Shahid Alam

Days with Dinko and other Memories, written by Monica Chanda, and edited and published by her daughter Malavika Karlekar, is a

I was never an autograph hunter. Never felt the urge, or the thrill, or the bragging right, or any of the rapid heart-thumping emotions

Rada was a lot of hard work interspersed with a good deal of pressure releasers. Talk about the right doses of work and play—RADA

This book's subtitle, Sketches from my Life gestures helpfully at the book's content for it is about the full and colorful life lived by its

We were out in the park, frolicking—all sixteen of us. Well, sort of! We were gamboling all right, but this was a part of the Alexander Technique exercise, something any casual observer in the park might not have understood.

Bret and I entered a cavernous RADA room, and not a moment too soon! What seemed like a thousand pairs of eyes stared at us as we

Bret and I were marching resolutely towards our Holy Grail, waiting for us only a couple of hundred meters or so away, though still out

Almost in front of the entrance to, and egress from, the Goodge Street subway station on Tottenham Court Road stood a coin-

Wars, great and small, have been a part of recorded human history. Given the varied elements that go toward the making of

I guess I was bitten by the acting bug in my mother's womb. Otherwise, how does one explain my fascination for the theater, theatrics,

If only Job Charnock was prescient enough to know that some three hundred years after his death a thriller would be written based on

Light, heavy, or both? History offers the reader a choice among all three, or a combination of them.

Reviewing a book that traces the history of Bangladesh from ancient times in just over 400 pages has been, for me, a formidable experience, especially since a great deal of material has been covered within those pages. Almost as a fiendish twist, for a fairly lengthy portion, the book is as much a Reader's Digest version of Indian history as it is of Bangladesh. However, when one considers the subtitle of the book, A Subcontinental Civilisation, one can acknowledge

If you grew up as a teenager in the 1960s (and in the 1950s, or in the early1970s), and had knowledge and experience of the life led by the upper crust society in then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), going through Niaz Zaman's The Maidens' Club might very well bring about a sense of déjà vu or nostalgia, or both, in you.

Going through Crafted by History: An Interpretive Review of the Emergence of Bangladesh was a perplexing experience in view of the