Books like Nine Rupees an Hour

How would you deal with surviving a disastrous flood that swallows your childhood home? Krupa Ge does this by channeling her rage and anguish into a book. Writing about the devastating floods that hit her hometown Chennai, in southern India, in 2015, she deftly weaves her own experience of being stranded in the flood, worrying about her family, into the larger narrative of state apathy and culpability. At the core, this is a book about environmental injustice. The poorest in the city were the worst affected, losing family and all their possessions. And yet it was also the poor who showed extraordinary resilience and compassion: the fishermen who rescued stranded and recovered bodies or sanitation workers themselves affected but who turned up to clean the city.

Through meticulous research, the book unravels the causes of this man-made disaster, mincing no words in holding the state responsible for what it was… show more.

This is a small book. But in its own way, it is rich and detailed when it comes to how profoundly it draws out the relationship between the forest and the Kadars, an indigenous community residing in South India. The authors visiting the forest are researchers from the city, but here in the forest their teachers are the Kadars whose very name means “people of the forest.” With a touch of humour the book, wonderfully illustrated, is an ode to the traditional ecological knowledge, powers of observation, and story-telling skills of the Kadars. The simple activity of walking on a forest path with the Kadars is a revelation of the wealth of knowledge they possess and their relationship with the plants, animals, and even spirits. This is knowledge no ecological textbook can provide, but this knowledge is immeasurable in its value.

I have two pets cats, and my relationship with them is pretty straightforward—I care for them to the point of being obsessive about meeting their every need. Unlike me, the communities described in this book have a range of relationships with the non-human species they share space with. Care of course, and kinship, but also relationships of conflict and violence. Complex themes such as animal ethics, Hindu nationalism, the politics of exclusion, conservation, and even inter-species love are written about against the backdrop of the everyday lives of the villagers. The binary of domestic cow and the wild bear and the pigs that fall in between are all a part of this narrative of the tangled relationship between humans and animals. For those of us who balk at reading anthropological works, this book is a pleasure and easy read for the relatable style of writing.

Who among us has not looked at our published academic paper and felt that tinge of sadness at so much left unsaid? This book is about all that is left unsaid—an entertaining account of the many stories behind the data collected for research that does not make it into our sanitised published papers. Traversing different parts of North India, two young women carrying out conservation research encounter not just nature but also opinionated men, corrupt officials, and a bureaucracy that worked at a frustrating snail’s pace. The accounts in the book are hilarious and relatable to anyone who has done field research, ecological or otherwise in India, where data collection is interspersed with memorable and amusing everyday conversations with a range of people. This is a book I would have loved to write myself. And I hope I still can someday, in my own way.

It seems we don’t have as many opportunities to read fables as we grow up and this is a loss. That is why The Story of a Goat is such a wonderful chance to remember the power of fables and allegories. This book taught me about our human capacities for cross-species compassion and love. The simple writing style and pacing of the story can sort of sneak up on you as you develop sincere feelings for the main character, a small black goat. Additionally, the back story of why Murugan wrote this particular book is fascinating and adds such depth to the reading experience. 

“Do you understand the sadness of geography?” is the epigraph by Michael Ondaatje to this short story collection, I would ask the same.

Memory and desire are central emotions in the lives of South Indian immigrants who move. The sense of dislocation belongs equally to the ones who go and the ones who stay and is woven beautifully in these stories.

In one, brochures about marvels in a retired home in Tamil Nadu are flaunted by a daughter who lives in Atlanta and cannot take care of her mother in India. The mother had encouraged the daughter to seek fortune in America but longs for the old life when the children did not move away.

The contradictions are powerfully rendered in all the stories and they speak to me.

It is often hard to get our minds around poverty and the scarcity of resources that affect people’s lives. This is especially true of rural life in the Global South. This is a highly accessible book written by an eminent journalist in India and is considered to be a classic text on rural poverty. It also illuminates the failures of governance including the programs and policies that seek to help poor and marginalized communities in countries like India.

I read this book on my way home from India about 9 years ago, after a women’s leadership conference in Bangalore at the Art of Living Foundation International Headquarters. 

It was the perfect supplement to the theme of the conference – supporting leaders. Management Mantras had a list of strategies and tips that I still use today, and greatly credit to my success. One of the best pieces of advice was the vacation schedule: 3-day weekend every month; 1 week every quarter; 2 weeks every 6 months. 

These breaks allow us to be rejuvenated and refreshed so we catch burnout before we burn up! It is an easy read, very well written, and a great resource no matter where you are in your professional journey or industry.

Lisa Barrett is one of the most respected researchers in psychology today in part because she is unafraid to debunk the comforting misconceptions we have about our minds, and especially about our emotions. Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain dispels myths about emotion, and about our reptilian brain, among others. One of the most important lessons in the book is that your brain is not for thinking—it is primarily for myriad other processes of maintaining internal organs, blood oxygenation, energy consumption level, balance, and for performing a host of other tasks. But for Barrett, it’s not just about debunking. She has a compelling vision of how the brain actually does work. Not only does she have deep expertise in human behavior, brain anatomy, evolution, and neurochemistry, her vision of how our minds work is also described in energetic prose.

We started in the snow-capped peaks of Davos and end in the sun-baked forested hills of Niyamgiri in Odisha, where Adivasis (India’s “tribals” or indigenous groups) are fighting land seizures by multinational mining companies like Vedanta. This remarkable book, co-authored by anthropologist and regional expert Felix Padel (who happens to be Charles Darwin’s grandson) and activist and filmmaker Samarendra Das, shows how such distant spaces are connected. It brings attention to the commodity chain of aluminum, from the bauxite in the ground to the finished industrial and consumer products all around us, and faithfully captures both corporate strategies and indigenous perspectives (a rare feat). Now in its second edition, Out of this Earth continues to inspire a deeper understanding of capitalism as a total system and provides hope to those challenging it.