Is love only about how you look?
Will a makeover change Tara’s life? Can it change anybody’s life?
When plain Jane Tara is dumped by her fiancé at the altar for a stunning rich heiress, it shakes her confidence. However, she’s not ready to give up. She will do whatever it takes to win her Arun back. Even if it means undergoing a complete makeover!
The school reunion is her big chance. So when Tara turns up there, completely transformedglamorous and sexy-she gets more than her fair share of attention, especially from Arun. It seems her plan is working. But soon the unexpected begins to happen and Tara finds herself in a dangerous situation. She stumbles upon secrets she’d never known. Life shows her how unpredictable it is!
Archives: Books
Suleiman Charitra
A Hindu poet, Kalyana Malla, renders in classical Sanskrit a biblical story for his Muslim patron, a Lodhi prince of the sixteenth century, in this unusual intermingling of cultural
traditions. The sensual unfolding of David and Bathsheba’s love story-the bathing scene, David’s infatuation, his pursuit of Bathsheba, and their eventual union-is strikingly portrayed in the language of the gods through its shringara rasa, or the erotic mode, by a writer better known for the sex manual Ananga Ranga.
This marvellous, first-ever English translation of Suleiman Charitra-a delightful Sanskrit rendering of Hebraic and Arabic tales-elegantly brings together the east and the west.
On Creativity
The concept of genius has been a subject of much speculation and debate since the eighteenth century. However, in a world obsessed with creative genius and the possibilities of the human imagination, the actual workings of the creative process and its psychological underpinnings remain a mystery.
In On Creativity, a group of experts seeks to unlock this enigma.The essays of Sudhir Kakar, Günter Blamberger and Weihua Niu provide a cross-cultural perspective, comparing historical and actual concepts of creativity in the East and the West. The essays of Patrick Mahony, James Kaufman and Margaret Boden offer an interdisciplinary perspective, demonstrating the successes and limits of the psychoanalytical and psychological approaches to understanding creativity while also discussing cognitive biology as the seemingly most promising approach to solving the puzzle of the creative mind.
Brilliant, lucid and thought-provoking, these essays examine and illumine the reasons that compel us to innovate further.
The Living Goddess
In a small medieval palace on Kathmandu’s Durbar Square lives Nepal’s famous Living Goddess-a child chosen from the Buddhist caste of goldsmiths whose role is to watch over the country and protect its people. Once she attains puberty, another girl takes her place.
To Nepalis she is the embodiment of Devi and for centuries the kings of Nepal have sought her blessing to rule. Legends swirl about her. But the facts remain shrouded in secrecy and closely guarded by the Living Goddess’s priests and caretakers. Why are Buddhist girls worshipped by Hindu monarchs? Are the initiation rituals as macabre as they are rumoured to be? And what happens to Living Goddesses once they attain puberty?
Using myth, religion, history and her unprecedented access to the priests, caretakers and ex-Living Godessess, Isabella Tree takes us deep into this hidden world. Through it she draws a vivid portrait of the girl-goddess, the beliefs and practices of traditional Nepal, and the uneasy journey it now makes towards modernity. Deeply felt and written over many years of travel and research, The Living Goddess is a profound, compelling and extremely moving book.
Touching Lives
Touching Lives is is the story of journeys to far corners of India meeting people whose lives have been transformed by technology. It is the account of people who have forged a different destiny for themselves, breaking the cycle of poverty and helplessness, with a little help from ISRO. Throwing light on some of the million tiny revolutions sweeping the country, the book takes us from Jhabua to interior Karnataka, from the Sundarbans to Chamoli in Garhwal. It is our chance to meet everyday
A Strange Kind Of Paradise
A Strange Kind of Paradise is an exploration of India’s past and present, from the perspective of a foreigner who has lived in India for many years. Sam Miller investigates how the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, Arabs, Africans, Europeans and Americans came to imagine India. Spanning the centuries from Alexander the Great to Slumdog Millionaire, Miller’s account features, among others, Thomas the Apostle, the Chinese monk Xuanzang, Marco Polo, Babur, Clive of India, Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles and Steve Jobs-all of it interspersed with the story of his own 25-year-long love affair with India. At once scholarly and thought-provoking, delightfully eccentric and laugh-out-loud funny, this book is destined to become a much-loved classic.
Yuva India
Yuva India takes a deep dive into the lives of India’s young men and women. In unravelling what makes them tick, the book uncovers the phenomenon of ‘attitudinal convergence’ that is rapidly growing across youth cohorts in India. Tracing its origin to the arrival of and exposure to a ‘composite culture’, the research behind ‘convergence’ zeroes in on how a young India is defining itself using new-age sensibilities.
Drawing on insights collected over a decade, Ray documents and analyses how young men and women in India approach issues of identity, image, sexuality, spirituality, personal relevance, social connections and community, and professional pursuits. In a one-of-a-kind analysis, using comprehensive data from across the nation, Ray scrutinizes young India’s psyche to make sense of their aspirations.
Filled with numerous first-person accounts and brand stories, Yuva India provides an insightful understanding of India’s most valuable asset, its youth population. The present and the future of India’s young, it reveals, will be invaluable not just for business and brand managers, but also for all those who wish to engage with them.
The Tusk That Did The Damage
When a young elephant is brutally orphaned by poachers, it is only a matter of time before he begins terrorising the countryside, earning his malevolent name from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries with leaves.
Manu, the studious son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger and is drawn into the alluring world of ivory hunting.
Emma is working on a documentary set in a Kerala wildlife park with her best friend. Her work leads her to witness the porous boundary between conservation and corruption and she finds herself caught up in her own betrayal.
As the novel hurtles toward its tragic climax, these three storylines fuse into a wrenching meditation on love and revenge, fact and myth, duty and sacrifice. In a feat of audacious imagination and arrestingly beautiful prose, The Tusk That Did the Damage tells an original and heart-breaking story about how we treat nature, and each other.
Panty
Darkly glamorous and fiercely erotic heroines take the centre stage in these two novellas. In Panty, when a mysterious young woman arrives in Calcutta and moves into a guesthouse, she finds in an otherwise empty wardrobe a soft and silky panty in leopard-skin print. She thinks the woman who wore it must have possessed a wild sexual nature. A sensation of companionship envelops her; the sexual lives of the two women begin to mingle and blur.
In Hypnosis, another young woman—a TV journalist on perpetual night duty—has an unconsummated but passionate affair with a famous musician that leaves her shattered. In a nightmarish sequence of events that follow, she allows herself to be hypnotized and drugged to aid her search for love.
Exposing our darkest desires and deepest fears when it comes to love, the effect of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s ferocious storytelling is deliciously anarchic and deeply unsettling.
Maya
Sometimes you lose what is real. But . . .
Dan and Krish have invented a gadget that they know will change the way augmented reality is perceived. When the gadget is still in its trial phase, an accident kills Krish’s sister, Maya. Little does he know that Dan and Maya were deeply in love. For both, the pain of her loss is intense, but Dan will not accept losing Maya, and challenges the powers that be that took her away. He sets about creating something unique that he knows will fulfil Maya’s dream of becoming a dancer and also satisfy his need to be with her. But is it the right thing to do?
Maya is set in a world between reality and virtual reality, and explores human relationships through its lens