NAME: Aryaman Khanna.
PROFILE: Ex-intelligence officer, Phoenix 5 division, Intelligence and Research Wing.
STATUS: Released from a high-security prison in Lakshadweep after serving a seven-year sentence for a botched counterterrorism operation led by Director General Amarjyot Bhushan.
KNOWN FAMILY: A mother, a son and a wife, who was attacked before she could publish an exposé about a bioweapon in her newspaper.
CURRENT LOCATION: Last seen heading to Mumbai in pursuit of his wife’s attackers and on a top-secret comeback mission.
MISSION: Foil the bioweapon strike an international terror group has been planning to carry out in Mumbai on the anniversary of 26/11.
The Phoenix tells a dystopian tale of espionage and global terror, of sleeper cells and double agents, of biological warfare and suicide attacks. But at its heart there’s a message of hope and one man’s love for his family and country.
Right from childhood, Sahil and Ayra have been very different from each other. While Sahil is careless, carefree, ‘new money’ and ‘the brat’, Ayra is sensitive, reserved, shy and not easy to talk to. And that is probably what attracts Sahil to her. Their story progresses slowly and delicately, and things gradually take on a love-tinged hue.
However, their lives soon begin to unravel. Sahil learns why Ayra is so private when the most damning truth about her life is revealed. Just as they overcome that challenge, another cruel blow threatens to tear them apart. It’s now about a life beyond life, and a love somewhere among the stars . . .
Included here are the classics ‘The Train to Pakistan’ that describes the tragedy of Partition through the love story of a Sikh dacoit and a Muslim girl, ‘I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale’, which deals with the conflict in a prosperous Sikh family of Punjab in the 1940s; and the best-selling ‘Delhi’ , a vast, erotic, irreverent magnum opus centred on the Indian capital.
In the story, the author talks about the shocking but true political happenings in the country that he witnessed during his tenure. The plot centers around a character called Anand, a young man who gives up a lucrative career in the hopes of bringing about political reformation. He begins his political career by contesting against the oppressive ruling party. Next, he reaches a spot where he has to choose between the current Chief Minister and his rival. His rival soon wins the post of CM, and he is made to serve under him. Anand then moves to Delhi, at a time when Indira Gandhi takes over the reigns of power. Under her governance, the tables turn, for Anand now replaces his rival Chaudhary and becomes the Chief Minister of Afrozabad. He then has to run the political show under her regime. The book discusses the state of events and the political scenario in India under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, delving into areas like her rise to power, second coming, assassination, followed by her son Rajiv Gandhi’s entry into the world of politics. The Insider reveals to the reader the state of affairs in a political scenario, narrated by a man who has had first-hand experience of it all. The 2nd revised edition of the book was published by Penguin India in the year 2000, and is available in paperback.
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.
In Shashi Tharoor’s satirical masterpiece, the story of the Mahabharata is retold as modern Indian history, and renowned political personalities begin to resemble characters from the epic -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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
