Courtesans and Tantric Consorts: Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconography and Ritual by Serinity Young (2004)
  

February 17, 2010

• Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes by Carol Myers-Scotton (2002)
  

  Singly-occurring nouns are the most commonly switched elements in code-switching corpora. ...

• The story of our food by K. T. Achaya (2000)
  

  The fine varieties of mangoes which the Portuguese had developed by grafting techniques [e.g. Alfonso] were also avidly pursued by the Mughals. ...

• Hindu Soul Recipes by Pushpesh Pant (2007)
  

  the discussion is airy and insubstantial. Despairingly, one searches for answers, but none are to be found, e.g. the _doshas_ relate to the three elements - water, air, and fire - but the "relation" is never elaborated. ...

• Making Space: The Development Of Spatial Representation And Reasoning by Nora S. Newcombe and Janellen Huttenlocher (2000)
  

February 5, 2010

• The rebel's silhouette: selected poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Agha Shahid Ali (tr.) (1995)
  

  Each star a rung,
  night comes down the spiral
  staircase of the evening. ...

• The Penguin Book of Modern Urdu Poetry by Mahmood Jamal (tr.) (1986)
  

  Last night your lost memory came to me as spring comes quietly upon a wilderness ...

• Kala Ghoda Poems by Arun Kolatkar (2004)
  

  a palpitating hill
  of naked idlis ...

February 1, 2010

• How do you withstand, body by Gieve Patel (1976)
  

  -- And the professors! O professors,
  Stale, malodorous, with yesterday's coats ...

• A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book of Indian Writing on Food by Nilanjana S. Roy (2004)
  

  her breasts were like used tea bags. As the weight loss progressed, the sachets deflated gradually, becoming little more than flaps of skin. ...

• bhojanshilpI bAMAlI by buddhadeb basu (2004)
  

  There is nothing called "Indian literature," - as I have been saying in so many forums - similarly, there is nothing called "Indian food". It would be ...

• Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-minded Man by Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (1997)
  

  Bela was married when she was 15 and Renuka at 10... although Rabindranath was strongly opposed to child marriage.] ...

January 25, 2010

• In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali by Edward C. (trans.) Dimock and Denise Levertov and Anju Chaudhuri (ill) (1967)
  

  The marks of fingernails are on your breast and my heart burns. ...