In his latest book, The Social Life of Indian Trains (Aleph Book Company), the writer and academic Amitava Kumar, who was born in India and now lives in the United States, explores how trains in his native land “have seeped into the national psyche”. “The railway lines that crisscross the country,” he writes, “and are longer even than our majestic rivers, bind the landscape into a whole and give it a sense of a nation.” There’s a brief extract from the book on the Indian news website Scroll. It’s also featured in quite a few reviews, including a particularly thought-provoking one from a writer on Newslaundry, Anand Vardhan. He says the book is “readable, brisk, and contains fleeting moments of literary radiance. But it is ultimately weakened by its purposefulness.”