Will climate change wipe out and reset our world, as it did in 1700 BCE?
How are the Rajputs of India related to the Kims of Korea?
What startling parallels unveiled in China during the Mahabharata war?
How was misogyny injected into our DNAs by a band of nomads?
Uncover shocking secrets – as history meets suspense – in this mind bending book that will make you doubt everything from the past you thought you knew.
Unravelling thread by thread, this book investigates the disproportional effect of historically unconnected and random events like climate changes, imperial pursuits, pandemics, and nomadic migrations on our modern lives in the most unbelievable ways.
The book looks at the life of one of India’s foremost scientists, Dr R. Chidambaram, who served as principal scientific advisor (PSA) to the Government of India and as chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Cabinet (SAC-C) from November 2001 to March 2018. As one of India’s most distinguished experimental physicists, Dr Chidambaram has made outstanding contributions to many aspects of basic science and nuclear technology.
A Padma Vibhushan awardee, he played a leading and integral role in the design and execution of the peaceful Nuclear Explosion experiment at Pokhran in 1974 and led the team of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), which designed the nuclear devices and carried out in cooperation with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) the Pokhran tests in May 1998. During his stewardship of the DAE, the nuclear power programme got a big boost and the capacity of the nuclear power plants increased sharply.
Ruminating about his interactions with the scientific community and the political leadership, Dr Chidambaram describes key events in India’s journey to self-reliance in nuclear energy. India Rising is not only a memoir of one of India’s eminent scientists, but also a fascinating account of India’s ascendance in the world of science and technology.
India, 1922: Perveen Mistry is the only female lawyer in Bombay, a city where child mortality is high, birth control is unavailable and very few women have ever seen a doctor.
Perveen is attending a lavish fundraiser for a new women’s hospital specializing in maternal health issues when she witnesses an accident. The grandson of an influential Gujarati businessman catches fire–but a servant, his young ayah, Sunanda, rushes to save him, selflessly putting herself in harm’s way. Later, Perveen learns that Sunanda, who’s still ailing from her burns, has been arrested on trumped-up charges made by a man who doesn’t seem to exist.
Perveen cannot stand by while Sunanda languishes in jail with no hope of justice. She takes Sunanda as a client, even inviting her to live at the Mistry home in Bombay’s Dadar Parsi colony. But the joint family household is already full of tension. Perveen’s father worries about their law firm taking so much personal responsibility for a client, and her brother and sister-in-law are struggling to cope with their new baby. Perveen herself is going through personal turmoil as she navigates a taboo relationship with a handsome former civil service officer.
When the hospital’s chief donor dies suddenly, Miriam Penkar, a Jewish-Indian obstetrician, and Sunanda become suspects. Perveen’s original case spirals into a complex investigation taking her into the Gujarati strongholds of Kalbadevi and Ghatkopar, and up the coast to Juhu Beach, where a decadent nawab lives with his Australian trophy wife. Then a second fire erupts, and Perveen realizes how much is at stake. Has someone powerful framed Sunanda to cover up another crime? Will Perveen be able to prove Sunanda’s innocence without endangering her own family?
In this sweeping tale, at once epic and intimate, Shyam Selvadurai introduces us to Siddhartha Gautama-who went on to become ‘the enlightened one’-an unusually bright and politically astute young man settling into his upper-caste life after marrying Yasodhara, a woman of great intelligence and spirit. Mansions of the Moon traces the couple’s early love and life together, and then the anguished turmoil that descends upon them both as Siddhartha’s spiritual calling takes over and the marriage partnership slowly, inexorably crumbles.
Drawing on ancient records and historical sources, and weaving it with fiction and mythology, Shyam Selvadurai creates a vivid portrait of Yasodhara, a remarkable woman on a remarkable journey. Mansions of the Moon is an evocative, thought-provoking novel and a must-read for anyone interested in spirituality, mythology and the power of the human spirit.
Winner of the JCB Prize for Literature 2023
Fire Bird is a masterfully crafted tale of one man’s search for the elusive concept of permanence. Muthu has his world turned upside down when his father divides the family land, leaving him with practically nothing and causing irreparable damage to his family’s bonds. Through the unscrupulous actions of his once-revered eldest brother, Muthu is forced to leave his once-perfect world behind and seek out a new life for himself, his wife and his children.
In this transcendental novel, Perumal Murugan draws from his own life experiences of displacement and movement, and explores the fragility of our fundamental attraction to permanence and our ultimately futile efforts to attain it. Translated from the nearly untranslatable Aalandapatchi, which alludes to a mystical bird in Tamil, the titular fire bird perfectly encapsulates the illusory and migratory nature of this pursuit.
Fire Bird is a thought-provoking and beautifully written exploration of the human desire for stability in an ever-changing world.
