Intriguing India: The Alluring North by Hugh and Colleen Gantzer

Harry Potter’s Hogwarts is a magical place. But it’s an unreal one: it does not exist. Hugh and Colleen Gantzer have discovered magical places in India that are real and accessible.

What is the origin of the fear that a monster lies beneath the surface of the high, blue, lake of Pangong Tso? Who was the Englishman who carved out his own kingdom in the Himalayas? What gourmet dish was created by a ruler to feed his famished subjects? What is the epic tale of the white shrine where the weapons of a martial saint are revered?

This is not a travelogue, or a guide-book, or even a retelling of ancient folklore. It is, however, a little bit of all three. It is a conversation with two well-informed people who have travelled, and questioned, and analysed. They are convinced that every legend, every custom has grown out of a hard-core of fact, a historical event whose impact was so great that it was branded into the racial memory of the community. It then became encased in multiple layers of myth.

In ‘The Alluring North’, while describing their experiences in their gently evocative style, Hugh and Colleen Gantzer also uncover many fascinating gems of other, enduring, realities that glitter within our ‘intriguing India’.

Hugh and Colleen Gantzer live their dream. Colleen had always wanted to fly and she did pilot a plane in the Swiss Alps while Hugh sat behind saying a rosary, just in case! Hugh had longed to see those faraway places with their strange-sounding names so he joined the Indian Navy. Hugh took premature retirement when he was the Judge Advocate of the Southern Naval Area and Hugh and Colleen decided to become a travel-writer-photographer team.

Suddenly, things changed. They found themselves surfing on the great travel wave that was sweeping across the world. In quick succession they launched India’s first travel column carried in all editions of a national daily on the editorial page. They hosted fifty-two weekly episodes of India’s first nation-wide TV travel show, wrote the first travel scripts for dot.coms, won national and international awards, toured India and the world as guests of eager tourism organisations. They have, possibly, visited, photographed and written about more places in India than anyone else in the long history of our land.

Once, a greatly revered maternal uncle, who had just retired as India’s Naval Chief, had asked them, “How long more will you continue to travel?” That was before they were invited to a winter ball in Vienna. Today, for six months every year, when they’re not in their Victorian cottage in the oak woods of the Himalayas, they’re still travelling…and they’re still having a ball.

RETHINKING MODERNITY Towards Post Rational Architecture by Jaimini Mehta

Has the project to usher in Modernity run its full course and is now ready to be replaced by something called Post-Modern? Re-examining the very idea of Modernity in architecture, and drawing from a number of diverse sources such as philosophy, social science, art and technology, Prof. Mehta argues that the normal historical progression of architectural thought and production suffered an epistemological break in mid-18th century, caused by the separation between architecture and engineering and resulted in increasing rationalization of architecture. Critical writings of several post-Renaissance scholars and academicians aided this process. Prof. Mehta refers to this as “Academic Architecture”. While the pre-Renaissance scholars were content to codify the practice of architecture, the new writings actively sought to construct an identity of architecture to align it with modern science and industry. The overwhelming need to validate architecture from the logico-mathematical perspective favored the cerebral over the existential qualities of architecture. Prof. Mehta asserts that alternatives to the rationalist and positivist narratives always existed in the West and also in several non-Western cultures but the very strong “foregrounding” of Rationalism confined them to the academia. His insightful analysis indicates that the contours of Post Rational architecture are already visible in the works of several contemporary architects. THE AUTHOR Prof. Jaimini Mehta is a practicing architect and an academician based in Vadodara, India. He studied architecture at M.S. University of Vadodara, and at University of Pennsylvania in the Louis Kahn Studio. He went on to work in the offices of Louis Kahn and Mitchell/Giurgola Associates in Philadelphia. Returning back to India in 1975, he set up his own practice and taught at a number of Indian as well as American universities. He was an Adjunct Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, New York and at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India. He also worked as Head of the Schools of Architecture at Vadodara and Goa. At present he is an Honorary Director of the Vadodara based “Centre for the Study of Urbanism and Architecture” which he instituted in 2006. He contributes regularly in the ongoing discourse on architecture through articles in Indian as well as international journals. Among his many writings is the book, Louis Kahn, Architect co-authored with Romaldo Giurgola and published in 1975. Specifications: Size: 10 inches X 9 inches Binding: Hardcover with Dust Jacket Paper: 150 gsm, matt coated Page extent: 156 Photographs: 140 ISBN: 978-81-89738-72-3

Invisible City

INVISIBLE CITY By Rakhshanda Jalil Illustrations by Premola Ghose Photographs by DN Chaudhuri

I asked my soul, what is Delhi?
She replied: The world is the body
and Delhi its soul.

Invisible City: The Hidden Monuments of Delhi explores this other Delhi—the little-known, seldom-visited and largely unheard-of, the Delhi that has been rendered practically invisible.

World Wildlife Week: Conservation begins with understanding

As the world observes the “World Wildlife Week” between October 1 and 7 there couldn’t be any better time to know about our surroundings particularly the areas where wildlife in our country thrives. Needless to say, wildlife is an integral part of our ecosystem and any damage to it could directly impact our lives. Let us give wildlife our care and it is wise to begin with understanding their environment. After all, it is their world too!

Niyogi Books has published a book on Sunderbans, the world’s largest mangrove expanse and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Sunderbans is also the home to more than 250 tigers in the country. This book is titled SUNDERBANS: The Mystic Mangrove by Biswajit Roy Chowdhury & Pradeep Vyas.

Brihadeeswara temple, 1000 years later!

In this fascinating study in words and images Pradeep Chakravarthy and Vikram Sathyanathan narrate the cultural history of Thanjavur starting from its early days of grandeur in the Chola empire when the Chola king Raja Raja I built the Rajarajeswaram Temple now known as Brihadeeswara temple which celebrates its 1000th year of consecration in 2010.

They weave together known