A haunting collection of stories from the master of suspense and intrigue, this book showcases some of Satyajit Ray’s memorable explorations into the twilight territories of the peculiar and supernatural.
Archives: Books
Sahibs Who Loved India (Pb)
A rare collection of essays that invites the reader to revisit a
vanished era of sahibs and memsahibs. From Lord Mountbatten to Peggy Holroyde to Maurice and Taya Zinkin, Britishers who lived
and worked in India reminisce about topics and points of interest as varied as the Indian Civil Service and the Roshanara Club, shikar
and hazri, the Amateur Cine Society of India and the Doon School,
Rudyard Kipling and Mahatma Gandhi.
Selected from a series of articles commissioned by Khushwant Singh when he was the editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, these
delightfully individualistic and refreshingly candid writings reveal
a fascinating array of British attitudes, experiences, observations, fond memories, the occasional short-lived grouse and, above all, a deep and abiding affection and respect for India.
Unveiling India
The women in this book are not extraordinary or famous, and yet their stories and testimonies, narrated here by one of India’s best-known women journalists, provide a passionate, often deeply touching, revelation of what it means to be a woman in India today.
The women tell of marriage and widowhood, unfair work practices, sexual servitude, the problems of bearing and rearing children in poverty, religion, discrimination, other forms of exploitation…Yet they also talk of fulfilling relationships, the joys of marriage and children, the exhilaration of breaking free from the bonds of tradition, ritual, caste, religion…Interwoven with all this isi the story of one woman’s journey—-of how Anees Jung, the author, brought up in Purdah, succeeded in shaking off the restricting influences of her traditional upbringing to become a highly successful, independent career woman, still a comparatively rare phenomenon in India.
As such, the book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the women of India—the silent majority that is now beginning to make itself heard.
The women in this book are not extraordinary or famous, and yet their stories and testimonies, narrated here by one of India’s best-known women journalists, provide a passionate, often deeply touching, revelation of what it means to be a woman in India today.
The women tell of marriage and widowhood, unfair work practices, sexual servitude, the problems of bearing and rearing children in poverty, religion, discrimination, other forms of exploitation…Yet they also talk of fulfilling relationships, the joys of marriage and children, the exhilaration of breaking free from the bonds of tradition, ritual, caste, religion…Interwoven with all this isi the story of one woman’s journey—-of how Anees Jung, the author, brought up in Purdah, succeeded in shaking off the restricting influences of her traditional upbringing to become a highly successful, independent career woman, still a comparatively rare phenomenon in India.
As such, the book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the women of India—the silent majority that is now beginning to make itself heard.
Byomkesh Bakshi (2)
Classic tales of crime detection featuring Byomkesh Bakshi, the master inquisitor. Written long before Satyajit Ray’s Feluda series, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi mysteries heralded a new era in Bengali popular fiction . Set in the old-world Kolkata, three stories featuring the astute investigator and his chronicler friend Ajit are still as gripping and delightful as when they first appeared.
Byomkesh’s world, peopled with wonderfully delineated characters and framed by a brilliantly captured pre-Independence urban milieu, is fascinating because of its cotemporary flavour, In the first story, Byomkesh works undercover to expose an organized crime ring trafficking in drugs. In the ‘Gramophone Pin Mystery’, he must put his razor-sharp intellect to good used to unearth the pattern behind a series of bizarre roadside murders. In ‘Clalamity Strikes’, the ace detective is called upon to investigate the strange and sudden death of a girl in a neighbour’s kitchen, In the next story, he has to lock horns with an old enemy who has vowed to kill him with an innocuous but deadly weapon. And, in ‘ Picture Imperfect’, Byomkesh unravels a complex mystery involving a stolen group photograph, an amorous couple, and an apparently unnecessary murder.
India’s Economic Policy
A lucid and brilliantly-argued book on India’s recent economic reforms Nearly fifty years after independence, India remains a very poor country. It ranks near the bottom in terms of per capita income, and is similarly placed in the Human Develoent Index which measures social well-being. Economic growth in India has been less than half that of China or even other countries in Asia. And governments, at the Centre as well as in the states, are close to insolvency. The reason for our spectacular underachievement lies in the continuation of policies which had a certain validity as a response to the colonial experience, but which have long outlived their usefulness. The global economic scene has changed dramatically since they were formulated, and we must respond to the new realities. Bimal Jalan, the well known economist and present Governor of the RBI, in this lucid and well-argued book, makes a case for governments doing what they alone can best do, and less of what they cannot do effectively.
