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Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa (Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements)
by G. Arunima Patricia Hayes Premesh LaluThis book addresses emancipatory narratives from two main sites in the colonial world, the Indian and southern African subcontinents. Exploring how love and revolution interrelate, this volume is unique in drawing on theories of affect to interrogate histories of the political, thus linking love and revolution together. The chapters engage with the affinities of those who live with their colonial pasts: crises of expectations, colonial national convulsions, memories of anti-colonial solidarity, even shared radical libraries. It calls attention to the specific and singular way in which notions of ‘love of the world’ were born in a precise moment of anti-colonial struggle: a love of the world for which one would offer one’s life, and for which there had been little precedent in the history of earlier revolutions. It thus offers new ways of understanding the shifts in global traditions of emancipation over two centuries.
Love and Sex with Robots
by David Levy Adrian David Cheok Kate DevlinLove, marriage, and sex with robots? Not in a million years? Maybe a whole lot sooner! A leading expert in artificial intelligence, David Levy argues that the entities we once deemed cold and mechanical will soon become the objects of real companionship and human desire. He shows how automata have evolved and how human interactions with technology have changed over the years. Levy explores many aspects of human relationships—the reasons we fall in love, why we form emotional attachments to animals and virtual pets, and why these same attachments could extend to love for robots. Levy also examines how society's ideas about what constitutes normal sex have changed—and will continue to change—as sexual technology becomes increasingly sophisticated. Shocking, eye-opening, provocative, and utterly convincing, Love and Sex with Robots is compelling reading for anyone with an open mind.
Love and Sex with Robots: First And Second International Conferences, Lsr 2014, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, November 2014, Lsr 2016, London, Uk, December 2016, Revised Selected Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science #10237)
by David Levy Adrian David CheokThis book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Love and Sex with Robots, LSR 2017, held in December 2017, in London, UK. The 12 revised papers presented together with 2 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 83 submissions.One of the biggest challenges of the Love and Sex with Robots conference is to engage a wider scientific community in the discussions of the multifaceted topic, which has only recently established itself as an academic research topic within, but not limited to, the disciplines of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, robotics, biomedical science and robot ethics etc.
Love and Society: Special Social Forms and the Master Emotion (Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Emotions)
by Swen SeebachWhy does love matter? Love and Society discusses the meaning and importance of love for contemporary society. Love is not only an emotion that occurs in our intimate relationships; it is a special emotion that allows us to relate to each other in a lasting fashion, to create out of our individual pasts a shared past, which enables us to project a shared future. Bringing together the idea of Simmel’s second order forms with theories of love, this insightful volume shows that the answer to why love is so central to society can be found in the social transformation of the last two centuries. It also explains how we can build our strongest social bonds on the fragility of an emotions thanks to the creation of "special moments" (love rituals) and "intimate stories" (love myths) that are central to the weaving of lasting social bonds. Going to the cinema, reading a book together or sharing songs are forms of weaving bonds of love and part of the cycle of love. But love is not only shared between two people; the desire and the search for love is something we share with almost all members of society. With rich empirical data, an analysis of love’s transformation in modernity, and a critical engagement with classical and contemporary theorists, this book provides a lively discussion on the meaning and importance of love for today’s society. It will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers who are interested in fields such as Sociology of Emotions, Sociological Theory and Sociology of Morality.
Love and Survival: Healing Power of Intimacy, The
by Dean OrnishThe Medical Basis for the Healing Power of IntimacyWe all know that intimacy improves the quality of our lives. Yet most people don't realize how much it can increase the quality of our lives -- our survival.In this New York Timesworld-renowned physician Dean Ornish, M.D., writes, "I am not aware of any other factor in medicine that has a greater impact on our survival than the healing power of love and intimacy. Not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery."He reveals that the real epidemic in modern culture is not only physical heart disease but also what he calls spiritual heart disease: loneliness, isolation, alienation, and depression. He shows how the very defenses that we think protect us from emotional pain are often the same ones that actually heighten our pain and threaten our survival. Dr. Ornish outlines eight pathways to intimacy and healing that have made a profound difference in his life and in the life of millions of others in turning sadness into happiness, suffering into joy.
