In a village in India, a forsaken man is about to kill himself in quiet despair. A million miles away, Katya Misra is celebrating a perfect evening in her fine, academic life in Seattle . . . until she is informed that her teenage son Kabir has run away to India in search of a father he has never met. Contemptuous of her homeland and determined to bring Kabir back where he belongs, Katya must follow her son into the home of a suicidal farmer, in a village where, every eight hours, a man kills himself. Here, as Kabir’s father inspires his son with his selfless social work, Katya finds an ally in the farmer’s wife Gayatribai, who saves Kabir’s life by damaging her own, and in return asks for Katya’s help in keeping her husband alive in the suicide epidemic that has gripped this treacherously changing nation.
Whipped up in a world of violent protest rallies, mass weddings, inglorious suicides, and a love that demands to be rekindled, Katya must learn whose life can be saved and whose she should just let go.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry continues to inspire and enthral contemporary readers. The Best of Faiz consists of Shiv K. Kumar’s translations of Faiz’s most popular Urdu poems into English. The collected poems include ‘Mujh Se Pehli Si’, ‘Subhe Azadi’, ‘Sochne Do’ and ‘Bol’. This edition also includes a translator’s foreword and the original poems in nastaliq and devanagari scripts.
Julia Robinson’s bored. Her job at a top London ad agency is starting to feel a bit same-ish, her London rent is killing her and she’s been rained on one time too many to find the British weather amusing any longer. More importantly, everyone but her seems to be paired off in cosy twosomes.Julia wants to shake things up—and to the horror of friends and family jumps at the chance of a new job in Mumbai. Armed with nothing but a travel guide, fondness for curry and a vague awareness of Bollywood, she finds herself bang in the centre of one of the most chaotic, energetic cities in the world. But will she be able to navigate the potholes in the street, the glitzy nightlife of exclusive clubs and expensive cocktails, and the customs and traditions of a whole new world to find her way to Mr Right?
Playwright, author and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body—a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not, inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.”
But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women there. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer and, through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body—pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the Earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully—and gratefully—joined to the body of the world.
Unflinching, generous and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the world.
How do you get your 6-year-old to sleep on time?
How do you get your child to socialize?
How do you get your 5-year-old to stop throwing tantrums when she wants something?
When conventional approaches such as reward and punishment don’t work, what do you do? As much as being a joy and blessing to raise a child, parenting is a journey riddled with questions. As a parent, how do you know what’s right for your child and you?
Family counselor and columnist, Gouri Dange tackles all your parental woes with simple and reasoned answers and suggestions. Presented in an accessible question–answer format, More ABCs of Parenting provides practical solutions to demonstrate how there are answers to problems you thought were impossible.
Akhil Arora, a young, dorky engineer in Delhi, can’t wait to get away from home and prove to his folks that he can be on his own. Meanwhile in a small town in Punjab, Jaspreet Singh, aka Jassi, is busy dreaming of a life straight out of American Pie. As fate would have it, they end up as roommates in Florida. But the two boys are poles apart in their perspectives and expectations of America. While Akhil is fiercely patriotic and hopes to come back to India in a few years, Jassi finds his Indian identity an uncomfortable burden and looks forward to finding an American girl with whom he can live happily ever after.
Laced with funny anecdotes and witty insights, Amreekandesi chronicles the quintessential immigrant experience, highlighting the clash of cultures, the search for identity, and the quest for survival in a foreign land.
‘The child you threatened once, the young shoot you stepped on,
the Tamil you teased, is standing with a gun in front of you.’
This short diary was recovered from Malaravan’s kit after he was killed
in action in 1992, when barely twenty. In it, he recounts his unit’s journey
to Maankulam, the island’s granary, to fight a critical battle where they
routed the Lankan military. The LTTE’s planning and tactics, the fervour
and camaraderie of the young Tigers, and the actual combat are minutely
chronicled. As a foil to the violence, Malaravan brings out the beauty
of the Tamil forest and countryside and the humanity and support of the
common people for them, despite their suffering under army rule.
Bittersweet, fresh and lyrical at times, War Journey is a testament
to the Tamil longing for a homeland and the wider conflict
that once engulfed the island.
Born in 1861 in one of the foremost families of Bengal, Little Rabi grew up to become a great nationalist, a gifted writer, a talented artist, a brilliant visionary and a reformer of education. He was also Asia’s first Nobel Laureate. His contribution to India’s freedom movement is forever immortalized in Jana Gana Mana, a song he wrote to inspire the nation.
This wonderfully insightful biography, rich in anecdotes and little-known facts, brings alive this legendary figure to contemporary readers. Monideepa Sahu vividly recounts Rabindranth’s experiences at school that helped to formulate his vision of Shantiniketan. She also traces the evolution of his poetry from schoolboy rhymes in dog-eared notebooks to universally loved poetry, prose, novels and short stories.
Explore the life and times of this remarkable personality in this compelling biography.
It is the 1970s. After a bloody struggle, Bangladesh is an independent nation. But thousands are pouring into Dhaka from all over the country, looking for food and shelter. Amongst them is Nur Hussain, an uneducated young man from a remote village, who is only good at mimicking a famous speech of the prime minister’s. He turns up at journalist Khaleque Biswas’s doorstep, seeking employment. He is initially a burden for Khaleque, but then Khaleque, who has recently lost his job, has the idea of turning Nur into a fake Sheikh Mujib. WIth the blessings of the political establishment, he starts chasing in on the nationalist frevour of the city’s poorest. But even as the money rolls in, the tension between the two men increases and reaches a violent climax when Nur refuses to stick to the script.
Intense yet chilling, this brilliant first novel is a meditation on power, greed and the human cost of the politics.
Ram Krishna is an artist who paints nudes. Incensed by his wife’s possible infidelity, and despite his own conjugal insecurities, he engages in an adulterous liaison. Immediately, Karma strikes: his wife’s purported lover pushes him to his death into a flooding river. Unclad of corporal existence, he hovers above earth and discovers that—apart from his parents, dog, and a few friends—no one misses him. Dejected, he encounters Yama, the Lord of Death, and begins a conversation that extinguishes his own airs and affectations, and makes him see that he may have been wrong about life . . . and his wife.
Armed with a wry sense of humour, Shiv K. Kumar lays bare the questions of humanity’s inescapable end, plying us with a story of the afterlife that gives us new reasons to live and laugh.
