Home

Mother Pious Lady: Harper Collins India, 380 pages, Rs399

Mother Pious Lady

Making sense of Everyday India

by Santosh Desai

A new India is visibly emerging from within the folds of its many pasts. This new India needs to be seen with new eyes, free from the baggage of yesterdays characterizations. This is exactly what Santosh Desai, one of India’s best-known social commentators, does in this warm, affectionate and deliciously witty look at the changing urban Indian middle class.

Read More About the Book

“This is a rare and captivating book, wise and witty, on the inner lives of middle class Indians. Desai both enlightens and entertains.”

Sudhir Kakar

Reddit This
Stumble Now!
Share on Facebook
Share on LinkedIn
Post on Twitter

  • Book Reviews

    Mother Pious Lady – Book Review – squidoo.com

    By sd-editor on March 14, 2011

    What is MOTHER PIOUS LADY all about? The book that I have the priviledge of reviewing is a veritable gold mine for the marketers targetting the Indian Middle Class. Yet it does not come in the garb of a marketing book. It is actually a collection of articles written by Santosh Desai in his column… Read more »

    Category:

    The Hindu : Literary Review

    By sd-editor on September 6, 2010

    We are like this only ANVAR ALIKHAN A collection of delightful essays on India, and Indian-ness. Mother Pious Lady, Santosh Desai, HarperCollins, p. 380, Rs. 399. What is it that defines our Indian-ness? What is it, exactly, that unites us — variously Punjabi, Malayali, Gujarati, Bengali or whatever — into a single nation-state? A difficult… Read more »

    Category:

    Ahmedabad Mirror Review

    By sd-editor on August 4, 2010

    Indefinable middle class Market researchers attempt to ‘crack’ this inscrutable constituency of an India whose consumption potential can redefine the economic world order By Rita Kothari Posted On Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 02:36:20 AM Those of us who have grown up in the India of the seventies and eighties would know what it is… Read more »

    Category: ,

    Deccan Herald Review

    By sd-editor on July 19, 2010

    Many days in the life of middle-class India MEERA RAJENDRAN Mother Pious Lady: making sense of everyday india Santosh Desai. Mother Pious Lady, Making Sense of Everyday India, provides a fantastic insight into the daily life of the middle-class Indian. ‘Where Do We Come From’, the first section, a collection of pieces on our ‘Indian’… Read more »

    Category: ,

    Amazon US Review

    By sd-editor on June 29, 2010

    A cheat-sheet for dealing with Gen-X Indians (several variants of the truth exist), June 28, 2010 By S.Yogendra  This is an amusing yet thought-provoking, insightful yet confounding, and relentlessly introspective, with hints of self-flagellation, book. The title is a nod to the specialised language used in the very specialised Indian area of matrimonial ads that… Read more »

    Category:

    Mail Today Review

    By sd-editor on May 10, 2010

    Beyond the Age of Paisa Vasool By Shiv Visvanathan Desai traces India’s move from asocialist republic of scarcity to astate of bounty The study of popular culture as a genre has produced some wonderfully creative writers. One thinks of Ashis Nandy, Patricia Uberoi and Vijay Pershad. Probably the most playful of them is Santosh Desai…. Read more »

    Category:

  • Recent Columns

    On the wild charms of masala soda

    By sd-editor on May 7, 2012

    As cities grow, some essential parts of it go into hiding. The street stalls retreat into the inner folds of the new city, local ice cream vendors (for some reason called Mewad Prem across large parts of the country) turn coy and cede ground to nationally known brands, the baraf ka gola with its luscious… Read more »

    Category: ,

    The religion of the self?

    By sd-editor on April 30, 2012

    Observing a recent religious ritual, one was struck by how much of the prayer had to do with individual desire. One didn’t know what exactly the shlokas being recited by the priest meant in Sanskrit, but going by the translation offered, it seemed as if the prayer was nothing but a laundry list of petulant… Read more »

    Category: ,

    The terrorism of power

    By sd-editor on April 23, 2012

    We cannot call our parliamentarians names for fear of disrespecting the institution of the Parliament, we cannot forward mildly critical cartoons of a chief minister without being arrested. A historian cannot write a scholarly account of Sri Aurobindo’s life without effectively being thrown out of the country, we cannot protest against nuclear plants in our… Read more »

    Category: ,

    The sadness of the lullaby

    By sd-editor on April 16, 2012

    There is something magical about a lullaby. The experience of listening to one is quite unlike anything else. It is almost impossible to listen to one without responding to it with an emotion that one never fully understands. Even without knowing the words, we know exactly what a lullaby intends even if we are unable… Read more »

    Category: , ,

    The unfairness of elections

    By sd-editor on April 9, 2012

    Can an election ever throw up the right candidate? Or to put it more moderately, is an election the mechanism best suited to throw up representatives that will strive to work for their constituents and attempt to better their life? Are there in-built into the electoral process, a set of imperatives that help pre-determine one… Read more »

    Category: ,

    The Power to do nothing

    By sd-editor on April 2, 2012

    That running a coalition government is not easy has been made obvious enough by the experience of the UPA government. If in its first innings, it was felt that the overbearing presence of the Left was stifling; in fact, the second innings started with a big sense of relief that the monkey was finally off… Read more »

    Category: , ,