About the Book

20 ESSAYS ON THE VILLAGES OF INDIA
Each essay in this collection has been written in the form of a postcard sent by the author, Shivbalak Misra, who left city life and his high-profile job as a geologist to move back to his village in UP and start a school with his wife. He has seen the villages of India change in the last five decades and writes about it in a way that will give the urban reader interesting insights into cultures, societal structures, aspirations of the rural youth, challenges of the past and present, and achievements that they are largely unfamiliar with. They will see an India which is very different from the spaces they occupy and is ever changing.

About the Author

Dr Shiv Balak Misra was born in a small village in Uttar Pradesh in 1939. He is a well-known geologist, author and social worker. In 1967, Dr Misra played a vital role in finding the fossils of ‘Ediacaran fauna’, which is being used to study the origin of life on earth. The area where Dr Misra found the fossils was conserved and named ‘Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve’ in 1984 and was declared World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2016. In 2007, the Ediacaran fossil was named after Dr Misra as ‘Fractofusus Misrai’. In 1969, Dr Misra left his job as a geologist in Canada to open a school in his village.