Love and Technology: An Ethnography of Dating App Users in Berlin (Anthropology of Now)
by Fabian BroekerLove and Technology: An Ethnography of Dating App Users in Berlin explores how dating apps fit into Berlin’s unique dating culture and brand of intimacy, and form a tangible nucleus around which users navigate dating rituals, romantic biographies, and digitally mediated intimacies within city space. Drawing on the field of digital anthropology, this book takes the form of an immersive ethnography, resulting from 13 months of fieldwork with young dating app users, across Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid, in Berlin. It argues that dating apps offer, or impose, depending on their context of use, a series of affordances. These affordances, and the technological devices they rely upon, exist through the relation between users and their environment, both in terms of physical spaces and cultural frameworks. The book posits that dating apps are woven into spatial practices and self-narrativization, constituting imagined communities for their users, as well as a canvas, alongside the city of Berlin, against which to characterise romantic experiences. Scholars interested in digital anthropology, ethnography, dating, and regional Berlin will find that Love and Technology offers a vibrant springboard for thinking through both theoretical and methodological concerns.
Love and War in the WRNS: Letters Home 1940-46
by Vicky UnwinSheila Mills’s story is a unique perspective of the Second World War. She is a clever, middle-class Norfolk girl with a yen for adventure and joins the WRNS in 1940 to escape the shackles of secretarial work in London, her unhappy childhood and her social-climbing mother. From a first posting in Scotland in 1940, she progresses through the ranks, first to Egypt and later to a vanquished Germany.Extraordinary and fascinating encounters and personalities are seen through the eyes of a young Wren officer: Admiral Ramsay, the Invasion of Sicily and Operation Mincemeat that triggered it, The Flap, the sinking of the Medway, the surrender of the Italian fleet and the Belsen Trials. These observations are peppered with humorous insights into the humdrum preoccupations of a typical Wren – boys, appearance and having fun, while worrying about home and family.This treasure trove of hundreds of letters, along with scrapbooks and memorabilia, some of which are reproduced here, was discovered in bin liners shortly after Sheila died. Her daughter, Vicky, has pieced together a fascinating and unusual record of the Second World War from a woman’s perspective.
Love and War: How Militarism Shapes Sexuality and Romance
by Tom DigbyIdeas of masculinity and femininity become sharply defined in war-reliant societies, resulting in a presumed enmity between men and women. This so-called "battle of the sexes" is intensified by the use of misogyny to encourage men and boys to conform to the demands of masculinity. These are among Tom Digby's fascinating insights shared in Love and War, which describes the making and manipulation of gender in militaristic societies and the sweeping consequences for men and women in their personal, romantic, sexual, and professional lives.Drawing on cross-cultural comparisons and examples from popular media, including sports culture, the rise of "gonzo" and "bangbus" pornography, and "internet trolls," Digby describes how the hatred of women and the suppression of empathy are used to define masculinity, thereby undermining relations between women and men—sometimes even to the extent of violence. Employing diverse philosophical methodologies, he identifies the cultural elements that contribute to heterosexual antagonism, such as an enduring faith in male force to solve problems, the glorification of violent men who suppress caring emotions, the devaluation of men's physical and emotional lives, an imaginary gender binary, male privilege premised on the subordination of women, and the use of misogyny to encourage masculine behavior. Digby tracks the "collateral damage" of this disabling misogyny in the lives of both men and women, but ends on a hopeful note. He ultimately finds the link between war and gender to be dissolving in many societies: war is becoming slowly de-gendered, and gender is becoming slowly de-militarized.
Love and the Market: How to Recover from the Enlightenment and Survive the Current Crisis
by Rob Faure WalkerLove is fundamental to the flourishing of society and nature. However, the competition of the market economy has resulted in a fractured and traumatized modern world. Revisiting philosophical developments and countercultures since the Enlightenment, this book offers a ‘loving critique’. It shows how learning to love better is the key to releasing ourselves from the alienating grip of the market. The utopian template presented draws on archaeology, the witch trials, hippies, Hinduism, Buddhism, quantum mechanics and psychedelics to describe how we can build a more loving society that can survive and flourish through the ecological, ethical, economic and existential crises that we all now face.