Jamyang Norbu has taken the stories of ‘forgotten’ Tibetans–resistance fighters, secret agents, soldiers, peasants, merchants, even street beggars–and skillfully worked their myriad accounts into a single glorious ‘memory history’ of the Tibetan struggle. He uses recollections from his own childhood to ease the reader into an immersive understanding of the complexity of Tibet’s modern history: the Chinese invasion, the uprisings in Kham and Amdo, the formation of the Four Rivers Six Ranges Resistance Force, the March ’59 Lhasa Uprising, the CIA supported Air Operations, the Nyemo peasant Uprising of 68/69 and the Mustang Guerilla Force in northern Nepal, where Norbu later served.
He writes of leaving home to drive tractors at refugee settlements, educate refugee children, produce plays at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, and collect intelligence for the Tibetan Office of Research and Analysis (TORA) and for France’s External Intelligence Agency (SDECE). He uses these anecdotes not so much as autobiography but as a framing device to recount the lives, deeds and, too often, tragedies of the many Tibetans he encountered and befriended throughout his life–nearly all of whom played vital roles in shaping the recent history of their country but whose contributions are still unsung and forgotten. Jamyang Norbu’s lifelong commitment to collecting and orchestrating the ‘echoes’ of these many forgotten voices from the past has resulted in a lyrical, learned and compassionate book that could well be described as the prose epic of the Tibetan freedom struggle.
As a young boy, Amitav Ghosh’s narrator travels across time through the tales of those around him, traversing the unreliable planes of memory, unmindful of physical, political and chronological borders. But as he grows older, he is haunted by a seemingly random act of violence. Bits and pieces of stories, both half-remembered and imagined, come together in his mind until he arrives at an intricate, interconnected picture of the world where borders and boundaries mean nothing, mere shadow lines that we draw dividing people and nations. Out of a complex web of memories, relationships and images, Amitav Ghosh builds an intensely vivid, funny and moving story. Exposing the idea of the nation state as an illusion, an arbitrary dissection of people, Ghosh depicts the absurd manner in which your home can suddenly become your enemy. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award.
‘It never occurred to me to just play it safe and get to where no Indian had gotten before-a Test triple century. Do I regret reaching for the ball well outside off from McGrath that I spooned to point? Do I feel I should have batted out that one hour at my disposal and ticked off the 25 needed to get to the Promised Land? No, and no. I have never played my cricket that way . . . The individual milestone would have been terrific, but if I were to get the chance to replay that day, I would do exactly the same. I walked off the park immensely satisfied. I hadn’t missed out on 300 by 19 runs; I had made 281 . . . and put the team in a position from where we could expect to pull off a win against all odds. Isn’t that what you play the game for?’
A stylish batsman who could score against any kind of bowling, VVS Laxman played over a hundred Tests to aggregate more than 8000 runs. Cricket fans still remember with awe his game-changing knock of 281 against Australia in 2001 at Eden Gardens. But playing for India was never easy, and despite his vast experience and unimpeachable skill, he never made it to a World Cup team.
All through his playing years, Laxman was known to be a soft-spoken man who kept his distance from controversy. Which is what makes this autobiography truly special. It’s candid and reflective, happy and sad by turns. He writes of dressing-room meltdowns and champagne evenings, the exhilaration of playing with and against the best in the world, the learnings with John Wright and the rocky times under Greg Chappell.
In 281 and Beyond, Laxman lays bare the ecstasy and the trauma of being one of the chosen XI in a country that is devoted to cricket.
Varavara Rao: A Life in Poetry is the first-ever collection in English of poems by the Telugu poet, selected and translated from sixteen books that he has published. Having begun to write poetry in his early teens, Varavara Rao, now in his early eighties, continues to be a doyen of Telugu modern poets.
He was a consistent comrade-in-letters to all the social movements from the 1960s to the 2010s, and this volume is a capsule of momentous social history captured in his
poetic imagination.
The poems in the collection offer an artistic blend of tender response and thoughtful reaction to social realities, as well as an explosion of powerful emotions from a voice
sought to be subdued. Varavara Rao’s poetry, more than anything else, is an offering of solidarity to the voiceless, the underdog and the oppressed.
‘Rohan’s work is especially important for he has been able to make environmental news and messages accessible to the world at large’. — Arati Kumar Rao, National Geographic explorer, environment photographer, writer and artist
Pugmarks and Carbon Footprints is a collection of gag cartoons and comic strips based exclusively on wildlife and nature. Staying true to their theme, the cartoons and comics in the book will speak about wildlife, ecology, interesting trivia about the lives of wild animals, and how the lives of these creatures are entwined with ours. Other than providing some much needed comic relief during environmental doomsday, the book will equip the reader with snippet-sized information about environmental issues in an easily palatable manner.
A comprehensive and satirical take on various aspects of the natural world and the threats to its conservation, Pugmarks and Carbon Footprints will appeal both to the scientifically inclined reader as well as the layman.