Accidents Like Love & Marriage
A ribald, good-natured story of love in Delhi.
Jaishree Mishra’s second novel is an unexpected romp through the universal dilemmas of love and marriage. It is a compelling tale of icompatible relationships and their astonishing success rated. The Sachdevs, Memoms and Singhs are urban Indians, normal folk with everyday converns, instantly recognizable, in fact, just a little bit like youji and me. But when a foppish Delhiwalla falls for a loverly, smart keralite and his brother finds remance abroad, passion and comedy take control of their destinaies. Why are any of these couples married to each other? Why are the unmarried wanting to marry each other? And why are some of them friends? For wouldn’t you have throught that friends, at the very least, had to be vaguely compatible, even if husbands and wives weren’t?
This hilarious tale of imcompatiblities explores why we do the things we do or, indeed, why we let them happen to us.
Making The Minister Smile
Meet Chris Stark—six-feet-four, weighing a healthy 300 pounds—a former player of American football who, as he himself is the first to accept, ‘think pretty good but don’t talk that great on account of playing too much football’. Following the pportunities created by Liberalisation, his family’s c orporation h as e ntered in to a business
collaboration with an Indian company, and this has brought the sportive young man to Delhi. While in India he becomes enmeshed i n i ndustrial d isputes, p olitical
machinations, weird intelligence webs and an unfortunate love
affair, besides various other oddities.
The solution to the entire Gordian knot of problems lies in making
the Minister smile. What happens?
Best Loved Indian Stories – II
The rich and varied body of writing in the Indian languages has grown immenasurably in the last hundred yeards. This collection of short stories brings together some pernnial favourites from this vast treasure trve, written by acknowledged masters of the art and sensitively translated. The twenty-three stories included here deal with themes central to modern India:caste, gender politics and emerging changes in the traditonal family structure, These are striking vignettes from all parts of te country, evocative of different lifestyles, yet reflective of common problems and issues with which we can all idnetify.
Those Days
Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award An award-winning novel that uses both vast panoramic views and lovingly reconstructed detail to provide an unforgettable picture of nineteenth-century Bengal. The Bengal Renaissance and the 1857 uprising form the backdrop to Those Days, a saga of human frailties and strength. The story revolves around the immensely wealthy Singha and Mukherjee families, and the intimacy that grows between them. Ganganarayan Singha’s love for Bindubasini, the widowed daughter of the Mukherjees, flounders on the rocks of orthodoxy even as his zamindar father, Ramkamal, finds happiness in the arms of the courtesan, Kamala Sundari. Bimbabati, Ramkamal’s wife, is left to cope with her loneliness. A central theme of the novel is the manner in which the feudal aristocracy, sunk in ritual and pleasure, slowly awakens to its social obligations. Historical personae interact with fictional protagonists to enrich the narrative. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, the reformer; Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the poet; the father and son duo of Dwarkanath and Debendranath Tagore; Harish Mukherjee, the journalist; Keshab Chandra Sen, the Brahmo Samaj radical; David Hare and John Bethune, the English educationists—these and a host of others walk the streets of Calcutta again, to bring alive a momentous time.
Kalki
‘Kalki’ R. Krishnamurthy, one of the pioneering giants of the Tamil press in the tumultuous times of the nationalist movement, was a versatile and prolific writer, inscribing the urgencies of his time in his fiction. This collection brings together the best of Kalki’s short stories, which contain some of his most colourful and enduring characters and themes of Tamil popular fiction of the nineteen thirties and forties. There is in these stories the heady urgency of the freedom struggle, the piquant humour of the parodied Tamil gothic and devastating social satire. In her sensitive translations, Gowri Ramnarayan has succeeded in capturing the nuances of the gently mordant wit that made Kalki’s stories the highlight of the magazines they were originally published in, creating for themselves a dedicated following that flourishes undiminished to this day.
Coinciding with the centenary of Kalki’s birth, this volume is a well-deserved tribute to a writer whose breadth of vision and genius imagined and served a new India.