Exploring the legal and political history of India, from the British period to the present, Republic of Rhetoric examines the right to free speech and it argues that the enactment of the Constitution in 1950 did not make a significant difference to the freedom of expression in India. Abhinav Chandrachud suggests that colonial-era restrictions on free speech, like sedition, obscenity, contempt of court, defamation and hate speech, were not merely retained but also strengthened in independent India. Authoritative and compelling, this book offers lucid and cogent arguments that have not been substantially advanced before by any of the leading thinkers on the right of free speech in India.
Archives: Books
The Lone Wolf
The Bangladesh Liberation War was nearing its bloody end when Colonel Ashok Tara, then a twenty-nine-year-old major, was assigned the task of rescuing Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s family which was being held hostage by the Pakistani Army. Ashok Tara, unarmed, entered the lion’s den, and negotiated with the hostile soldiers for the release of Bangladesh’s Father of the Nation and his family that included a young Sheikh Hasina.
The Lone Wolf is Ashok Tara’s story, charting the course of his celebrated yet quiet life as a member of the armed forces. Neha Dwivedi’s writing expertly captures our hero’s humble beginnings, his life-altering experiences, and offers a blow-by-blow account of a seminal event in South-east Asian history. As much as it is the story of Colonel Ashok Tara’s bravery, it is also the story of a bleak-yet-victorious period of Bangladesh’s quest for freedom.
Brandvantage
In the hyper-cluttered consumer world, unsuspecting brands are heading towards commoditization. With Brandvantage, brands and their custodians now have a platform to catapult to glory. The book gives a vantage perspective based on a unique triple-paradigm:
The hardware of brand competencies built on reimagined fundamentals of marketing. Discover how to gauge brand strength and diagnose problems by reading data transversally to turn around a declining brand or propel a steady brand to new heights. Learn how to position your brand uniquely in a super-competitive environment. Get tips on understanding your consumer to segment and communicate with high resonance, and create an engagement world with the mystique of a cult brand.
The software of managerial skills, based on the ‘STRIVES’ framework, required to navigate the volatile corporate world successfully.
The hitherto unspoken world of office art that facilitates the interplay between the hardware and software, bringing brand advantage to fruition.
Peppered with live examples and case studies, based on their personal experience spanning over four decades of building iconic brands, Trupti and Arvind bring to you twelve weeks of carefully crafted steps to brand leadership. Grab the advantage to create your cult brand with Brandvantage.
For further conversations on brand leadership and strategy, write in to:
truptiarvind@pragmarketism.com
Yogi Adityanath
Is he the next Prime Minister in the making?
He is young and dynamic. He is a fierce orator and is often perceived as unconventional. Most importantly, he is an incredibly popular politician in India.
Is Yogi Adityanath India’s next Prime Minister in the making? His unprecedented rise in the Bharatiya Janata Party and his over-the-top campaigns and displays of his photograph along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s on billboards, among many other moves, seem to suggest his political ambition.
Tracing his early life, entry into electoral politics and elevation to the position of the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, this book evaluates many untold stories of Yogi Adityanath. Sifting through information on the Chief Minister’s out-of-the-box administrative skills; his claims on law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh; and handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the first and the second waves of the pandemic, the authors present to us what is probably the first critical biography of Yogi Adityanath.
A Place in My Heart
A Place in My Heart is a many-splendored thing. It is a listicle. It is a celebration of the power of storytelling. It is also an account of a life lived in the Bollywood trenches. National Award-winning author, journalist and film critic Anupama Chopra writes about fifty films, artistes and events that have left an indelible impression on her and shaped her twenty-five-year-long career. Shah Rukh Khan is here. So are Super Deluxe and the Cannes Film Festival. A Place in My Heart is a blend of recommendations and remembrances, nostalgia and narratives. It is a smorgasbord of cinematic delights, written, as Marie Kondo would say, to ‘spark joy.’ Above all, it is a testament to Chopra’s enduring love for all things cinema.
Midnight Freeway
Yogesh Moolchandani, a disreputable builder, is dead. All the signs say suicide but there was nothing wrong with his life. He had just cracked a deal and things were looking hale and hearty for him. He had recently even purchased an imported Volkswagen Jetta. CCTV footage from the night of his death shows him crashing into a toll booth at a speed of 180 km per hour on the Bandra-Worli Sea Link. The dealer he had purchased his car from had received five missed calls from him just five minutes prior to the time of the alleged crash.
