From Koyra to Kolkata - Bangladeshi Climate Migrants' Journey from loss and hope-Nidhi Dugar Kundalia

After Cyclone Aila forced Safrat’s family to leave the Sundarbans and cross into India, the search for a new home brought its own struggles. In a Kolkata slum, her daughter Nur finds moments of freedom beside a neglected pond, while Minaz dreams of returning to school, finding a better job and paying for her father’s medicines. Through their lives, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia explores the realities of climate displacement, the hardships of rebuilding a life away from home and the hopes that endure despite uncertainty. Read the full article. Link in the comments. .

When the air hits your brain-tales of neurosurgery - Frank Vertosick Jr

I finished this book at two in the morning with tears on my face, which I did not expect from a memoir about brain surgery. Frank Vertosick Jr. wrote about tumors and aneurysms and drills slipping in the operating room, and somehow he also wrote about what it means to be human. The title comes from the first rule of neurosurgery: "You ain't never the same when the air hits your brain" . By the last page, I understood that the rule applies to readers too. Here are the five lessons that stayed with me: 1. The surgeon is not a god, and that's the whole point. Vertosick starts as a terrified medical student and ends as a chief resident, and he hides nothing along the way. His first attempt at inserting a nose tube fails miserably. He describes the "surgical psychopath"—the mask surgeons wear to survive, the way humanity gets "placed under general anesthesia" so you can keep cutting . But he doesn't glorify that mask. He shows you what it costs. When a colleague's hand slips during an aneurysm clipping and a young man's brain bleeds, the colleague never speaks of it again . The lesson isn't that surgeons are cold. It's that they have to fight to stay warm. 2. Failure teaches more than success ever will. Vertosick writes about his mistakes with a honesty that made me wince. He describes the first death that was solely his fault. He describes procedures that went wrong, patients who didn't make it, nights he spent desperately trying to keep an infant alive only to learn his superior knew the child would die and thought the experience would be "valuable" . He doesn't dress any of it up. He lets you see the sweat and the fear and the guilt. And that's why the book works. You trust a man who tells you the worst things about himself. 3. Compassion and competence are not enemies. The chapter about Rebecca, a six-week-old infant with a terminal brain tumor, broke me. The nurses rotated her care to avoid getting attached. Her parents stopped coming. Vertosick kept visiting. He writes: "I would never be as important to anyone as I was to Rebecca that night" . His "façade of surgical psychopathy" cracked to pieces . He learned that you can hold a life in your hands and still let your heart break. That surgery and sympathy are not mutually exclusive. That the best doctors are the ones who never fully lose the ability to feel. 4. The brain is a mystery, and humility is the only sane response. Vertosick explains complicated procedures and anatomy without ever making you feel stupid, but he never pretends he understands everything. He writes about the brain with awe. He knows that a millimeter in the wrong direction changes a person forever. He knows that "brain surgery isn't the most intellectually demanding occupation on earth" despite the mystique . He knows that the human body is a fragile, flawed, miraculous thing. Reading him, I felt the same thing I felt reading Oliver Sacks: that the mind is the strangest place in the universe, and that anyone who claims to have mastered it is lying. 5. The ending will wreck you, and you'll be grateful. I won't spoil the epilogue. I'll just say that Vertosick wrote this book knowing something about his own future that he doesn't reveal until the final pages. When I got there, I had to put the book down and sit with it. The New York Times called this book "dramatic, moving, and utterly fascinating" . That's accurate but insufficient. It's a book about a man learning to be a surgeon and learning, along the way, how to be a person. It's funny in places that shouldn't be funny. It's devastating in places that sneak up on you. And it's honest in a way that most medical memoirs are too afraid to be. Read it if you want to understand what happens behind the operating room doors. Read it if you've ever trusted a doctor with someone you love. Read it if you want to laugh and then sit in silence for a while. It's a brilliant, bruised, beautiful book. And yes, you'll never be the same after the air hits your brain. BOOK: https://link.amazon/B01Yv3cbA

Raghu Rai - Book of animal photos

To depict animals via photographs is not simply to document them – it is to open a doorway into something older than memory, larger than logic. Animals have always been more than their biology." https://scroll.in/.../long-before-we-named-the-gods-we... An excerpt from Maneka Gandhi’s Introduction to ‘Animals’, by

. HarperCollins India #bookexcerpt

Food Memoir by Nilanjana Debnath

We are happy to announce the launch of our new series, Genre Studies, which explores how literary forms evolve across global and Indian traditions in response to changing cultural, social and political contexts. The series is edited by Nandana Dutta, who teaches at the Department of English, Gauhati University, and Krishna Sen, former Professor and Head of English at the University of Calcutta. Our first release in this series is

