Gaia is the Greek word for mother earth. Gaia is said to be 4,600 million years old. Should this figure be condensed to Gaia being 46 years old, little would be known about her birth or her life as a teenager or even a young adult. Dinosaurs appeared only a year back, when Gaia was 45. The ice age enveloped Gaia last week, modern humankind has been around for barely four hours. It was only during the last hour that human beings discovered agriculture, and the industrial revolution and its consequent urbanisation began only a minute ago. The last 60 second have been devastating, says Anwar Fazal, regional coordinator of the Asia Pacific 2000 team of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The bulk of the world's population is going urban. While some of the population was pulled in and others pushed on, a majority are going to be born urban. This social transformation has become a key factor in economic productivity, social justice, ecological sustainability, cultural vibrancy and popular participation. Social movements have failed dismally to keep pace with the challenges imposed by unbridled urbanisation. Cities have been growing at alarming rates and newer ones peep cropping up.

In June 1996, heads of state and official delegations assembled at Istanbul, Turkey, for the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements. This global conference on human settlements, popularly known as Habitat II, provided urban stakeholders with a framework for addressing many of the pressing issues on urbanisation. Information about the framework, unfortunately, remained inaccessible in a format which could have facilitated action in the form of networking, advocacy, information-sharing, resource-mobilisation and capacity-building.

The Asia Pacific 2000 team of UNDP had reasons to rise up to the occasion in bridging this information hiatus. Asia, the largest of the continents, underwent (it is still undergoing) the most dramatic metamorphosis. Asia, by and large, has the tallest buildings. Eight of the 10 most costliest cities in the world are Asian cities. According to a study conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO), 13 of the 15 cities with the worst air pollution are in Asia. An Asian Development Bank (ADB) study, air pollution in Jakarta alone was costing more than $2 billion a year in terms of brain damage to children and premature deaths and illnesses generally. Urban poverty emerged as the most potent explosive political, economic and social force in India. The Asian urban landscape, Fazal points out, is one of immense contrast - of ostentatious plenty and abject poverty, of great beauty and terrible ugliness, of vast opportunity and yet rampant oppression. In fact, 17 of the world's projected 27 megacities will be located in Asia.

Asia Pacific 2000 talks of the five 'plosions' that are ravaging the continent. The first is a horrifying 'explosion' of people and new kinds of both affluence and poverty. There is also a deafening 'implosion', a deepening of alienation and anger, manifesting itself in urban violence, and even more, in urban terrorism. Rendering the picture more gloomy is a 'displosion', a disintegration - a breaking up of family, community, and indigenous values. The first of the latecomers is 'techplosion', the introduction of new, complex, often ruthless technologies, operating in environments inappropriately prepared for such ventures. The last of the scourges is 'infoplosion' - the proliferation of mindless entertainment and propaganda that is overwhelming and confusing, often creating new addictions and distractions, often enlarging the power of bureaucracy and commercial propaganda.

Fazal uses 'pyrotechnic' images to drive home his point - the issues are hot and the cities are in crisis. Cooling down things would take a while, but a start had to be made at a lower level too. Fazal's team decided to rise up to the occasion and thought of a popular book that would bring together key documents developed during various United Nations and civil society fora, glossaries of important terminologies, information sources, the increasing number of websites and the contact information about a growing number of stakeholders working on urban-related issues. "Our Cities, Our Homes" is the outcome.

No, the compendium is not Asia-specific. The realities are global in nature, and Sofjan and Arokiasamy's compilation is meant for a worldwide audience. The truth concerns all.

Popular Hindi cinema was not, till quite recently, considered worthy of serious study. Even now, a large part of the research on films is done by academics abroad, maybe because they have easier access to funding. Plus, the necessary distance to see Hindi films as more than just mindless entertainment. Informative, readable, intelligibly written books about popular film personalities are still not written. The honest biography and tell-all autobiography cult has not yet reached here. So, in a small way Nasreen Munni Kabir's Talking Film: Conversations On Hindi Cinema with Javed Akhtar marks a welcome beginning.

Filmfolks may not have the time or the ability to write about themselves and their work, but they have no trouble talking. And writer, poet, lyricist is among the more articulate and intelligent ones. He was a good choice for a first book. As Kabir says, "He is a brilliant conversationalist and original thinker...He has great wit, razor sharp humour, an intense mind and a special connectedness to the pulse of India." For the reader, the conversations format gives more or less the same information as a straight biography, but in an easier-to-zip-through format. The negative side is that what the reader is paying good money for is just an extended magazine interview. Rs 295 for a quick read (two hours at the most) is a bit much.

It is undeniable that Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan brought in a fresh style of writing into Hindi cinema, trying to shake off the old influence of theatrical, bombastic dialogues and melodramatic story lines. There had not been any writer like them when they made a splash in the Seventies, and it can now be said, that there have not been writers as prolific as Salim-Javed after them. It might have been terrific to get them to talk about their work together - films that include commercial trendsetters like Zanjeer, Sholay, Trishul, Deewar. Filmmakers like Yash Chopra, Prakash Mehra and Ramesh Sippy made some of their finest films based on Salim-Javed scripts.

Akhtar claims they submitted detailed scripts with shot divisions - rare for the commercial film industry - it might have been pertinent to include some samples of their writing. There are just a few references to their dialogues-mostly from Sholay. Akhtar is, of course, at his engaging best, recounting 'scenes' from his life and early struggles in the industry with great elan. You get a fairly detailed account of how a song is created in Indian films and what is its importance in the larger scheme of things.

However, on the whole, the book leaves one with a sense of incompleteness. Too much emphasis on Sholay and its archetypal villain Gabbar Singh, not enough on other films; too much on his perception of the modern hero, not enough on the heroine; hardly anything on his working relationships; practically nothing at all on his two marriages with Honey Irani and Shabana Azmi (if the excuse is that his private life was not under discussion, then why the fairly lengthy portion on his childhood?); very little on his political beliefs and how they are perceptible in his writing.

There are some errors in the translations of Hindi/Urdu words into English, a couple of factual mistakes, and some amount of repetition. However, this is just nitpicking, the biggest complaint about the book is that it is not substantial enough. It is quite readable, but not of much lasting value, since a lot of the information in the book has already appeared in Akhtar's many published interviews. What, nevertheless, needs to be lauded is the effort and the publishers' openness to a new (Indian) genre of books. Perhaps the history of popular cinema and the ideas of its proponents will best be recorded as conversations - it is another form of entertainment after all!