From the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Westerners descended upon India, disciples of a cultural revolution that proclaimed that the magic and mystery missing from their lives could be found in the East. Recording her observations of these ‘pilgrims’ interacting with their hosts, Gita Mehta skewers the entire spectrum of seekers: The Beatles, homeless students, Hollywood rich kids in detox, British guilt-trippers and more. Brilliantly irreverent, Karma Cola displays Mehta’s gift for weaving old and new, common and bizarre, history and current events into a seamless and colorful narrative that is at once witty, shocking, and poignant.
Archives: Books
Snakes and Ladders
India is a land of contrasts. It is the world’s most populous democracy, but still upholds the caste system. It is a burgeoning economic superpower, but ranks among the poorest nations on earth. It is home to the world’s largest film industry after Hollywood, as well as two still-practised religions that are millennia old. It is an ancient civilization celebrating more than half a century as a modern nation. Mehta is fascinated by India in all its rich detail and gives a loving but unflinching assessment of India today in an account that is entertaining, informative, and wholly personal.
It Will Always Be You
You don’t intend to find love.
You’re not even looking for that ‘one’ special person.
But sometimes it’s not ‘you’ who is taking the call.
Life is.
He is a gorgeous-looking rock star, a college stud who has girls falling all over him. He has everything one could possibly ask for.
She is in his house because of a troubled past. Hurt and confused, she is a wild, rebellious girl. She is least bothered about his superstar image and can’t stand his arrogance. And she won’t let his good looks affect her.
He can’t take how she ignores him. And even though her coal-black eyes attract him, he wants to teach her a lesson.
That’s how their story begins-with hate.
Will it end the same way? Find out.
A Life Apart
Ritwik, twenty-two and orphaned, escapes from Calcutta to England, to start his life all over again. But his all-consuming relationship with his mother is a minefield he must first navigate. Will Ritwik find salvation through the story of an Englishwoman in Raj-era Bengal or through the figure of the eighty-six-year-old Anne Cameron, who gives shelter to Ritwik in London in exchange for the care that she needs? As present and past of several lives collide, Ritwik’s own goes into free fall.
Unsentimental yet full of compassion, and written with unrelenting honesty, this scalding debut is about dislocation and alienation, outsiders and losers, the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories, and the consolations of storytelling.
The Big Book of World Mythology
The stories in The Big Book of World Mythology will take you on a magical journey across the rainbow, chasing fairies, fighting serpents, riding dragons and reaching for the sun. These tales from the Americas, Asia, Europe, Egypt, Africa and Oceania will introduce you to Great Spirits, shape-shifting trickster heroes, monsters, giants and wicked witches and a beautiful girl who may suddenly turn into a river or a tree, a seal or even just an echo!
Go an adventure with monkey, spider and serpent gods who make you laugh and learn life’s small and great lessons. Beautifully illustrated, this book offers young readers one of the accessible guides to the world’s imagination!
Odysseus Abroad
Ananda’s uncle, Rangamama, is an eccentric bachelor who has taken early retirement
and lives off his pension in a squalid bedsit in Belsize Park. His habits are angular—he
rarely bathes, and devours paranormal stories—and his personality, combative. Ananda,
by contrast, is fragile, nervous and romantic. Uncle and nephew circle around their past,
walk the streets of London and find in each other an unspoken solace.
A retelling of the story of Odysseus and Telemachus, Odysseus Abroad is a novel about
a young man and an old man, about friendship, loneliness and love. Written in a voice
at once tender and ribald, wry and unsentimental, this is Amit Chaudhuri’s most
extraordinary novel yet.
Written by Salim-Javed
The dramatic, entertaining story of the dream team that pioneered the Bollywood blockbuster
Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar reinvented the Bollywood formula with an extraordinary lineup of superhits, becoming game changers at a time when screenwriting was dismissed as a back-room job. From Zanjeer to Deewaar and Sholay to Shakti, their creative output changed the destinies of several actors and filmmakers and even made a cultural phenomenon of the Angry Young Man. Even after they decided to part ways, success continued to court them-a testament not only to their impeccable talent and professional ethos, but also their enterprising showmanship and business acumen.
Fizzing with energy and brimming over with enough trivia to delight a cinephile’s heart, Written by Salim-Javed tells the story of a dynamic partnership that transformed Hindi cinema forever.
The White Castle
In the seventeenth century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople, into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja-‘master’-a man who is his exact double. Hoja wonders, given the knowledge of each other’s most intimate secrets, if they could actually exchange identities.
Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colourful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination.
Nation at Play
Nation at Play is a novel history of India’s engagement with sport and a probing analysis of its cultural and political development under monarchy and the Raj, as well as in the decades after Independence. Interestingly, over time, some sports that originated in India have fallen out of favour, while others, such as cricket, a colonial import, have been adopted and made wholly India’s own.
Sen follows the transformation of sport from an elite, kingly pastime to a national obsession tied to colonialism, nationalism and free market liberalization. He pays special attention to two modern phenomena: the dominance of cricket in the Indian consciousness and the chronic failure of a billion-strong nation to compete successfully in international sporting competitions, such as the Olympics. Innovatively incorporating examples from popular media and other unconventional sources, Nation at Play not only captures the political nature of sport in India but also reveals the patterns of patronage, clientage, and institutionalization that have bound this diverse nation together for centuries.
‘A fine, lucid, engaging and constantly surprising study. Highly recommended’-Gideon Haigh
‘An informative and readable account of the Indian history of football, hockey, wrestling, boxing and cricket in the last two centuries’-Partha Chatterjee
‘An ingenious history of Indian sport . . . tells the story of India’s mostly failed love affair with competitive sport since the nineteenth century’-Mukul Kesavan
‘A fascinating, rich and thoroughly engaging history of sport in India’-Joseph S. Alter
A Strangeness in My Mind
Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karatas has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he’d hoped, at the age of twelve he comes to Istanbul—”the center of the world”—and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father’s trade, selling boza (a traditional, mildly alcoholic Turkish drink) on the street, hoping to become rich like the other villagers who have settled on the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut’s side. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have, he stumbles toward middle age in a series of jobs leading nowhere. His sense of missing something leads him sometimes to the politics of his friends and intermittently to the teachings of a charismatic religious guide. But every evening, without fail, Mevlut still wanders the streets of Istanbul, selling boza and wondering at the “strangeness” in his mind, the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else, until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for.
Told from different perspectives by a host of beguiling characters, a Strangeness in My Mind is a modern epic of coming of age in a great city, a brilliant tableau of life among the newcomers who have changed the face of Istanbul over the past fifty years. Here is a mesmerizing story of human longing, sure to take its place among Pamuk’s finest achievements.