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The Devourers
In a dusty caravanserai in seventeenth-century Mumtazabad, Cyrah, a young wanderer, meets a man who says he is a monster. Their encounter fills her with revulsion and dread, yet changes her forever. In present-day Kolkata, college professor Alok Mukherjee meets a man who claims to be a werewolf. Alone and estranged after a divorce, Alok is drawn to the stranger’s hypnotic allure, unable to tell delusion from truth, trickery from magic.// Beginning in Mughal India by the foot of the Taj Mahal and culminating in the lush, dangerous forests of the Sunderbans in twenty-first century India, The Devourers is a story about shape-shifters, hunters with second selves who prey on humans and live in the shadows of civilization. But it is also about what it means to be human, and the transformative powers of love. Utterly gripping and wholly original, it reinvents the literary fantasy novel for India, imbuing it with depth, emotion and richness.
Karan Ghelo: Gujarat’s Last Rajput King
The first Indian headmaster of an English-medium school in Surat, and later Diwan of Bhuj, Nandshankar Mehta (1835-1905) was a strong advocate of social reform. Karan Ghelo, the first modern Gujarati novel and his only work of fiction, draws heavily on bardic chronicles and historic texts. // Tulsi Vatsal, a graduate of Oxford University, is an independent researcher, writer and editor. She has authored a number of books on Indian history and culture. Her latest book is Sahib, Bibi, Nawab: Baluchar Silks of Bengal 1750-1900. // Aban Mukherji is the author of Soonamai Desai of Navsari: A Biographical and Autobiographical Sketch. She is currently co-editing a nineteenth-century Gujarati text, Mumbaino Bahaar.
Total Fitness
The complete health and lifestyle guide for the true fitness enthusiast
One of the pioneers in the health and fitness industry, and the first to introduce the idea of celebrity fitness in India, Leena Mogre is an institution in herself. Her client list boasts personalities such as Madhuri Dixit, Katrina Kaif, John Abraham, Bipasha Basu, among others. And for the first time ever, she tells us all about it in her debut book—Total Fitness.
In a humorous and inimitable style, Leena brings you all the insider secrets—everything from the myth of size zero to assessing your actual strength and fitness before starting out, and finding your comfort zone and pushing beyond it gradually to achieve complete fitness. This book is the perfect guide for anyone looking to get fit the right way.
Supersurvivors
A supersurvivor is a person who has dramatically transformed his or her life after surviving a trauma, accomplishing amazing things or transforming the world for the better.
When tragedy befalls, many people succumb to trauma and suffer many psychological setbacks such as posttraumatic stress disorder. Many are able to move past the trauma and return to normal life. Some, however, are able to bounce back stronger and tougher than before. This rare species is called the supersurvivor.
The scope of suffering may vary, but most people face troubles small or big in their day-to-day lives. Supersurvivors offers astonishing stories of the indomitable human spirit which will put your own life and how you live it into perspective.
Two Lives
Shanti Behari Seth was born and brought up in India in the late years of the Raj, and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin to study medicine and dentistry. It was here that Shanti’s path first crossed that of his future wife, as a lodger in her father’s house. Henny Gerda Caro was born in Berlin, to a Jewish family, cultured, patriotic and intensely German. A friendship flowered between them, and when Henny fled Hitler’s Germany for England, just a month before the war broke out, she was met at Victoria Station by the only person she knew in that country: Shanti.
Vikram Seth, their great-nephew from India, arrived in this childless couple’s life as a teenage student. Now he has woven together the astonishing story of Shanti and Henny, and the result is an extraordinary tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War, Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Israel and Palestine, post-war Germany and 1970s Britain. Two Lives is both a history of a violent country seen through the eyes of two survivors as well as an intimate portrait of their friendship, marriage and abiding yet complex love. This is the true tale of two remarkable lives-a masterful telling from one of our greatest living writers.
The World of the Tamil Merchant
How did the Tamil merchant become India’s first link to the outside world?
The tale of the Tamil merchant is a fascinating story of the adventure of commerce in the ancient and early medieval periods in India. The early medieval period saw an economic structure dominated by the rise of powerful Tamil empires under the Pallava and Chola dynasties. This book marks the many significant ways in which the Tamil merchants impacted the political and economic development of south India.
You Can Make Your Dreams Work: Inspirational Stories of 15 Innovators
What if you decided to do what you love instead of working at someone else’s desk every day?
That’s exactly what the men and women in this book did. They took the conventional route but slowly gathered the skills, resources and strength to make their own path. Featured here, among other incredible people, are Mahesh and Suresh Ramakrishnan, IT and banking professionals turned bespoke suit makers, former corporate lawyer Piya Bose, who now owns a travel company, and Raghu Dixit, a microbiologist turned rock star. Success, to them, is in earning a living from their passion, having a strong sense of purpose and learning from the challenges they face every day.
Their lives and sterling tips for success are not only inspiring but also empower you to muster up the courage and make a go of your new life.
The Seven Sages: Selected Essays
A scintillating collection from one of our most original minds
Eminent philosopher, professor and public intellectual, Ramchandra Gandhi (1937-2007) was regarded as a sage in his lifetime. This book brings together some of his long essays and hitherto unpublished talks and writings on themes ranging from non-violence and karma to svaraj, brahmacharya and modern Indian spirituality, that are contextualized in an introduction by close disciple A. Raghuramaraju.
Bridging the moral, religious and social, the book offers many original insights: on how Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Sarada Devi’s catholic vision of religion annihilated exclusivism; the manner in which Gandhi’s martyrdom broke the prevailing power of evil and violence worldwide; how going beyond celibacy, brahmacharya is a joyous renunciation of sex; and on svaraj being ‘a struggle for the kingdom of self and autonomy’, not mere political independence.
Brilliantly argued and inspiring, The Seven Sages brings Ramchandra Gandhi’s ideas to a new audience, beyond his admirers.