2009, ISBN: 81f02490e5eb62abbc370eaafdb0b785

A must for [anyone] who wants to understand Tamil Nadu politics' New Indian Express Tamil Nadu is a state very different from the rest of India, both culturally and historically. It has… More...

A must for [anyone] who wants to understand Tamil Nadu politics' New Indian Express Tamil Nadu is a state very different from the rest of India, both culturally and historically. It has retained a fundamentally separate identity for itself in language and caste structure, and this is most evident in its politics. Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars: The Word of Tamil Politics tells a political story that has all the elements of a blockbuster film, where ironies and larger-than-life characters abound: Periyar, a Kannada-speaker, who introduced the notions of Tamil self-respect and regional pride, yet dismissed Tamil as 'a barbaric language'; the matinee idol MGR, a Malayalee born in Sri Lanka, who became Tamil Nadu's most popular mass leader; the Dravidian movement which, by its own ideology, should have helped the Dalits but has instead supported only the upwardly mobile middle groups; and parties that rose to power by propagating anti-Hindi and anti-Brahmin sentiments but have now allied themselves with the BJP. It is fitting that this reel-like scenario is presently dominated by the electoral politics of Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa, one a scriptwriter and the other a former actress. Well-known writer and journalist Vaasanthi has observed the dramatis personae in this epic drama at close quarters for a decade. Now updated with an additional chapter on the war of succession Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars offers an objective and insightful view of a political world that is both fascinating and perplexing., Penguin Books India, 1.5, 753 pages with maps, charts, tables, figures, bibliography and index. Royal octavo (9 1/2 x 6 1/4") bound in original publisher's blue cloth with gilt lettering to spine in original jacket. First American edition. Darlington's early career was undistinguished. From a family of modest means and accomplishments (his father was a schoolmaster and later a secretary to a chemist), he showed little promise at school. Unhappy and isolated, he preferred to read omnivorously on his own, something he kept up throughout his life. The family atmosphere appears to have been on the cold side of reserved. An elder brother served in the Great War, but Cyril did not have much to do with him. His own higher education started at an agricultural college, but an application to farm cotton abroad was turned down. Perhaps Darlington would never have been noticed if he had not, after reading Morgan and Sturtevants Physical Basis of Heredity (1921), persuaded William Bateson to take him on as an unpaid researcher at the John Innes Agricultural Institute. Relegated at first to routine and menial tasks, he rose surely through the ranks. The Innes Institute was then the leading genetics center in Britain, even if its leader Bateson had fallen out of touch with his rapidly developing field. The field Darlington first made his name in - cytology, or the study of organic cell structure - is not readily accessible to most readers. The early history of controversies in the field, played out in the first half of the 20th century, might be arcane even to a present-day cytologist (working scientists, for the most part, do not spend much time looking backward). Harmans lengthy coverage of the maze of false leads, abandoned hypotheses, misunderstood observations and minor feuds, will glaze many eyes. Although he does manage to convey some sense of the importance of Darlingtons contributions to cytology (his groundbreaking study, Recent Advances in Cytology, first appeared in 1932), few of Harmans lay readers will understand exactly what these were, since he makes no real effort to broaden his audience. Most importantly, Darlington established just how it is that chromosomes recombine to establish the linkage between genetics and heredity; but he was also an expert and widely-read popularizer of science, and his own Genetics and Man (1964, first published as The Facts of Life in 1953) is a better place to start. Scientifically, Darlington was a synthesizer, constructing systems and unifying theories with a view to explaining broad bodies of observations; he favored bold hypotheses, which he was equally prepared to reject if the evidence required it. He was not a patient and cautious observer - unlike many of his colleagues, who built up facts and exceptional cases for decades, and were often upset by Darlingtons bold and sometimes risky generalizations, or so they said. He was not a mathematical biologist of the Haldane or Fisher variety, but rather an unusually literate biologist with a thorough grounding in plant