Mainstream Weekly

Bata: A multinational that stole Indian hearts | M.R. Narayan Swamy

M R Narayan Swamy — 2026-10-07T23:47:08Z

BOOK REVIEW Batanagar: A Personal History of India's Forgotten Company Town
by Paramita Sen
Pan Macmillan India Pages: xxi + 225 It goes to the credit of Bata that it merged so beautifully with Indian ethos that millions for a long time never suspected that it was a multinational from Europe.
Bata's quiet birth in India during the British rule, its steady expansion both before and after the country's independence, and its closeness to the icons of the freedom movement gave the (…)

- 2026 / Book Review

Platform Cooperatives as a Path Beyond Corporate Control: Review of Trebor Scholz's Own This! | K Sahadevan

K. Sahadevan — 2026-09-19T23:17:55Z

BOOK REVIEW Own This! How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet by R. Trebor Scholz Verso 2023 If one were asked to select books that share ideas conducive to the systemic transition demanded by our times, Trebor Scholz's Own This!: How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet would certainly rank among the first on the list. While I have read numerous books this year that accurately depict the problems and crises facing the present day, (…)

- 2026 / Book Review

How Erdogan Turned Turkey into a Fiefdom | M.R. Narayan Swamy

M R Narayan Swamy — 2026-08-25T03:44:33Z

BOOK REVIEW From Life Itself Turkey and Istanbul in the Age of Erdogan
by Suzy Hansen
Profile Books When you read a political biography of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, you feel you are discovering modern-day dictators around the world. It is not a surprise that he once boasted: “Now there are only two experienced leaders in the world. They are myself and Vladimir Putin.”
American journalist Suzy Hansen also puts Erdogan in the same bracket as Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping – men who insist on (…)

- 2026 / Book Review

Learning from the past of India's forests | Dinesh C Sharma

2026-08-15T09:12:54Z

BOOK REVIEW India's Forests: Revisiting Nature and History Arupjyoti Saikia & Mahesh Rangarajan (Editors) Vintage 343 pages Price 999 Forests have been at the centre of human life since ancient times. They are part of history, archaeology, myths, culture, livelihoods, politics, commerce, and much more. Forests are closely inter-linked with all activities in the modern era – food, fuel, water, energy, development, transportation, human health, recreation and so on. Their extent, quality (…)

- 2026 / Book Review

God's shadow over Mizoram peace | M.R. Narayan Swamy

M R Narayan Swamy — 2026-08-15T09:12:49Z

BOOK REVIEW
From Guerrilla Fighter to Chief Minister: A Memoir by Zoramthanga
Penguin/Eight; Pages: xvi + 443; Price: Rs 599 In an age when politicians take credit for everything they do even while spending the tax payers' money, it is heartening to see a guerrilla-turned-political leader give full marks to God for turning Mizoram from one of the most disturbed regions into India's most peaceful state.
Zoramthanga, a pioneer of the once feared Mizo National Front (MNF) who was later (…)

- 2026 / Book Review

Arun Shourie Tears Apart ‘Veer' Savarkar and his Myths | M.R. Narayan Swamy

2026-08-15T09:12:29Z

BOOK REVIEW The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts by Arun Shourie
Penguin/Viking Pages: xviii + 543; Price: Rs 999 Vinayak Damodar Savarkar bragged, exaggerated and even lied. When the Congress battled the British, he did not mind collaborating with the colonial masters. He was adept in spewing hate. Scholar and veteran journalist Arun Shourie says one has to in fact search hard for revolutionary acts that can be traced back to Savarkar. It is such a man who got the sobriquet ‘Veer' (Brave) (…)

- 2026 / Book Review

Cultural Transformation at the End of Soviet Socialism

2026-07-29T21:36:43Z

BOOK REVIEW The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse by Joseph Kellner
Cornell University Press 2025. 242 pp. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5017-8151-3 Reviewed by Margaret McCool
Joseph Kellner's monograph, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, offers a fresh and illuminating perspective on how ordinary Soviet citizens navigated the collapse of the Soviet Union by turning to new cultural phenomena to orient themselves to a rapidly changing (…)

- 2026 / Book Review

Prabhakaran's militarist strategy led to doom, says revealing book | M.R. Narayan Swamy

M R Narayan Swamy — 2026-07-14T18:11:10Z

The seeds for a miserable end to Velupillai Prabhakaran's Tamil Eelam dream were laid by the man himself — a long, long, long time ago.
This is the conclusion one draws after reading a brutally honest and at times painful sketch of the early years of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by one of Prabhakaran's earliest associates, Ganeshan Iyer.
The Tamil work, Porattahil Enadhu Pathivugal, was first published abroad in 2011, two years after Prabhakaran was slain. It was (…)

- 2026 / Book Review

Review of Shastri's Learning Across Continents: My Academic Odyssey | P. S. Jayaramu

P S Jayaramu — 2026-07-14T18:11:03Z

Book Review: Learning Across Continents: My Academic Odyssey, by Sandeep Shastri Writers Choice Publications Pvt Ltd. New Delhi, 2026, Pp.158, Price: Rs. 495. ISBN : 978-93-49389-26-7 Prof. Sandeep Shastri , who is a well known academician writing for decades on electoral poitics, federal relations and about the functioning of India's democratic institutions has penned a book about his academic assignments across the continents from 1993 to 2022. He refers to them as his academic odyssey. (…)

- 2026 / Book Review

Sustained from Below: Dalit Women and the Ambedkarite Movement's Limits of Liberation | Theertha Praveen Panachoor

2026-06-24T23:48:40Z

BOOK REVIEW 1. The Prisons We Broke, Baby Kamble, trans. Maya Pandit. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2008. 2. We Also Made History: Women in the Ambedkarite Movement, Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon, trans. Wandana Sonalkar. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2008. The history of the Ambedkarite movement in India has largely been written as a history of its leadership. Its constitutional achievements, its formal organisations and its founding figure are well documented. What has received far less attention is (…)

- 2026 / Book Review