Gautaman Bhaskaran's book releasing on Sept 17

Popular journalist, writer, columnist, and film-theatre critic Gautaman Bhaskaran's book Adoor Gopalakrishnan: A Life in Cinema, based on the life of renowned Malayalam director Adoor Gopalakrishnan, will be released on September 17 by the Alliance Française of Madras in association with the Courtyard by Marriott.

Adoor Gopalakrishnan: A Life in Cinema is the first authorized biography of the Dada Saheb Phalke Award winner.

"Gautaman Bhaskaran traces the ebbs and flows of the life this enigmatic director. From his birth during the Quit India movement to his lonely childhood at his uncles’ house; from life at Gandhigram, where Adoor studied economics and politics, to his days and nights at the Pune Film Institute; and from his first film, Swayamwaram, to his latest, Oru Pennum Rantaanum, Bhaskaran’s lucid narrative tracks the twists and turns of Gopalakrishnan’s life, finding an uncommon man and a rare auteur," a press release said.

Full report here Galatta

Missed opportunity

The book relates a sad tale of an archetypical Indian family steeped in its own world of pettiness, with family members wasting their entire lifetime keeping that narrow-minded world alive, says S Nanda Kumar

Sinking, not Swimming; Nalini Rajan
Penguin, 2010, pp 255, Rs 299 

Sinking, not Swimming starts promisingly enough, with flavours of old Madras and Mylapore, and a typical extended Tamil family. It is a sad tale of an archetypal Indian family steeped in its own world of pettiness, with family members wasting entire lifetimes keeping that narrow-minded world alive. And before they realise it, life has gone by in a flash.There is a lesson here on taking the broad view of life, and realising that life is too short to be spent nursing petty animosities. The author seems to have also understood the futile suffering of the families of cancer patients.

If it loses momentum, it is simply because there are far too many characters and voices in this book. There is no main protagonist, although the titular head of the family, Suri, begins the tale in his own voice. And just about the time when one is making a connection with him, the chapter ends. Rajan has used one voice per chapter — this means by the time we are introduced to all the main players in their own voices, and their points-of-view, one is already halfway through the book. By this time, one should have become familiar with the names of the entire family — but for me personally, the family tree right at the beginning of the book proved to be a boon as well as a curse — a boon, because I could keep flipping back to find out who each character was in relation to the others; a curse, because one needed to keep checking on who the various people who pop up are —it took away from the flow of the book.

Full review here Deccan Herald

A magnificent collection

The book is an able attempt at making sense of the drawings of peoples, places, and monuments which Colin Mackenzie, a Scottish engineer of the British Army of the Madras Presidency, collected mainly from southern India and, on a smaller scale, from northern India, Sri Lanka, and Java, during his four-decade career as a military surveyor in colonial India. The ‘Mackenzie Collection,' reputed as much for its complexity as for its enormity, constitutes the largest and oldest of the extant archives of drawings gathered by a single European in Asia.

Painstaking effort
Jennifer Howes, who set out to catalogue them, realised that it would make little sense unless each item is accompanied by a description and contextualised in the light of Mackenzie's varied enterprises. Given the huge numbers and the bewildering diversity, it was obvious that covering the entire collection will be an almost impossible task to accomplish. So she chose to discuss only certain sets of drawings — those that lent themselves to contextual analysis. The outcome is the book under review, a painstaking effort.

The introductory chapter carries a brief biography of Mackenzie. It is primarily a note on his career, projects, and field staff, prepared on the basis of conspicuously scant data. In the epilogue, Howes speaks of her experience, as she researched the collection, a veritable archive.

Full report here Hindu