The World Between Covers

A hundred encounteres

With modern thinkers, poets, playwrights, and novelists

Sham Lal

Rupa

535 pages/Rs 395

The art of reading is a process of becoming conscious: Wolfgang Iser.

The publication of Sham Lal's A Hundred Encounters reinforces the notion that the man is an avid bibliophile. This book is a veritable atlas of ideas, mapping a pilgrimage through mindscapes, pondering, weighing various beliefs, putting concepts under a microscope, and resuming the journey still a sceptic.

Culled from over five decades of writing, this selection covers a gamut of subjects ranging from the collapse of communism to the growth of a globalised market to the ills of modernity.

 

Lal is worried of what the future holds for mankind, especially those from indigent third world countries. He is wary of Paul Kennedy