Books

Illustrated by Clément Vuillier, the book is structured in two parts | Photo Credit: GREGORIO GONELLA Building on the conversations around the environment and educating children about Nature, Milan’s research-based design studio Formafantasma is out with a picture book for young readers and adults alike. Titled Down Under: The Curious Fall of a Child Who Knew Nothing and Became Everything, the book (illustrated by Clément Vuillier) is structured in two parts. It begins with the story about a child ‘who, upon falling into a hole in an open field, embarks on a journey through the hidden layers of the Earth,…

Niranjan Narasipuram, Vishwa Kumar Narasipuram, Veda Madhurya Kowturu and Medha Vaishnavi Kowturu, aged between seven and 12, walk into the Saptaparni Cultural Centre in Hyderabad with a sense of familiarity, drawn to shelves filled with books, activity kits, and board games. “This is the team that approves the books we shortlist for Namaste Gang,” say their mothers, Visali Kopparthy and Shilpa Kowturu. Namaste Gang (thenamastegang.com) curates books for children in the age group of 0 to 10, predominantly in Telugu, with a few titles in English, Kannada, and Tamil.Visali teaches copyright and civil law at Siddhartha Law College, Vijayawada, and divides…

It was a viral video of a group of cheetahs taking down a wildebeest that triggered Big Cat People, Jonathan and Angela Scott, to put together their latest e-book, Safari Etiquette: An essential guide. “There were five male cheetahs, unusual to have such a big coalition, and in October 2022, two of these cheetahs ended up nailing a wildebeest,” Jonathan says. Within seconds of their kill, they were surrounded by vehicles filled with overexcited people, egging the guides and driver to go even closer. “It is the paparazzi effect, isn’t it? People behave really badly when there is something they…

Chennai, then Madras, 1819. Syed Mir Mohsin Husain, a jeweller from Arcot, was working in the store of his employer, George Gordon, when some British military officials stopped by with a strange instrument, asking if Mohsin could fix it. Though he had never seen such an instrument before, he managed to repair it, a skill noted by one of these officers, Lieutenant-Colonel Valentine Blacker, “who was thoroughly impressed with Mohsin’s ‘uncommon intelligence and acuteness’”, states a new book titled India in Triangles: The incredible story of how India was mapped and the Himalayasmeasured by Shruthi Rao and Meera Iyer, published…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.Published a little over a century after its source of inspiration, Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) retains the original characters and narrative but replaces some discussions of yearly allowances and the size of estates with talk of katanas and the undead.While we cannot be sure what author Jane Austen (1775-1817) would have made of the Bennet sisters getting trained by Shaolin monks, as one Goodreads review puts it: “Fans will either think this book is brilliant or are already setting…

“If Indira Gandhi can run the country, why can’t a woman run the country’s premier medical institution?” This was Dr. Sneh Bhargava’s reply to people upset that a woman from a low-profile Radiology department was appointed as director of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi, in 1984. She remains the first — and only woman — to have helmed AIIMS in the past seven decades. But what Dr. Bhargava never would have imagined was how day one as AIIMS director on October 31, 1984, would unfold.Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been shot by two bodyguards in the morning and…

On a chilly Sunday evening in January, I drove to Crossword at Mumbai’s Kemp’s Corner with my children to meet David Walliams. The celebrated British children’s author and comedian was visiting as a part of his multi-city India book tour, and the bookstore had announced a meet-and-greet. I expected the whole affair to be a quick one — after all, how many people would want to meet Walliams in India?I could not have been more wrong.The large bookstore was filled with hundreds of children and parents buying books to sign, and queuing up to meet Walliams. He greeted them, signed…