Of Cricket, Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture

The eight essays that comprise this book offer a 'dissenting, futurist, and hermeneutic' perspective on Indian civilization and various aspects of the modern cultural history of India. They explore the national obsession with the Guiness Book of Records and the paranoia over VIP security, the politics of sexuality as embodied in the lifestyles of hijras and the nationalist fervour over the nuclear tests. There are essays on the impossibility of the Other in the Hindi film, on the World Cup of Cricket, on Gandhi's life as an ecological treatise, and on Gandhi's experiments with celibate sexuality.