Whether it is the chitter chatter ambience of a 21st century beauty parlour, the pretentious world of Marxist intellectuals or the nouveau riche middle class of urban India, Nandita C Puri’s eye misses nothing.

A coffee table collection of global recipes, stories that unveil hidden truths, a witty discovery of a state…Verve presents new reads

Touching Tale

“My daughter will equal a hundred sons,” proclaims Pratap Chandra Sen, when little Indulata comes into this world, the feudal world of 19th century Khulna in present day Bangladesh. Much against the wishes of his wife, he brings up Indulata like a boy, educating her and allowing her to gambol freely with her male cousins. Unfortunately, Indu’s liberated upbringing comes to an abrupt halt when her father dies of a sudden heart attack in the arms of a nautch girl and her mother vents her spleen on the hapless eight-year-old child by marrying her off to a twice-widowed, 48-year-old. Basing her story loosely on the memoirs of Haimabati Ghosh, one of the first women doctors of Bengal, Nandita C Puri weaves a touching tale about a child widow who rises above the exploitative circumstances of her life to become a skilled doctor in the chauvinistic set-up of her times. The British Raj, the reformative Brahmo movement, social prejudices of the period, the emerging role of independent women…these form the backdrop of a deeply engrossing and inspiring tale that is one of the nine stories of Puri’s recently released book, nine on nine.

- Alpana Chowdhury

Karnataka Kaleidoscope

The Open Eyes – A Journey through Karnataka opened my eyes to the fact that Dom Moraes had a wonderful sense of humour. His account of a journey through Karnataka that began in 1976 and continued intermittently over seven years comes alive all these decades later thanks to his witty descriptions of droll incidents and encounters that took place in the course of his travels through the innards of the state.

My favourite is his experience at the Rani Chenamma Residential School for Girls near Kittur, where he was expected to take the salute as rain-drenched students marched past the dais he shared with their earnest and exacting principal.

-Ammu Joseph

Diverse Flavours

A gourmet offering from The Times of India group diehard vegetarians have cause to celebrate: Around the World in Eighty Plates, the plush coffee table publication, presents the joys of a holistic vegetarian diet. Even before I tried out any of its recipes, I read the book, cover to cover, impressed by the loving care with which it has been put together. For sentimental reasons, the book – “a votive vegetarian offering from The Times of India group” – is extra special. It is, as the blurb on the inside cover says, “inspired by a young food lover’s epiphanic understanding of ‘green’ cuisine”. It is a tribute from Meera Jain
to her late son, Vardhman’s passion for food: “Vardhman would never shy away from experimenting and loved eating the finest food.... He wanted his palate to honour the subtleties of all the high cuisines.” Thus, was born, in the teenager’s mind, the germinal idea of a book that gave a twist to Jules Verne’s famed journey around the globe.

- S.J.S

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