For centuries, Rajasthan has been a gold mine of oral traditions and histories with Padma Shri Vijaydan Detha being one of the foremost storytellers of all time.
Timeless Tales from Marwar gives a new lease of life to his folk tales. It is a hand-picked compilation from the much-celebrated Batan ri Phulwari–‘Garden of Tales’–a fourteen-volume collection written over a span of nearly fifty years.
Retold in Detha’s magical narrative style complete with imagery, this selection offers some of the oldest and most popular fables from the Thar Desert region. Discover tales of handsome rajkanwars, evil witches, exploitative thakars, miserly seths, clever insects, benevolent snakes and more. Vishes Kothari’s vivid English translation introduces one of the most venerated figures in Rajasthani folk culture to a wider audience.
Do you have numerous friends on social media, but hardly any in real life?
Do you find that your relationships don’t last?
These and similar questions have now become the part and parcel of our lives. Today, more than ever, friendship has become more important than any other relationship. The warmth and companionship that a good friend can provide is unmatched and each one of us craves for that special friend to whom we can unburden our heart or seek help from in troubled times. But not all of us are that lucky!
In his book, Shubha Vilas discusses, in a simple and straight-forward manner, what is missing in our friendships today and the various scenarios that prevent people from making and maintaining good friends.
For not having loved one’s dead father enough, could one make amends by loving one’s child more?
Eighty-five and half paralysed, Shyamanand is on his deathbed when he goes missing. His apparent refusal to meet death in the expected way-calm and accepting and lying down-is a cause for great anguish to his son Jamun, who leads a life of quiet desperation, trying to balance feelings of despair and resignation since the suicide of his friend and neighbour Dr Mukherjee.
After their father disappears, Jamun and his brother Burfi reconnect in their old home that builder Lobhesh Monga has his eyes on. In their quest to find out what happened to Shyamanand, they find a path out of desolation, even as TV executive Kasturi, Jamun’s former lover and mother of his only child, is busy recycling the more melodramatic moments of Jamun’s life for the blockbuster Hindi soap Cheers Zindagi.
In powerful, austere prose shot through with black humour, Upamanyu Chatterjee has produced an intensely moving examination of family ties and the redemptive power of love, however imperfect, in the midst of death and degeneration.
Najeeb’s dearest wish is to work in the Gulf and earn enough money to send back home. He achieves his dream only to be propelled by a series of incidents, grim and absurd, into a slave-like existence herding goats in the middle of the Saudi desert. Memories of the lush, verdant landscape of his village and of his loving family haunt Najeeb whose only solace is the companionship of goats. In the end, the lonely young man contrives a hazardous scheme to escape his desert prison. Goat Days was published to acclaim in Malayalam and became a bestseller. One of the brilliant new talents of Malayalam literature, Benyamin’s wry and tender telling transforms this strange and bitter comedy of Najeeb’s life in the desert into a universal tale of loneliness and alienation.
Troubled by the silence that surrounds her parents’ death, seventeen-year-old Korobi Roy clings to her only inheritance from them: the unfinished love note she found hidden in her mother’s book of poetry. But when her grandfather dies, the young woman discovers a dark secret which will finally explain her past.
Maya Haque-outspoken, passionate, headstrong-has been estranged from her brother Sohail for almost a decade. When she returns home to Dhaka hoping for reconciliation, she discovers he has transformed beyond recognition. Can the two, both scarred by war, come together again? And what of Sohail’s young son, Zaid, caught between worlds but desperate to belong? The Good Muslim is an extraordinary novel about faith, family and the long shadow of war.
Orbit-shifting innovation happens when an area that needs transformation meets an innovator with the will and the desire to create, and not follow history. At the heart of the orbit-shifting innovation is the breakthrough that creates a new orbit and achieves a transformative impact.
Businesses, social enterprises and even governments need orbit-shifting ideas to create a transformative impact. But how does that groundbreaking idea come about, and what translates it into actuality? Charting the vast landscape of orbit-shifting innovation and innovators across countries, cultures and industries, the book brings to the fore the moving force that drives orbit-shifters to take on a transformative challenge and to navigate the pitfalls and obstacles in making it happen.
Meghnad Desai reflects on Indian democracy as it completes seventy years of colourful, eventful and energetic parliamentary existence. Pulling no punches, Desai looks at the history and evolution of Indian democratic institutions, pinpointing their achievements, but also their repeated failure to live up to the standards envisaged by the nation’s founders. Drawing on his own career as a Labour peer in Britain’s House of Lords, Desai has the rare understanding and familiarity with the process of politics, and is able therefore to identify its universal features and zoom in on its uniquely Indian aspects. This is a candid, reflective and unsparing view of the precepts and practice of Indian politics. It traces at the evolution and growth of identity politics, coalition governments and single-party rule and the differing political narratives of the north and the south. The Raisina Model is a critical and frequently uncomfortable meditation on India’s contemporary political culture.
In The Room on the Roof, Rusty, a sixteen-year-old Anglo-Indian boy, decides he has had enough of the tiny, diminishing European community and his tyrannical guardian, and runs away. To his delight, Rusty finds that life on the open road is packed with excitement and high adventure…
In Vagrants in the Valley, which picks up from where the first book ends, Rusty is joined in his travels by Kishen, another ‘runaway’. As they venture further into the unknown, they discover new friends and participate in more escapades but also begin to understand the complexities of growing up and the boundaries that circumscribe even the freest spirits…
Sharply observed, witty and wise, haunted on every page by the sights, smells and sounds of India, this evocation of youth, innocence and friendship will be read for a long time to come with deep, lasting pleasure.
The Room on the Roof won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.