, Assistant Professor, English, at the ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education, Hyderabad. This book examines the world of the "foodoir”, exploring how cooking, eating and feeding serve as profound modes of storytelling. By bridging literary studies with sociology, anthropology and cultural theory, it unpacks how culinary practices shape who we are across Western and South Asian writings. Grab your copy today: https://orientblackswan.com/Food-Memoir/details?obsin=4319 Also available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.in/dp/9369736522 #OrientBlackSwan #OrientBlackSwanReads #NewRelease #GenreStudies #FoodMemoir #Foodoir #SouthAsianLiterature #LiteraryStudies #CulturalStudies

Geoffrey Galt Harpham's The Ends of Race is a new history of the scientific inquiry into race. Now available (5 January UK pub).

Learn more: https://hubs.ly/Q04CjCgc0 The attempt to define the concept of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is often described as a corrupt “pseudo-science,” but in this strikingly original account, Geoffrey Galt Harpham describes the inquiry into race as a serious scientific project undertaken by some of the leading figures of the time. In a “skeletal history” of this project, Harpham tracks the rise and fall of racial science, focusing on the central role played by craniology, or the study of skulls, in key debates in Germany, the United States, and France. Emerging at the end of the eighteenth century as a way of thinking about human variation, the concept of race became entangled in an extraordinarily wide range of scientific, philosophical, theological, and political debates about issues ranging from the place of humanity in the natural world to the rationales for colonization and slavery. But at the end of the nineteenth century, a number of prominent scientists came together to announce the failure of the century-long attempt to define race or even to locate racial markers in the human body—only to see the concept taken up by others, including W.E.B. Du Bois, who sought to preserve the concept as essential to the nonscientific ends of solidarity and identity. With this probing and vivid narrative account of the scientific inquiry into human variation, Harpham provides a new way of approaching the history of race, introduces a host of previously little-known figures, explores the larger contexts and inner dynamics of the discourse on race, and questions the ends that the concept of race serves today.

WITHOUT FEAR OR FAVOUR — A LIFE DEDICATED TO JUSTICE - Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul

WITHOUT FEAR OR FAVOUR — A LIFE DEDICATED TO JUSTICE!** 📖 Discover the remarkable journey of **

**, one of India's distinguished judicial figures, in his compelling memoir *Without Fear or Favour*, written with Jay Vinayak Ojha. From landmark judgments to the challenges of upholding constitutional values, explore a fascinating perspective on India's judicial system. 🇮🇳 📚 **Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul: Without Fear or Favour** 🔥 **NOW AVAILABLE AT JUST ₹499!** 🛒 **Buy exclusively at inkandchai.in** ✨ A must-read for law students, legal professionals, UPSC aspirants, and anyone interested in law, justice, and Indian democracy.

Forces of Creolization: Glissant and a Decolonial Feminist Aperture" by Ruthanne Soohee Kim!

Happy #pubday to "

Forces of Creolization reads Édouard Glissant’s poetic and philosophical work through a feminist, decolonial lens, foregrounding creolization as a force of resistance, relationality, and submerged becoming. Drawing on Caribbean poststructuralism, Black feminist thought, and Global South epistemologies, Ruthanne Soohee Kim unveils a method of reading Glissant that centers diffraction, opacity, and errantry—not merely as metaphors but as political and poetic strategies. Reading Glissant alongside Luce Irigaray, Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, and Kamau Brathwaite, Kim shows how creolization resists colonial genealogies, racial essentialism, and patriarchal closure. With her close readings of Glissant’s novels, essays, and theoretical writings, Kim theorizes the abyss, the open boat, and the Medusing shoreline as sites where historical trauma becomes creative insurgency. Here, chaos, revolt, and carnival emerge as generative forces of world-making. Forces of Creolization offers an interdisciplinary framework for rethinking kinship, identity, and futurity, and contributes a necessary feminist aperture to Caribbean thought. "A brilliant and highly engaging book on the semio-linguistic foundations of Edouard Glissant’s complex, extensive, and submarine poetics. Kim's analysis is original, distinct, and fills an important void in the literature." —Paget Henry, Brown University #postcolonialism #CriticalRaceTheory #feminisme #diaspora #BlackFeminist #caribbeanstudies #theory #frenchcaribbean #antiblackness #poetic #frantzfanon #Martinique #tidalectics #errantry #luceirigaray #edouardglissant https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10231