Vocabulary of human emotions
Based on extensive research, Prof Brene Brown of the University of Houston tells us that part of why most of us are stressed is because we are limited in our understanding of emotions to be able to manage and regulate them, as vastness of human emotions and experiences are grossly expressed as mad, sad, and glad. And these three limit us to understand our emotional experience. We need emotional granularity for nuanced understanding, and to quote philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'the limits of language mean the limits of my world'. In
Atlas of the Heart (Vermilon/PRHIPL, 296 pp, Rs 1250) Brown has found 87 human emotions to enrich our vocabulary with more power to better articulate and understand our emotional experience. Having access to the right words alone can open up the entire universe to us, and help us get over quite a bit of what we may not need. It is a virtual tour de force on human emotions, revealing more than what we may know about ourselves.
Envisioning future farming
Provocative and somewhat outrageous, it is hard not to agree with writer-activist George Monbiot’s proposition of reinventing our food system because farming has emerged as the greatest cause of environmental destruction. Having got us on a worse diet, longer hours of work, greater risk of starvation, crowded living conditions, increased susceptibility to disease, new forms of insecurity and uglier forms of hierarchy, modern agriculture might well be the greatest crime in human history. Packed with factful case studies, Monbiot argues that it is still possible to feed the world without devouring the planet.
Regenesis (Allen Lane, 339 pp, Rs 999) is a clarion call to unlock the farming system that has made over 800 million go to bed hungry while demand for growing food continues. Drawing on astonishing research, the book opens up a vital debate on how to value and protect most precious substance on which we’re so reliant and yet is so little talked about – soil.
Antidote to intellectual fragmentation
With seven decades of her colossal literary career, Margaret Atwood’s occasional pieces and essays are no less imaginative and inspiring. While her milestone ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ remains a literary masterpiece on women’s reproductive rights amidst intersectional failings,
Burning Questions (Chatto & Windus, 475 pp, Rs 999) has 65 non-fiction pieces written by her over a period of 17 years which are wide in scope and reach. From literature to human rights, and from feminism to environment, Atwood provides direct access to her thinking and feeling on the challenges confronting us. It is not all bad, as she swings between hope and despair. Written in her characteristically tongue-in-cheek style,
Burning Questions is a serious treatise on questions that must be addressed if we care about our own human wishes, and wish very hard for our own future survival.
Ability to change
Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday, 390 pp, Rs 699) sits at the intersection of fiction and non-fiction, blurring the imagined from the real, in narrating the story of Elizabeth Zott who becomes the face of a cooking show ‘Supper at Six’ through which she educates her viewers in chemistry, self-worth and agency. Zott, the single mother and a chemist, triumphs through a sexist 1950s establishment with hard work and pragmatism and uses the media available to women of her era to new ends – daring them to change the status quo. Funny and furious, it makes for interesting and compelling reading as an average woman wade through the unpredictability of life to become acceptable as a change agent. Such is her influence that Vice President Lyndon Johnson, after watching the show, opined to a persistent reporter ‘I think you ought to write less and watch TV more’. It is no exaggeration to say that when Elizabeth Zott finished cooking, an entire nation sat down to eat.
Veiled resistance
Hijab is a burning question of our times. What is more, the issue of unveiling and veiling has been initiated by Muslim women. The lingering question is: whether it is women’s sartorial choice of wearing a hijab or it is linked to religious and patriarchal enforcement. There are no easy answers though, as hijab gets new meanings under changing political and social contexts. In this timely collection of essays in
The Hijab (Simon&Schuster, 240 pp, Rs. 599), the writers explore the politics of Muslim women’s attire as a site of contestation. It goes without saying that the meaning of veiling is neither stable nor singular, irreducible to any one reason or justification.
By sourcing diverse opinions and perspectives, the editors have left it to the imagination of the reader to draw emotional underpinnings of hijab as a manifest personal practice that is up against private challenge triggered by public gaze. Given the grave political contestation on the subject, the book provides a variety of historical, ethnographic, and political perspectives to get a better sense of its politics. The Hijab makes a significant contribution to understanding veiling in the context of the wider community, and the very idea of citizenship itself. Only a well-informed public discourse on the subject can resolve the simmering discontent.
War yet to be won
It has been five decades since an all-time classic film Anand hit the screen, and Richard Nixon had signed the landmark National Cancer Act to fund research on combatting cancer. Far from winning the war over cancer, it has become the emperor of all maladies with an estimated 18 million new cases diagnosed each year. A decade from now, however, the global burden is projected to grow to 21 million new cancer cases with no less than 13 million succumbing to it. Tragically, Anand’s inspiring tale of celebrating life amidst brutal certainty remains perhaps the only mantra for all those who may have to traverse their own journeys through the dreaded illness, then and now.
A New Deal for Cancer (Public Affairs, 404 pp, US$30) while detailing the ways in which our deeper failing as a society have held us back from winning the war over cancer offers bold new plans to win humanity’s battle against the dreaded condition. All said, the war against cancer continues to remain humanity’s most ambitious undertaking.
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