It is AD 3000. Hiding from the world in a cave in Mount Kailash, Dawn encounters two strange beings on her sixteenth birthday. They urge the long-lost princess of Kashmir to fulfil the prophecy of fighting the Troika. This nefarious trinity-the merciless leader Arman, the AI war machine AIman and their supreme, omniscient overlord Dushita-is a vicious manipulator of stories, minds and histories. With an army of weaponized AIs and mind-controlled automatons based in Kashmir, they rule over a deadly world where men have lost their souls and women have been slain-all heading to Sarvanash, the Great Apocalypse.
With a motley group of five outlaw boys, Dawn sets upon a tumultuous journey across Time and Space to battle the most technologically lethal empire known to humanity. Her only hope is to seek out secrets hidden in the Niti folk tales of Kashmir and unlock the powers within her to become the ultimate warrior.
As the only female left in the world, Dawn will decide the fate of the Universe. But can she unleash her body, mind and spirit and ignite the fiery cosmic power of all the women who have ever lived?
A sci-fi saga that reveals eternal truths as it traverses the terrains of the Kashmir Valley-the birthplace of the greatest stories ever.
The poems in this book are some of the earliest about Visnu, one of the Hindu Trinity, also known as Tirumal, the Dark One. Tradition recognizes twelve alvars, saint-poets devoted to Visnu, who lived between the sixth and ninth century in the Tamil-speaking region of south India. These devotees of Visnu and their counterparts, the devotees of Siva (nayanmar), changed and revitalized Hinduism and their devotional hymns addressed to Visnu are among the earliest bhakti (devotional) texts in any Indian language. In this selection from Nammalvar’s works, the translations like the originals reflect the alternations of philosophic hymns and love poems, through recurring voices, roles and places. They also enact a progression”from wonder at the Lord’s works, to the experience of loving him and watching others love him, to moods of questioning and despair and finally to the experience of being devoured and possessed by him.
U.G. Krishnamurti famously described enlightenment as a neurobiological state of being with no religious, psychological or mystical implications. He did not lecture, did not set up organizations, held no gatherings and professed to have no message for mankind.
Known as the ‘anti-guru’, the ‘raging sage’ and the ‘thinker who shuns thought’, U.G. spent his life destroying accepted beliefs in science, god, mind, soul, religion, love and relationships—all the props man uses to live life. Having taken away all support systems from those who came to him, he refused to replace them with those of his own; always insisting that each must find his own truth.
And when U.G. knew that it was time for him go, he refused all attempts to prolong life with medical help. He let nature, and his body, take their course.
On the afternoon of 22 March 2007, U.G. Krishnamurti passed away in Vallecrosia, Italy.
What if your life depended on being able to tell a good story? Schariar, King of Persia, would marry a woman every night only to chop off her head every morning. He had sentenced the beautiful and clever Scherazade to the same fate. Determined to save herself and other women from this gruesome decree, Queen Scherazade began telling him stories one night — of magic lamps and genies, of fishermen and caliphs, of treasure-caves and strange potions. Tales so wonderful that the one night turned into 1001…. But what would happen when Scherazade ran out of yarns to spin? This new collection of Tales from the Arabian Nights will make you gasp with wonder and laugh with delight and the magical storyteller Scherazade will keep you spellbound for days.
In September 1996 a fourteen-year-old Fatima Bhutto hid in a windowless dressing room shielding her baby brother while shots rang out in the streets outside the family home in Karachi. This was the evening that her father, Murtaza, was murdered along with six of his associates. In December 2007 Benazir Bhutto, Fatima’s aunt, and the woman she had publicly accused of ordering her father’s murder, was assassinated in Rawalpindi. It was the latest in a long line of tragedies for one of the world’s best known political dynasties. Songs of Blood and Sword tells the story of the Bhuttos, a family of rich feudal landlords who became powerbrokers in the newly created state of Pakistan; the epic tale of four generations of a family and the political violence that would destroy them. It is the history of a family and nation riven by murder, corruption, conspiracy and division, written by one who has lived it, in the heart of the storm, The history of this extraordinary family mirrors the tumultuous events of Pakistan itself, and the quest to find the truth behind her father’s murder has led Fatima to the heart of her country’s volatile political establishment. Finally Songs of Blood and Sword is about a daughter’s love for her father and her search to uncover, and to understand, the truth of his life and death.