genetics. Darlingtons idea of scientific procedure provoked a warm response from Karl Popper, because it reminded Popper of his own account of science as a series of conjectures and refutations, but Popper was not convinced that Darlingtons hereditarianism was falsifiable. Harman misses the crucial point, though, that Popper (1982) thought Darwinism was itself unfalsifiable because it was a tautology: the fittest survive, but those who survive are fit. Popper is said to have changed his mind about Darwinism later, provided it was phrased in terms he did not object to. The key to Darlingtons theory of evolution, first set out in his influential study The Evolution of Genetic SystemsIn the case of man, this genetic system is complex, including stratification into races (breeding groups) and castes (ranked breeding groups with hereditary occupations). These breeding groups pursue varying strategies for inbreeding and outbreeding, depending on their circumstances, because there is a continual evolutionary tension between adaptation and variation. Inbreeding is a successful strategy for a group whose environment remains relatively static for some time, and inbred groups can achieve high levels of fertility, tending to eliminate internal genetic variation and thereby adapt to their environment. Outbreeding is suited to groups whose environment changes, because it produces increased variation. However, an inbred group that switches too rapidly to outbreeding reduces its fertility, whereas an outbred group that switches to inbreeding risks the combination of harmful recessive genes. Genes select their environment, which in turn selects them. Director of the Innes Institute by 1939, and elected to the Royal Society in 1941, Darlington quickly established himself as a leading figure of his day, not only within the genetics field but also in the more general world of ideas. In 1947 he founded, with R. A. Fisher, the highly influential and financially successful journal Heredity (unusual because it did not use anonymous referees, selecting material editorially instead). When J.B.S. Haldane moved to India in 1957, striking a pose for Third-Worldism in response the Suez Crisis, Heredity became the premier British journal in its field. In 1953, Darlington moved from the Innes Institute to Magdalen College in Oxford, taking up the Sherardian Chair of Botany, his first academic appointment (and a rule-changing precedent, since he was not an Oxbridge product). He retired in 1971, but maintained his prolific output until his death in 1981, continuing to produce books, articles and numerous letters to the newspapers. (1939), was his notion of a breeding system. For Darlington it is the breeding system as a whole, rather than the individual bearers of genes, that selection operates on to produce evolution. By this Darlington meant not only the chromosome structure of an organism, but its whole approach to breeding. Much of Darlington's later career was devoted to an elaboration of evolutionary theory applied to man, anticipating the spirit of the sociobiologists who later followed. His wide-ranging interests had prepared him for this ever since adolescence, and the result was The Evolution of Man and Society (1969), a provocative universal history of man from a genetic perspective. This was history that took heredity seriously, perhaps the only substantial history ever successfully attempted from that perspective; to complete it, Darlington cast his net widely. The product owed a great deal, as Darlington acknowledged, to his early contact with J.B.S. Haldane, then a left-wing eugenicist and not yet a Marxist, at the John Innes Institute. There was also his friendship with Sir Cyril Burt, the eminent hereditarian psychologist; and his warm relationship with the distinguished biologist John Randal Baker, now remembered chiefly for his influential book on Race (1974). Typical of Darlington's approach to man was his contention that ideas do not fly on wings, they march on feet. Throughout most of human history, ideas and technologies have not spread culturally but rather through the movements of those skilled in them, not merely by practice but also by heredity, an adaptation developed by selection over an extended period. Condition: Page ends lightly soiled else near fine in a fine jacket., Simon and Schuster, 1969, 4.5, Singapore: Monsoon Books, 2009. Pb, 308pp. Good, clean contents. Part biography, part travelogue, this book examines the legacy of Sir Stamford Raffles, who joined the East India Company at the age of fourteen and rose to become Lieutenant Governor of Java and an enthusiastic proponent of Indonesian culture. He founded the city state of Singapore in 1819 and became " that rarest of things - a colonial figure who is forgotten at home but still remembered with affection abroad".. Soft Cover., Monsoon Books, 2009, 0<