Download Free Madras Chennai And The Self Conversations With The City Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Madras Chennai And The Self Conversations With The City and write the review.

In a metropolis where customs are paramount, humility essential, the evil-eye feared and showing-off considered distasteful, how do people navigate the streams of tradition and modernity? How does the self form a lasting equation with the city? Some do it with ease, some with effort, but they all have a special love for the city - for a tradition they find organic and lived; for the co-existence of various religions; for the distinct sense of community and neighbourhoods; for the spacious inner life. In Madras, Chennai and the Self: Conversations with the City, Tulsi Badrinath creates a layered image of Chennai by sifting through her memories, and by narrating the stories of those who call it home - the current Prince of Arcot, Dalit writer and activist P Sivakami, superstar Vikram and karate-expert K Seshadri, among others. In their words come alive key aspects of the city - the fine beaches along the Bay of Bengal, Fort St. George, coconut and mango trees, jasmine stalls, cricket fever, classical music and dance, the twin temptations of idli and dosai, temple crowds and radical political movements.
Chaturvedi Badrinath (1933‒2010), a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award, 2009, for his work The Mahābhārata: An Inquiry in the Human Condition, was a passionate scholar of Indian philosophy, strikingly original in his approach. An Indian Administrative Service officer for 31 years, he delivered lectures on the concept of dharma and its application in modern times for which he drew extensively from the Mahabharata. In 1995, he was invited by The Times of India to contribute essays on Indian philosophy and thought. In the form of lucid discourses for the layperson, these dealt with dharma as the foundation of civilization. Ranging over perceptions of the self and the other; different ways of ordering society in Jainism, Islam, and Christianity; the paradox of sex; the roots of violence; and the quest for truth and peace, these essays gained wide acclaim and popularity. Badrinath’s daughter, Tulsi Badrinath, brings these essays together to present the reader with a book that explains the complex ideas of Indian philosophy in simple and accessible language.
Drawing from the work of academics and practitioners from ten states across the country, this edited volume showcases and synthesises the diversity and richness of efforts to understand and act on the social determinants of health in India, the conditions in which we are born, grow, live work and age. Such an effort is salient in the current era of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which have foregrounded the issue of equity and the need for a comprehensive, multi-sectoral agenda for health and development. In India, particularly in the last decade, there have been myriad efforts to more critically theorise and intervene in areas with bearing on health, like conflict, nutrition or urbanisation, or to address the concerns of vulnerable groups like women, children and the elderly. From these efforts emerge lessons of convergence for academic and policymaking institutions in India who are looking to operationalise and bring life to the SDG agenda in India and other Low and Middle Income Country settings. The book comprises eleven chapters and six short commentaries that appear in conversation with each other, as well as an annexure of validated, ready-to-use indicators for monitoring of social determinants of health.
About the Book MICHIEL BAAS BRINGS ALIVE A WORLD OF MEN SCULPTING BODIES, REDEFINING MASCULINITIES AND CONFRONTING THEIR VULNERABILITIES IN THE GYMS OF URBAN INDIA. The gyms of urban 'new India' are intriguing spaces. While they cater largely to well-off clients, these shiny, modern institutions also hold the promise of upward mobility for the personal trainers who work there. By improving their English, 'upgrading' their dressing style and developing a deeper understanding of the lives of their upmarket customers, they strategise to climb the middle-class ladder. Their lean, muscular bodies—which Bollywood has set the tone for are crucial to this. Diverging from an older masculine ideal represented by pehlwani wrestlers, these bodies not only communicate (sexual) attractiveness, but also professionalism, control and even cosmopolitanism. With the gym aspiring to be a safe space for women, trainers must also find a way to break with the toxic masculinity that dominates life outside. Yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Class barriers are less permeable than they appear. The use of bodily capital to breach them is more fraught with danger than one might anticipate. And the profession is riddled with pitfalls and contradictions. Michiel Baas has spent a decade studying gyms, trainers and bodybuilders, and finds in them a new way to investigate India. He walks us through the homes and workspaces of these men - yes, they are almost all men - to bodybuilding competitions and also into their most intimate worlds of ambitions, desires and struggles. An unusual study of an unusual subject, Baas unveils a fascinating world, hidden in plain sight.
In this anthropological history, Mary E. Hancock examines the politics of public memory in the southern Indian city of Chennai. Once a colonial port, Chennai is now poised to become a center for India's "new economy" of information technology, export processing, and back-office services. State and local governments promote tourism and a heritage-conscious cityscape to make Chennai a recognizable "brand" among investment and travel destinations. Using a range of textual, visual, architectural, and ethnographic sources, Hancock grapples with the question of how people in Chennai remember and represent their past, considering the political and economic contexts and implications of those memory practices. Working from specific sites, including a historic district created around an ancient Hindu temple, a living history museum, neo-traditional and vernacular architecture, and political memorials, Hancock examines the spatialization of memory under the conditions of neoliberalism.
Once upon a time by the sea, there was a story - and another and another - and some wandered into these pages to make up a city. So meet, among others, a travel guide who falls for a French tourist, a rice merchant with Kollywood dreams, a god whose editor proves elusive, a portly musical lawyer caught in a noir plot, and a man in search of family in the Great Madras Flood.Find yourself, among other places, in Town, at that gastronomic oxymoron, the Udipi cafe, in Velachery, looking for pot or maybe for love, on Kaanum Pongal day all across Madras, even in a fast car on East Coast Road, fleeing the city - till it lures you back with its lovely lies.It's all here: the salt in the breeze, the eternal summer, the swing of the sea. It's Madras on your mind.
Since the 1990s, literary and queer studies scholars have eschewed Marxist and Foucauldian critique and hailed the reparative mode of criticism as a more humane and humble way of approaching literature and culture. The reparative turn has traveled far beyond the academy, influencing how people imagine justice, solidarity, and social change. In The Ruse of Repair, Patricia Stuelke locates the reparative turn's hidden history in the failed struggle against US empire and neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s. She shows how feminist, antiracist, and anti-imperialist liberation movements' visions of connection across difference, practices of self care, and other reparative modes of artistic and cultural production have unintentionally reinforced forms of neoliberal governance. At the same time, the US government and military, universities, and other institutions have appropriated and depoliticized these same techniques to sidestep addressing structural racism and imperialism in more substantive ways. In tracing the reparative turn's complicated and fraught genealogy, Stuelke questions reparative criticism's efficacy in ways that will prompt critics to reevaluate their own reading practices.
These essays engage with themes and arguments from the oeuvre of Andre Béteille, ranging from changing patterns of stratification and policies of protective discrimination to the place of the individual in Indian history and threats to secularism.