‘I am damned,’ thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die. He feels that somewhere down the line he has made a grave mistake, but this realisation passes in a dreadful heartbeat and is gone—leaving him in a room at the Grenville Hotel, in his underwear, with nothing but himself and his appetites.
Bunny Munro drinks too much, smokes too much and thinks of sex all the time. Following his wife’s suicide, he takes his nine-years-old son on a trip to recover from the tragedy. But he is about to discover that his days are numbered.
Dark, funny and raunchy, The Death of Bunny Munro is the story of a man full of emotional atyachar. Written in the high octane, charged prose that has made Nick Cave one of the world’s most acclaimed lyricists, it is an unforgettable book.
‘Look, my feet measure beyond earth and sky!’ he said
and touched the sky.
I have surrendered to my lord
who glanced at me with his large radiant eyes.
The Tiruviruttam is an iconic poem by Namma?var (c. ninth century CE), the greatest of the a?var poet-saints of the Tamil Srivai??ava tradition. Its hundred interlinked verses celebrate the love between an anonymous heroine and hero, who come to be identified with Namma?var and his beloved deity, Vi??u. The poet masterfully weaves the erotic and esoteric to reveal both the contours of love and the never-ending cycles of separation and union, of birth and death, from which only Vi??u can offer release.
In A Hundred Measures of Time, Archana Venkatesan has crafted a sonorous free-verse rendering and an accompanying far-ranging essay to delight poetry lovers and scholars alike.
The literature of the new age seeks not to narrate a sequence of events, but to reveal the secrets of the heart. Such is the narrative mode of Chokher Bali’ – Rabindranath Tagore, Preface to Chokher Bali
Chokher Bali explores the forbidden emotions unleashed when a beautiful young widow enters the seemingly harmonious world of a newly married couple. This path-breaking novel by Rabindranath Tagore weaves a tangled web of relationships between the pampered and self-centred Mahendra, his innocent, childlike bride Asha, their staunch friend Bihari, and the wily, seductive Binodini, whose arrival transforms the lives of all concerned.
Radha Chakravarty’s translation brings the world of Tagore’s fiction to life, in lucid, idiomatic prose.
Fatima Bhutto’s stunning fiction debut begins and ends one rainswept Friday morning in Mir Ali, a small town in the troubled tribal region of Waziristan. Three brothers meet for breakfast. Soon after, the eldest, recently returned from America, hails a taxi to the local mosque. The second brother, a doctor, goes to check in at his hospital. His troubled wife does not join the family that morning for no one knows where Mina goes these days. And the youngest, the idealist, leaves for town on a motorbike. Seated behind him is a beautiful, fragile girl whose world has been overwhelmed by war. Three hours later, their day will end in devastating circumstances.
Beautifully written, full of emotion and heartbreak, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon is an extraordinary novel.
Sandeep and his younger brother, Manish, are not looking forward to spending three months in the remote, Internet-challenged hill station of Pahadpur, especially under the eagle eye of their military-minded great aunt. Apart from taking care of their kid sister, Chubs, who has a tendency to wander off on her own, the boys have absolutely nothing to do in the holidays. But there is more to Pahadpur than meets the eye. Sandeep and Manish discover that the neighbours next door, at Falcon Heights, are shunned and called ‘lepers’ by all the townsfolk. Who is the sullen, mysterious girl who lives there and flies a falcon every morning? Why do perfectly respectable citizens get up and leave, muttering darkly,every time she enters a shop or cafe? As Sandeep unravels the mystery, two terrible but seemingly plausible stories emerge, only one of which can be true.
