METROPOLIS MATTERS - REVIEW OF EDWARD GLAESER'S "TRIUMPH OF THE CITY"

How do you go about picking a book to read? Would you pick up an unknown title written by an untested author? I find some awards are good indicators of the quality of the book. I try to read most of the Booker-awarded or the Booker-shortlisted fiction since they are almost always engaging. In nonfiction, I try to go by the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book Award (now the FT/McKinsey Award) shortlist.

A book I chanced upon in my University library was Harvard economist Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City: How Urban Spaces Make Us Human (2011) which was, the cover declared, shortlisted for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2011. I knew nothing about the book or the author other than this fact. But yet I found the book eminently readable.

TRAVERSING HOLY GROUND – REVIEW OF DIANA L ECK’S “INDIA”

Salman Rushdie mentions somewhere (perhaps in Imaginary Homelands (1992)) that India does not exist in reality except in the minds of its people. It is a collective fiction, he says, which has to be maintained by riots and ritual outpouring of blood.