Set in Kollywood, or the Tamil film industry, in the 1980s, Dream Factory is a fictional chronicle of the shenanigans and the rising and falling fortunes of various players in show business.Vijay, the handsome protagonist, who is at the peak of his career as a superstar.Arumairajan, the passionate hotel waiter, who stakes everything in his life to make it big as a lyricist.Manonmani, the small-time actress, who struggles to deal with the compromises she is ...

Kalyanaraman, a guitar-playing folk music researcher from Madras, visits Mempatti hoping to collect folk songs. The locals house him in a crumbling mansion that once belonged to a zamindar. Enter Snehalatha, the late zamindar's vivacious granddaughter. While Kalyanaraman is drawn to local girl Velli, Snehalatha flirts openly with Velli's promised husband, Marudamuthu. Ghosts and diaries of the dead stir up an already volatile mix. Suspicion and ill will set off by rival romantic longings f...

Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary – and yet how typical – her family history truly was.Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew...

A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Nonfiction Book of 2017A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2017A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2017" Ants Among Elephants is an arresting, affecting and ultimately enlightening memoir. It is quite possibly the most striking work of non-fiction set in India since Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and heralds the arrival of a formidable new write...

This textbook provides a comprehensive description of a variety of vibration and acoustic pickups and exciters, as well as strain gauge transducers. It is an exhaustive manual for setting up basic and involved experiments in the areas of vibration, acoustics and strain measurement (using strain gauges only). It further serves as a reference to conduct experiments of a pedagogical nature in these areas. It covers the various theoretical aspects of experimental test rigs, as well as a descri...

In Cuba something curious has happened over the past fifteen years. The government has allowed vocal criticism of its policies to be expressed within the arts. Filmmakers, rappers, and visual and performance artists have addressed sensitive issues including bureaucracy, racial and gender discrimination, emigration, and alienation. How can this vibrant body of work be reconciled with the standard representations of a repressive, authoritarian cultural apparatus? In Cuba Represent! ...

Medical Pluralism in Contemporary India questions the dominant view of indigenous systems of medicine as cultural remnants of a traditional past. It points out that their practitioners greatly outnumber those of biomedicine (allopathy) and explores the reasons behind the enduring presence and importance of health care traditions such as ayurveda, siddha and unani.The authors go beyond simplistic distinctions like traditionalmodern and scienceculture. They  draw attention to the possibility of...

This is the story of Rukmini and the many people who flit in and out of her life.She is ordinary like so many of us. Sometimes beautiful, brash and intelligent. Sometimes dowdy, dull and stupid. One time, she is pretty with brains, a gorgeous boyfriend and a loyal friend. Other times, she is unremarkable with an insipid spouse and a loyal friend.Life doles out dashes of sweetness and bitterness, and we like they say, are required to make the requisite lemonade.Rukmin...

In this vivid ethnography of social movements in the barrios, or poor shantytowns, of Caracas, Sujatha Fernandes reveals a significant dimension of political life in Venezuela since President Hugo Chávez was elected. Fernandes traces the histories of the barrios, from the guerrilla insurgency, movements against displacement, and cultural resistance of the 1960s and 1970s, through the debt crisis of the early 1980s and the neoliberal reforms that followed, to the Chávez period. She weaves b...

At its rhythmic, beating heart, Close to the Edge asks whether hip hop can change the world. Hip hop-rapping, beat-making,b-boying, deejaying, graffiti-captured the imagination of the teenage Sujatha Fernandes in the 1980s, inspiring her and politicizing her along the way. Years later, armed with mc-ing skills and an urge to immerse herself in global hip hop, she embarks on a journey into street culture around the world. From the south side of Chicago to the barrios of Caracas and...

Hospital-based physicians are privy to some of the most meaningful moments of people’s lives, including life-changing diagnoses, pivotal medical procedures, complex medical decisions, and critical end-of-life decisions. Yet, hospitalists have no framework for how to incorporate the varied social factors that impact care such as race, gender identity, cultural background, immigration status, sexual orientation, primary language, housing status, and poverty into clinical decision-making. As ...

Storytelling has proliferated today, from TED Talks and Humans of New York to a plethora of story-coaching agencies and consultants. Heartbreaking accounts of poverty, mistreatment, and struggle may move us deeply. But what do they move us to do? And what are the stakes in the crafting and use of storytelling? In Curated Stories, Sujatha Fernandes considers the rise of storytelling alongside the broader shift to neoliberal, free-market economies. She argues that stories have been ...