Title: Build Your English Skills with Ruskin Bond
Author: Ruskin Bond
For anyone who aspires to build their English skills, there could be no better teacher than Ruskin Bond, the favourite wordsmith of many and more.
This book contains a careful selection of excerpts from some of Ruskin Bond’s favourite classics ranging from Christina Rossetti’s ‘Who Has Seen the Wind’ and Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘From a Railway Carriage’ to Jonathan Swift’s ‘Lilliput and Its Laws’ and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Mystery of the Test Papers’, among many other equally powerful examples of fine English writing.
Valuable exercises and skill-building activities accompany each text to help build and test the reader’s English skills. Ruskin Bond says. “This extraordinary book has been put together with the primary aim of helping students to appreciate the English language and to acquire fluency in it.”
Title: India’s Blind Spot- Understanding and Managing Our Cities
Author: Devashish Dhar
As Shashi Tharoor, MP for Thiruvananthapuram, Author, Former Under-Secretary-General, United Nations, says about the book, “‘India’s Blind Spot combines an incisive diagnosis of the problem with an unabashed faith in the resilience and potential of the city. Dhar’s nuanced analysis leaves much to be considered: we have a great deal to do if our cities are to survive and thrive in the long term. I believe that policymakers, planners and urban residents would do well to read it and take heed of its lessons.’
Amitabh Kant, G20 Sherpa and former CEO, NITI Aayog, ‘Does a brilliant job of combining economics, history and international relations to highlight the importance of well-planned, sustainable cities for India, and to illustrate how to implement sound urbanisation… Insightful, evidence-backed, comprehensive, progressive and scholarly.’
Author Devashish Dhar says, ‘‘I wrote this book to unpack the evolution of the role of cities since the agricultural revolution and to understand what role Indian cities will play in the 21st century. It attempts to explain the entire range of India’s urban issues and the policy solutions to tackle them. The book reimagines city economies and focuses on urban infrastructure, resource utilisation, planning and governance, building urban resilience, providing safety and inclusivity, resolving transport congestion, and mainstreaming vulnerable communities, among others.’