On the same night, in another part of town, Pranav Paleja, a criminal lawyer who works at the law chamber-
Mangesh & Mangharam, tries his best to extricate his client-a troublesome drunk-from the clutches of the police. Although an upholder of the law himself, Paleja is pathologically incapable of following it in his day-to-day personal life. Since Pranav Paleja was settling a dispute with the man concerned only moments before the crash, the police land up at his doorstep.
As the authorities try to find out why Yogesh was calling his car dealer frantically, the plot begins to thicken.
Who, or rather what, killed Yogesh Moolchandani?
Women of Influence
Women of Influence is a compilation of the untold stories of ten women IAS officers who have walked the extra mile and made a difference despite facing major pressures in governance. Having worked in the civil services for thirty-seven years, Rajni Sekhri Sibal has been in a unique position to see things at close quarters, which is why she is able to present narratives that provide an insight into the challenges of being a woman IAS officer, and also highlight episodes where the protagonist displays immense courage and commitment during the most difficult of times.
The narratives span many generations-the oldest narrative is set at the Bikaner border during the 1965 Indo-Pak War and the latest recounts events that occured fifty years later in UP in 2015. They also deal with varied subjects and geographies, ranging from a panchayat election in Punjab during the height of militancy in the eighties, to Naxal-prone Chandrapur in Maharashtra, to joyful learning in Karnataka and right across to the orchid plantations in Arunachal. The book relates accounts of how different protagonists responded to threats of violence post a death in police custody, to illegal mining by a sand mafia and to resistance to the introduction of technology in a government organization. Strategies adopted for making India Polio-free in 2011 and interventions to deal with the scrouge of human trafficking also provide interesting insights in the book. The narratives are inspiring tales of ten strong and efficient women of substance, and their extraordinary careers wherein they made a difference.
Ecstasy and Other Stories
STORIES THAT TOUCH YOUR HEART BY ONE OF THE BEST MODERN TAMIL WRITERS
Special Birth Centenary Edition
Thi. Janakiraman (ThiJa) was one of the best Tamil prose writers of the twentieth century. The stories in this specially curated collection offer a view of the modernizing Tamil countryside as well as the changing landscape of human relationships. A man builds his reputation based on lies to meet the expectations of his father, a woman desiring tenderness from her abusive husband finds release in an unexpected way, a music teacher is mocked for taking on a lower-caste student, and a drowning cat becomes the centre of attention during funerary rituals. In these and other tales, Janakiraman reaches inside the depths of the human heart and lays bare its contradictory pulls.
Through their brilliant translation, Professor David Shulman and the late S. Ramakrishnan reveal the ‘perfect pitch’ of Janakiraman’s precise, exquisite Tamil. They deftly capture his fluid, sensitive style in idiomatic English, seamlessly rendering the subtle inflections of the original. Prof. Shulman’s insightful and affecting introduction places Janakiraman within the long continuum of Tamil literature. There is also a short, beautiful memoir on him, written by his daughter Uma.
Selected Satire
Selected Satire: Fifty Years of Ignorance brings together about 20 satire pieces of eminent Hindi writer, Shrilal Shukla. Most noted for his novel Raag Darbari, for which he received the Sahitya Akademi Award, Shukla also wrote several collections of satirical essays and short stories.
The pieces in this volume include his socio-political and cultural satires, where he caricaturizes politicians, mocks the bureaucracy (many of whom were his friends), and picks on the so-called developmental schemes of the government. A couple of pieces are also about small town attitudes and pretentions of intellectuals. The overall flavour is of an irreverence to authority and humour drawn from everyday occurrences.
Yogiplate
Learn about Ayurvedic and sattvic cooking principles used at the ISKCON Mumbai Ashram and Govinda’s restaurant from former ISKCON monk and Yogiplate founder Radhavallabha Das. Ayurvedic diet varies by body type, a person’s nature, their lifestyle and the food they grew up eating. In this book, we learn how to identify our unique body type, the vegetables, fruits, grains, and spices that will suit us, and how Sattvic food nourishes the body, mind and inner soul.
Some food combinations can be toxic for a certain body type. In his simple style, Radhavallabha Das shows us how to pair the correct ingredients, avoid the ones that are harmful to us, and also focus on the oil, salt and water we cook with. This book will teach you how to tailor a unique diet that will nourish you to lead a happy and healthy life.