Brett Lee is one of cricket’s most prolific personalities. Recipient of the prestigious Allan Border Medal and a former Test Player of the Year—the blond speedster has amassed over 300 test wickets, and continues to add more feathers to his cap. Tearing in at over 160 kilometres an hour, ‘Binga’ has dented many a helmet and inspired fear in the best batsmen.
My Life is his story—honest, engaging, and laced with charming wit. The book takes you inside the dressing room and sheds light on the highs and lows of the game—the pride of possessing a baggy green, the camaraderie between the boys, superstardom, and the inevitable controversies. It provides a glimpse into the life of one of Australia’s most successful fast bowlers and his love for music, fashion, and above all India.
I have it all-IIT-IIM degrees, plum consulting-partner position with Mcarthur’s, a company-provided BMW-but things haven’t been going so well lately. Work bores me, my wife Meera and I haven’t had sex in years, my in-laws treat me like their personal slave. Also, for some time, I’ve been having reassuring conversations with Nunu, my dick. Actually, he thinks I’m losing it!
Sid, my friend from Institute days, has the same problem-he doesn’t talk to Nunu, though-and his solution is simple: anything goes … as long as the wife doesn’t find out! We have a plan to spice up our lives. It involves Jenny, the mystic masseuse from the Feather Touch massage parlour, the infuriatingly efficient Baby Detective Agency to get the in-laws to back off, and a leisurely, raunchy road trip along the coast from Kerala to Goa. Oh yes, did I mention that consulting project for Rajnikanth Sir’s new movie?
Winner of the Philips Literary Award in Bangladesh
The Woman Who Flew (Urukkoo) tells the story of Nina, a young woman who moves from small-town Bangladesh to the megacity of Dhaka, where she soon finds herself divorced, bereaved of her newborn and trapped in a mundane existence. Hungry for fresh air, Nina strikes up a friendship with her mother’s handsome ex-lover, Irfan, who encourages her to paint again. But as Nina tugs at her chains, her sexually confused ex-husband, Rezaul, insinuates himself back into her life, leaving her pregnant . . .
Intense, edgy and tinged with rage, The Woman Who Flew lays bare the inner world of a woman beating her wings against a hostile, conservative landscape.
A well-known figure in Pune, Achyut Athavale is a retired economist of wide-ranging interests and some social standing. He is often invited to give lectures and speak at public events. One such speech results in a riot taking place in the city, leading a troubled Achyut to move into a home for the elderly located near three small villages in rural India named Norway, Sweden and Denmark. There Achyut suffers a temporary loss of memory and murders another inmate of the home. Events take a turn for the bizarre with the media, the Hindi film industry and some international political figures campaigning to assert Achyut’s innocence.
Bringing together the stylistic elements of the early twentieth-century Marathi novel and the modern European Absurd in this superbly crafted exploration of causality and memory, Makarand Sathe creates a scathing and humorous narrative around the happenings of Achyut’s life.
When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s diaries came to light in 2004, it was an indisputably historic event. His daughter, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, had the notebooks-their pages by then brittle and discoloured-carefully transcribed and later translated from Bengali into English.
Written during Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s sojourns in jail as a state prisoner between 1967 and 1969, they begin with his recollections of his days as a student activist in the run-up to the movement for Pakistan in the early 1940s. They cover the Bengali language movement, the first stirrings of the movement for Bangladesh independence and self-rule, and powerfully convey the great uncertainties as well as the great hopes that dominated the time. The last notebook ends with the events accompanying the struggle for democratic rights in 1955.
These are Sheikh Mujib’s own words-the language has only been changed for absolute clarity when required. What the narrative brings out with immediacy and passion is his intellectual and political journey from a youthful activist to the leader of a struggle for national liberation. Sheikh Mujib describes vividly how-despite being in prison-he was in the forefront of organizing the protests that followed the declaration of Urdu as the state language of Pakistan. On 21 February 1952 the police opened fire on a peaceful student procession, killing many. That brutal action unleashed the powerful movement that culminated in the birth of the new nation of Bangladesh in 1971. This extraordinary document is not only a portrait of a nation in the making; it is written by the man who changed the course of history and led his people to freedom.
The 2010 mega-scams created a crisis of trust in governance and the leadership. Seeking solutions, N. Vittal analyses the record of the institutions involved and traces the roots of the growing rot to the decline of accountability in public life, the lack overall of transparency in governance, besides general greed and decline in integrity.
As a prominent insider in government for over four decades, he believes that greater transparency and use of technology and ensuring there is no alternative can reform our system. The curb on use of money power in state elections and the 2010 landmark judgement in the case of P.J. Thomas’s appointment as Central Vigilance Commissioner are such steps. Through greater application of Right to Information, strengthening of watchdog bodies like the judiciary or the Central Election Commission, and choosing people of integrity and commitment to man them, besides an alert civil society and media, Vittal is optimistic of achieving a clean India.
We often forget that Gitanjali, the book of poems for which Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, was actually a collection of songs. In his lifetime, Tagore was most renowned for his songwriting. But today, outside Bengal, his music remains largely unknown and his songs are scarcely understood. Much of what Tagore experienced in life his frustrations, his grief, his sense of devastation were expressed in songs. The distinction of Tagore s musical oeuvre lies in the near-perfect balance that he achieved between the evocative lyrics, the matching melody and the rhythmic structure in which each song is bound. Even his art, which flowered late in his life, was influenced by music. Music, in fact, is the key to understanding Tagore: the man and his greatness.
Despite being sullied by frauds and dismissed by sceptics, the paranormal has exerted a strange fascination over humankind for centuries. In Seriously strange, a group of nine intellectuals come together to shed light on some of the most baffling experiences on record – psychical experiences. Through these illuminating essays, they tell us how such extraordinary events can be decoded nad interpreted to become the object of rigorous scientific study. the range is wide, from essays that reveal how Freud and Jung engaged with the notion of the paranormal to a provacative and humorous memoir of a physicist who spent over a decade running a secret psychic spying programme for the US government druing the Cold Wa; from hearfelt accounts by practising psychiatrists of the anomalies in their healing practice to a learned call for the renewal of professional parapsychology in the light of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. By telling their own stories and exploring some of the implications of their work, these men and women map the mind-bending geography of the human psyche and the spectum of experiences – love and death, desire and sex, hurt and healing, myth and magic – that influence it.
