Economic development for men: GDP, IT, IIT, EMI, FDI, CEO, whatever. Economic development for women: SSA, ICDS, NRHM, NREGS. In full, that is: Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Integrated Child Development Scheme, National Rural Health Mission, and we all know that the UPA stands for NREGS.
This suggests that government planners see women as the “link” factor in delivering state social services to the poor. But it doesn’t take into account the fact that women are often excellent businesswomen. Women vendors work the urban streets, run food or beverage stalls, wash and iron clothes, sell fruits and vegetables...
This book, with its apt title, captures this dilemma: that women’s labour helps keep the nation solvent, yet the kinds of work that women do — whether they’re paid, underpaid, unpaid or unemployed — remain either outside or at the bottom rung of the economic realm that responds to macroeconomic policies and effects. Written by academic and consultant Jayati Ghosh, who also serves on the PM’s Knowledge Commission, this is a dense but fruitful little book of essays, one of a series on gender, politics, economics and violence from this feminist publisher.
NEVER DONE AND POORLY PAID
(Women's Work in Globalising India)
Author: Jayati Ghosh
Publisher: Women Unlimited
PAGES: x + 186
Price: Rs 250
Over the pitch
Cricket books aren’t actually fun to read, especially if written by players who are still plying their trade. Most of them refrain from stating the harsh realities of being a cricketer so that the “important” people aren’t rubbed the wrong way. But Aakash Chopra’s Beyond the Blues is a refreshing change in that sense.
Chopra is candid about most of the things — especially various aspects of domestic cricket — be it biased umpiring at times, murky politics regarding selections, how domestic cricketers stay in shabby hotels and so forth. The book gives a great insight into the lives of domestic cricketers and how difficult it is to actually make it into the national team. Chopra is one of the fortunate ones — he played 10 test matches — but is still unable to stake a claim for a regular spot in the national side despite scoring bucket-loads of runs.
He sheds light on the inaugural edition of the Indian Premier League, where, he says, the focus is more on the shenanigans rather than cricket. There is a line in Chopra’s book which sums up the life and times of a national-level cricketer. “Being an India cricketer is hell in many ways, because of the intense scrutiny you are subjected to by a billion people. But not being an Indian player is worse.”
BEYOND THE BLUES
Author: Aakash Chopra
Publisher: Harper Collins
PAGES: 227
Price: Rs 295
Gora...
The title character of this great Tagore novel, Gora, is a fair-skinned, orthodox Hindu nationalist who falls in love with a Brahmo girl, Sucharita, in 1880s Bengal. He doesn’t at first know, but the reader does, that he is, in fact, the son of an Irishman killed in 1857, adopted by a Hindu woman.
As Tagore first designed his tale, it was to end with Sucharita rejecting Gora because of his “impure” European blood. But Sister Nivedita, an Irish disciple of Vivekananda who knew Tagore, was appalled, and wrote to ask: “Why won’t you let things happen in literature that do not happen in real life?” So Tagore changed the end.
This is a new, definitive English translation by Radha Chakravarty, an academic, feminist and translator. It’s not always a smooth read, especially the stilted spoken passages, and the scholarly Introduction is useful but a little dreary: “The text also destabilizes the notion of identity in order to demonstrate its mutable, multiple and contingent nature,” and so on. There’s no need to paraphrase Tagore like that.
GORA
Author: Rabindranath Tagore
Publisher: Penguin
PAGES: xxvi + 518
Price: Rs 399