Love as a Collective Action: Latin America, Emotions and Interstitial Practices (Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Emotions)
by Adrian ScribanoThis book makes evident how love, as an interstitial practice, produces a set of collective practices and how, through a mapping of these practices, it is possible to observe the connection between the politics of sensibilities and social conflict. The book provides – in the face of a global normalization of immediate enjoyment through consumption, the internationalization of fear and anxiety, the rise of "post-truth" and a distrust regarding politics – a systematic analysis of love as an interstitial practice. This book follows a sociology of body/emotions approaches within which sensations, emotions and sensibilities are part of dialectical social structuration process. The book proposes love not only as an effect or trait of a society, but also as an analytical tool for better understanding the processes of social structuring. It connects a sociology of bodies/emotions with a specific perspective on collective action and links conflictual structures and the politics of sensibilities in six Latin American countries by using a strategy of inquiry attuned to current patterns of social transformation, that of digital ethnography. This work is of interest to a wide public, those who want to know which emotions are the prevailing in Latin America, as well as specialists such as sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and all researchers and graduate students who are interested in the connections between conflict, society and emotions.
Love for Sale
by Elizabeth Alice ClementThe intense urbanization and industrialization of America's largest city from the turn of the twentieth century to World War II was accompanied by profound shifts in sexual morality, sexual practices, and gender roles. Comparing prostitution and courtship with a new working-class practice of heterosexual barter called "treating," Elizabeth Alice Clement examines changes in sexual morality and sexual and economic practices.Women "treated" when they exchanged sexual favors for dinner and an evening's entertainment or, more tangibly, for stockings, shoes, and other material goods. These "charity girls" created for themselves a moral space between prostitution and courtship that preserved both sexual barter and respectability. Although treating, as a clearly articulated language and identity, began to disappear after the 1920s and 1930s, Clement argues that it still had significant, lasting effects on modern sexual norms. She demonstrates how treating shaped courtship and dating practices, the prevalence and meaning of premarital sex, and America's developing commercial sex industry. Even further, her study illuminates the ways in which sexuality and morality interact and contribute to our understanding of the broader social categories of race, gender, and class.
Love in Action, Second Edition: Writings on Nonviolent Social Change
by Thich Nhat HanhBe inspired by 21 key writings on nonviolence and reconciliation by Vietnamese peace activist and refugee advocate Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh"The essence of nonviolence is love," Thich Nhat Hanh says. "Out of love and the willingness to act selflessly, strategies, tactics, and techniques for a nonviolent struggle arise naturally." Collecting essays written by Thich Nhat Hanh at crucial moments of social transformation, Love in Action is an important resource for anyone engaged in social work, community organizing, political action, and cause-oriented movements. Reflecting on the devastation of war, Thich Nhat Hanh makes the strong argument that ethics and altruistic love based on mindfulness and insight are the only truly sustainable bases for political action. Having played a central role in the Buddhist nonviolent movement for peace in Vietnam during the 1960s and serving as Chair of the Buddhist Peace delegation to the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, Thich Nhat Hanh speaks with the voice of experience: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way."Together with essays on the connections between outer engagement and the inner work for peace, this anthology also features poetry and the script of the hauntingly beautiful 1972 play, The Path of Return Continues the Journey. The play's characters are drawn from the author's own life, the young men and women of his School of Youth for Social Service--many of whom were killed for their social actions. "At 12:30 a.m. on July 5, 1967, in the village of Binh Phuoc, Gia Dinh Province, a group of strangers abducted five young men, brought them to the bank of the Saigon River, and shot them," reports Thich Nhat Hanh. "All five were volunteer workers in the School of Youth for Social Service, a nonviolent organization that sought only to heal the wounds of war and reconstruct the villages." An elegy and a prayer for peace, the script shows a less-known side of the young Thich Nhat Hanh: grieving, profoundly in touch with his sorrow and pain, and channeling his anguish into art, inspired by love.
