A fictionalized account of Indian history over the past 100 years. It aims to remain true to the original events, including characters such as Gandhi and Mountbatten but it also utilizes characters, incidents and issues from the Indian epic, the Mahabharata.
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The Great Indian Novel
In Shashi Tharoor’s satirical masterpiece, the story of the Mahabharata is retold as recent Indian history, and renowned political personalities begin to resemble characters from the Mahabharata-all of whom have a curious and ambiguous relationship with Draupadi Mokrasi (D. Mokrasi for short) . . .
Brimming with incisive wit and as enjoyable a read as it is cerebrally stimulating, The Great Indian Novel brilliantly retells reality as myth.
Show Business
Critically ill, Bollywood superstar Ashok Banjara lies suspended between life and death in a Bombay hospital, a prisoner of the technicolour film that plays inside his head. As if for the first time, he watches himself rise to the heights of the film world, and encounters again all the people he met and used along the way. Show Business is many books rolled into one-a wonderfully funny tale about the romance and folly of cinema, a novel on an epic scale of ambition, greed, love, deception and death. It is a fable for our time, which teaches us that we live in a world where illusion is the only reality and nothing is what it seems.
The Five Dollar Smile
The Five-Dollar Smile is a collection of stories of young love and disaffection, adolescent high spirits and youthful traumas; there are also stories, written with the energy and passion of youth, which deal with very adult subjects: death, deceit, loss, hypocrisy, honour. Sensitive, compelling and persuasive, these stories, written for the most part in Shashi Tharoor’s late teens and early twenties, reveal an already formidable talent. Rounding off the collection is a marvellously inventive play set in the time of the Emergency.
Riot
Who killed twenty-four-year-old Priscilla Hart? And why would anyone want to murder this idealistic American student who had come to India to volunteer in a women’s health programme? Was she the innocent victim of a riot between Hindus and Muslims? Shashi Tharoor experiments brilliantly with narrative form, chronicling the mystery of Priscilla Hart’s death through the often contradictory accounts of a dozen or more characters. Intellectually provocative and emotionally charged, Riot is a novel about the ownership of history, about love, hate, cultural commission, religious fanaticism and the impossibility of knowing the truth.
The Great Indian Collection
In India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond, Shashi Tharoor casts his discerning eye on this fascinating, bewildering country, describing its challenges and its triumphs in lively, informative prose.
Gandhi before India, the result of rigorous research across four continents, is the remarkable story of how a brief less lawyer in South Africa transformed into India’s greatest man.
Combining scholarship with sparkling wit, Land of the Seven Rivers explores how India’s history was shaped by its geography. The result is a riveting, wry book, full of surprises
Death of a Moneylender
Falak, a young journalist from Delhi, is assigned to a remote village in south-central India where a moneylender is found dead, hung from a lamppost in front of his house by an entire village united against injustice.
Falak coldly hunts the story for a page one byline, unconcerned with corrective conscience, an attitude that cost him his relationship with Vani, a rival newspaper journalist. Within hours of reaching the village, his story is ready; a villainous moneylender killed by long-suffering villagers.
But Falak has also unearths a disconcerting fact, that the moneylender was a kind-hearted, generous man whose death was being used to intimidate other moneylenders. Outstanding loans are written off to buy peace with villagers, but the politically well-connected and dangerous moneylenders plan a brutal retribution.
Network 18
As Indians got their first taste of satellite television during the first Gulf War, Raghav Bahl saw his future in the signals flickering across the small screen. Armed with burning ambition, keen business sense and amazing audacity, he assembled a group of talented professionals and rank beginners to launch one of India’s earliest start-up success stories. Starting from a small room in New Delhi’s Safdarjung Enclave, Television Eighteen (TV18) grew into Network18, one of India’s biggest media conglomerates spanning television, print, films, the Internet, business and general news, drama and entertainment. In less than two decades filled with excitement, adventure and frequent crises, Network18 launched pioneering properties, television and film careers, and racked up partnerships with blue-chip media brands like CNBC, CNN and Viacom. But a mix of hubris, overreaching and external factors set it up for a free fall.
This is a story of brilliant ideas, severe setbacks, naked aggression, spectacular victories and fatal flaws. It’s a story of a media empire that could only have been Made in India.
Riverstones
What happens when a journalist makes the journey from stories on the page to reality?
Living with a carefully cultivated nonchalance amidst the rough and tumble of Delhi’s journalistic world, Ari occasionally grapples with a desire to do more than just flirt with ideas and flog the words. But he leads his life away from fights big and small, professional and ideological. He awaits fate, surrendering to the force of the flow of life, like a riverstone-supine in the riverbed, always facilitating persistent currents, never contesting them.
When a strange challenge thrown by his former professor and mentor hurts Ari deeply, he knows it is the pain of his futility, the knowledge of his own wasted existence. Just when the latent fear of a meaningless life threatens to convince him of its reality, he finds himself caught in a tragic situation-the violent death of a friend fighting for the cause of farmers.
As the dust settles, Ari discovers that for the first time in his life he is more than a mere spectator of events.
Is Wheat Killing You?
Ishi Khosla was recently listed as being among the twenty-five most powerful women in the country in her domain of expertise by the India Today Group. Her latest book, Is Wheat Killing You?, will help not only the millions of people with gluten/ whet intolerance, also known as celiac disease, but all those who prefer to avoid wheat. With the alarming rise in the incidence of celiac disease, this book is a boon as it provides information on the disease and how to manage it without having to give up any favourite foods. Most people with celiac disease who follow a gluten-free diet have a complete and rapid recovery.
This complete guide to gluten-free living is based on scientifically established principles of healthy eating and includes essential facts about a balanced diet that are of interest to all. The book features nearly 200 quick, easy-to-follow, practical and delicious recipes- pan-Indian, Oriental and Continental. Additionally, Is Wheat Killing You? integrates gluten-free cooking with mainstream cooking so those who cannot eat gluten can lead normal social lives. Ishi Khosla explains how grains can affect your health and profiles those at risk for gluten sensitivity.