Love in Contemporary Cinema: Audiences and Representations of Romance (Routledge Advances in Film Studies)
by Benjamín de Pava VélezThis book looks at social representations of romantic love as portrayed in films and interpreted by their audiences, using cinema as a means for analysing the state of romantic love today, and the touchpoints and disconnects between its representation on screen and the lived experiences of film audiences. Through a media sociology lens, the book draws on analysis of five contemporary romantic films and the meanings brought to and made from them by socially and economically diverse audiences. Employing both textual analysis and primary interviews, the book contests overly pessimistic perspectives on modern intimacy while acknowledging and exploring some of the challenges, woes and changes that romantic love is experiencing in late capitalism. Concerns and debates over monogamy, the teleology romantic love and the division of labour in relationships percolate in this book’s examination of how audiences’ responses to these films reflect their attitudes and expectations regarding romantic love. This book will have great resonance for scholars and students of not just film studies and media studies, but also audience studies, media sociology, philosophy, gender and sexuality.
Love in Five Acts
by Daniela Krien"Highly recommended" Sunday Times"Utterly captivating" Woman and Home"Sympathetic and clear-eyed" Financial Times Summer Reads of 2021"Unfailingly impressive" Irish Times"Sparse and precise" Telegraph"Beautifully direct and lucid prose . . . fierce intelligence" Melbourne Age & Sydney Morning Herald"A beautiful novel of what it is to be a women in modern Europe" New European"An intelligent study of female desire, ambition and frailty" ObserverBookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn't stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until she faces a choice between her work and her family. Abandoned by the "perfect" man, Malika struggles for recognition from her parents. Her sister Jorinde, an actor, is pregnant for a third time, but how can she provide for her family alone? Love in Five Acts explores what is left to five women when they have fulfilled their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters and daughters. As teenagers they experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, but freedom brings with it another form of pressure: the pressure of choice. Punchy and entirely of the moment, Love in Five Acts engages head-on with what it is to be a woman in the twenty-first century.Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
Love in Five Acts
by Daniela Krien"Highly recommended" Sunday Times"Utterly captivating" Woman and Home"Sympathetic and clear-eyed" Financial Times Summer Reads of 2021"Unfailingly impressive" Irish Times"Sparse and precise" Telegraph"A beautiful novel of what it is to be a women in modern Europe" New European"An intelligent study of female desire, ambition and frailty" ObserverrFive women attempt the impossible - to love, to be strong, and to stay true to themselves.Bookseller Paula has lost a child, and a husband. Where will she find her happiness? Fiercely independent Judith thinks more of horses than men, but that doesn't stop her looking for love online. Brida is a writer with no time to write, until she faces a choice between her work and her family. Abandoned by the "perfect" man, Malika struggles for recognition from her parents. Her sister Jorinde, an actor, is pregnant for a third time, but how can she provide for her family alone? Love in Five Acts explores what is left to five women when they have fulfilled their roles as wives, mothers, friends, lovers, sisters and daughters. As teenagers they experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall, but freedom brings with it another form of pressure: the pressure of choice. Punchy and entirely of the moment, Love in Five Acts engages head-on with what it is to be a woman in the twenty-first century.Spiegel #1 bestseller - More than 150,000 copies sold in GermanyTranslated from the German by Jamie Bulloch(P)2021 Quercus Editions Limited
Love in Modern Japan: Its Estrangement from Self, Sex and Society (Anthropology of Asia #1)
by Sonia RyangThis compelling and controversial book places the concept of love in both a social and historical context. Taking an approach in which state formation and vicissitude of power are explicitly taken into account in the discussion of intimacy and love, the author demonstrates that love as idealization and love as sexuality must be kept analytically separate. Chapters include discussions on sexualized rituals and fertility festivals, the murder case of Abe Sada, pure love in Miko and Mako’s tragedy and the 1990s phenomenon of ‘enjokosai’ or aid-date. Combining ethnographic, theoretical and archival research, this text will appeal to scholars of Japanese anthropology, feminist anthropology and gender studies alike.
Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together
by Dean SpadeIn this inspiring self-help handbook, a trans activist dares us to be the change we want to see—both out in the world, and amongst our closest connections. Lifelong activist and educator Dean Spade dares us to decide that our interpersonal actions are not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance. Many activist projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age. How do we divest from the idea that one romantic partner will be the solution to all our problems? How do we bring our best thinking about freedom and justice into step with our desires for healing and connection? Love in a F*cked-Up World is a resounding call to action and a practical manifesto for how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands, preparing us for the work of changing the world.
Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse
by Carolyn BakerGiven the daunting, dire predicament in which we find ourselves on this planet, what is described by social critic James Howard Kunstler as a "Long Emergency" may in fact become a "Last Emergency" for humanity. Whether we encounter a "long" or a "last" emergency, Carolyn Baker seeks to offer inspiration and guidance for inhabiting our remaining days with passion, vitality, empathy, intimate contact with our emotions, kindness in our relationships with all species, gratitude, open-hearted receptivity, exquisite creations of beauty, and utilizing every occasion, even our demise, as an opportunity to invoke and "inflict" joy in our world. Love in the Age of Ecological Apolcalypse addresses an array of relationships in the Last Emergency and how one's relationship with oneself may enrich or impede interactions with all other beings.Drawing upon her deep experience as a life coach, Baker writes of the specific need to understand our key relationships in a society in collapse, and how to navigate through differing levels of acceptance of collapse, trauma, and grief. Key relationships include those with our partners, children, friends, neighbors, as well as relationships with our work, our bodies, our natural resources, food and eating, animals, future generations, Eros, and indeed, the powers of the universe. Baker's writing is engaging, inspiring, and often beautiful in its depth and candor. She introduces a variety of spiritual practices facilitate our developing a relationship with the deeper Self. With these practices and giving and receiving support from others who are walking a similar path, we begin to live more frequently from the deeper Self, or at least are able to access it more quickly when we find ourselves becoming embroiled in the ego.Table Of Contents * Introduction * Chapter 1: Living, Loving, and Preparing With A Reluctant Partner * Chapter 2: Children And Collapse * Chapter 3: Friends, Neighbors, and The Community * Chapter 4: Work and The Creative Soul * Chapter 5: Our Relationship With Resources * Chapter 6: Loving The Body As The World Falls Apart * Chapter 7: Our Relationship With Food: Mindful Eating As A Spiritual Practice * Chapter 8: Loving The Time Of Your Life * Chapter 9: What An Animal You Are! * Chapter 10: Darkness Matters * Chapter 11: Ensconsed In Eros, Bathed In Beauty * Chapter 12: Our Relationship With The Powers of The Universe * Chapter 13: Near-Term Extinction And Waking Up To Death * Chapter 14: Empire, I Wish I Knew How To Quit You * Chapter 15: Grief And Love In A Culture Of Congestive Heart Failure * Chapter 16: Our Relationship With Future GenerationsFrom the Trade Paperback edition.
Love in the Dark: Philosophy by Another Name
by Diane EnnsIntimate love opens us up to suffering, sacrifice, and loss. Is it always worth the risk? Consulting philosophers, writers, and poets who draw insights from material life, Diane Enns shines a light on the limits of erotic love, exploring its paradoxes through personal and philosophical reflections. Situating experience at the center of her inquiry, Enns conducts philosophy "by another name," elaborating the ambiguities and risks of love with visceral clarity.Love in the Dark claims that intimacy must accept risk as long as love does not destroy the self. Erotic love inspires an inexplicable affirmation of another but can erode autonomy and vulnerability. There is a limit to love, and appreciating it requires a rethinking of love's liberal paradigms, which Enns traces back to the hostility toward the body and eros in Christianity and the Western philosophical tradition. Against a legacy of an abstract and sanitized love, Enns recasts erotic attachment as an event linked to conditional circumstances. The value of love lies in its intensity and depth, and its end does not negate love's truth or significance. Writing in a lyrical, genre-defying style, Enns delineates the paradoxes of love in its relations to lust, abuse, suffering, and grief to reach an account faithful to human experience.
Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir
by Neely TuckerNeely Tucker has traveled the world and has reported conflicts from Israel to Rwanda. When he and his wife meet a little girl in an orphanage in Zimbabwe, their hearts are captured. Follow tucker and his wife as they fight the bureaucratic system in Zimbabwe to take their daughter home.
Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972 (Sexuality Studies)
by Averill EarlsLove in the Lav uncovers Ireland’s queer lives of the past. Averill Earls investigates how same-sex-desiring men lived and loved in a country where their sexuality was illegal and seen as unnatural. Across seven social biographical chapters, each highlighting individuals at the nexus of these histories, Earls constructs a narrative of experiences through the larger contexts in which they are embedded. Earls uses courtroom testimonies, police records, and family history archives as well as “educated speculation” to show how structures governing male same-sex desire in Ireland played out on the bodies of the men who desired men, the teen boys who sold sex to men, and the way the Catholic-nationalist ethos shaped the Gardaí who policed them. Love in the Lav examines the experiences of people such as cabbie James Hand, who was put on trial for gross indecency, to provide a window into the queer working-class subculture of 1930s Dublin. Earls also focuses on issues of consent, especially with teens, and the unregulated queer Irish world of public figures, including Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards, Ronald Brown, and John Broderick. By examining twentieth-century Ireland through the lived experiences of ordinary same-sex-desiring Irish men who were relegated to obscurity by Irish society, Earls reveals the contradictions, possibilities, and magnitude of postcolonial Irish Catholic nationalism. In the series Sexuality Studies
Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa
by Mark HunterIn some parts of South Africa, more than one in three people are HIV positive. Love in the Time of AIDS explores transformations in notions of gender and intimacy to try to understand the roots of this virulent epidemic. By living in an informal settlement and collecting love letters, cell phone text messages, oral histories, and archival materials, Mark Hunter details the everyday social inequalities that have resulted in untimely deaths. Hunter shows how first apartheid and then chronic unemployment have become entangled with ideas about femininity, masculinity, love, and sex and have created an economy of exchange that perpetuates the transmission of HIV/AIDS. This sobering ethnography challenges conventional understandings of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.
Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis
by Laura KipnisIn this timely, insightful, and darkly funny investigation, the acclaimed author of Against Love asks: what does living in dystopic times do to our ability to love each other and the world?COVID-19 has produced new taxonomies of love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Will its cultural afterlife be as lasting as that of HIV, which reshaped consciousness about sex and love even after AIDS itself had been beaten back by medical science? Will COVID end up making us more relationally conservative, as some think HIV did within gay culture? Will it send us fleeing into emotional siloes or coupled cocoons, despite the fact that, pre-COVID, domestic coupledom had been steadily losing fans? Just as COVID revealed our nation to itself, so did it hold a mirror up to our own relationships. In Love in the Time of Contagion, Laura Kipnis weaves (often hilariously) her own (ambivalent) coupled lockdown experiences together with those of others, and sets them against a larger backdrop: the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, and the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, as she maps their effects on the everyday routines and occasional solaces of love and sex.
Love in the Time of Hate: In the Mirror of Urdu
by Dr Rakhshanda JalilKabhi hum bhi tum bhi thhe aashna tumhein yaad ho ke na yaad ho Once you and I were friends, whether you remember it now or not--Momin Khan Momin This is a book about love—love for one&’s country and for all that goes to make it one we can be proud to belong to. Poetry, it has been said, flourishes when all else is uncertain. With that in mind, renowned literary historian and translator, Rakhshanda Jalil, uses Urdu poetry to look at how the social fabric of secular India is changing. Rakhshanda delves into the past, to the events that have threatened communal harmony, from the bloodletting of partition, or the politics of successive elections, to communal riots, Mumbai, Gujarat and so on, to the present moment, to recent events around Ayodhya, cow slaughter and &‘love jihad&’. The book is divided into four sections: politics, people, passions, places. Strewn with delightful, thoughtful Urdu couplets that bring depth, lyricism and gravitas to the narratives, the writer cautions us against current popular sentiments based on hating the &‘other&’. Living in an India that now requires us to be resolutely one or the &‘other&’, all of us are losing the wonderful capacity to contain within ourselves many seemingly diverse ideologies and beliefs which is a motif that is reiterated through the verses and words in this book. The section titled &‘People&’ has the most delightful, charming vignettes of popular icons, from Tipu Sultan and Rani Lakshmi Bai to Gandhi and Nehru, from Ghalib and Majaz to Dilip Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar, viewed through an Urdu lens that makes each person memorable, unique and an advocate of peace and unity. From essays doused in the language of secular patriotism like Har Dil Tiranga, to pieces redolent with nostalgia like Dopahar ki Dhoop Mein, Rakhshanda invokes the power of love, inclusivity and communal harmony that is the trademark of poetry and literature, and which must continue to permeate the way we live our lives if we want to bequeath a meaningful legacy to the generations to come in our country.