Bishop Cotton Boys’ School, Bangalore, which completes 150 years in 2015, was founded in the memory of Bishop George Edward Lynch Cotton (a master at Rugby). The school has transitioned from a Victorian school conceived in Tom Brown’s School Days to one that has sought to keep the public school relevant in modern India. The book encompasses profiles of the people and the times, right from the 1860s, covering spheres as varied as the armed forces, public service, police, education, academia, law, medicine, the arts and the offbeat.
Peppered with extracts from old letters, oral history and archives, the narrative features an eclectic range of prominent personalities, such as Lieutenant William ‘Leefe’ Robinson (the first Victoria Cross in an air operation), General K.S. Thimayya, Admiral V.S. Shekhawat, Dr Raja Ramanna, Lord Colin Cowdrey, Leslie Claudius, Lucky Ali, Sam Balsara, Feroz Khan, Nandan Nilekani, and several others. With chapters dedicated to those martyred in the World Wars as well as linking the journey of the school with the city of Bangalore, The Order of the Crest traces the alumni of Bishop Cotton over this period, profiling those old boys who have accomplished eminence or otherwise
remained unsung, but not without touching others’ lives.
Catagory: Non Fiction
non fiction main category
The Tryst Betrayed:
In The Tryst Betrayed, former Indian foreign secretary Jagat Singh Mehta looks back on an eventful career which began on the day after India’s independence.
In his lucid and informative style Mehta sheds light on Nehru’s prophetic assertion of ideological agnosticism (named ‘Non-Alignment’ in 1946) and its distortion by the accidental overlap of decolonization with the Cold War.
Mehta argues that Nehru was naïve on China, wishful on the Soviet Union and prejudiced against America. The civil servants were hypnotized by what he refers to as the ‘Panditji knows best’ syndrome. He illustrates that Nehru’s bark was no doubt frightening but his bite not vicious.
Aarushi
It is the murder that haunts India with the simplest of questions: Who did it? A fourteen-year-old girl is killed in her comfortable suburban home along with the family servant under puzzling circumstances. Within weeks, her dentist parents are the prime suspects; within months, they are as good as exonerated; a year and half later, they are on trial. But did they do it? From the controversial police investigation to the media frenzy surrounding the Talwars and the protracted legal battle, every layer of the Aarushi case has mystery and metaphor. Now comes the ultimate retelling of the story. Avirook Sen has followed the court case, examined all the police documents and interviewed key players among investigators, lawyers, family and Aarushi s friends. In Aarushi he draws a superb portrait of the young woman, the aftermath of her death, and tries to answer the biggest question of all. Acute, gripping and brilliantly written Aarushi is a book that will take you into the heart of the murder that has gripped the nation.
The Lazy Girl’s Guide To Being Fit
Get smart, get moving!
Most of us want to be fit and healthy, but get stuck in a rut—we just don’t have the will power to get up and move. What is the incentive for you to get off that couch and work out when you have all three seasons of Game of Thrones waiting for you? Almost everyone wants to be fit, but they just can’t muster up the effort to do so. If you are like them, then this book is for you.
The Lazy Girl’s Guide to Being Fit is about the first few steps you need to take to go from a sedentary lifestyle to an active one, because that’s the biggest challenge for a couch potato—movement! It’s all about finding the balance in your life. This book will show you how exercise can take the guise of several daily activities—be it shopping or going on a picnic—and how eating right can solve half your problems. The easy and effective exercise routines contained here will get you fit in no time. The body can be beautiful if you know how to put it to use and have fun doing so. And this is exactly what this book will show you.
CII India Design Yearbook 2014
Showcasing the best in design in India for the year 2014-15
The CII India Design Yearbook 2014 is a medium to communicate the best of design emanating from India in diverse design disciplines. These yearbooks become an international reference for excellent design. Companies, journalists, architects, planners, designers and people all over the world who are interested in design use the yearbooks for their day-to-day work and keep them over the years as collectors’ items and an archive of excellent design.
This is the second instalment of the yearbook, which aims to capture over 200 recent projects in which the companies / design firms have employed agile design thinking, methodology and processes to achieve success for clients, partners and end users.
The Strength to Say No
Growing up in a remote village in Bengal, Rekha Kalindi was always made to believe that being born a girl was a burden. A feisty, intelligent child, she was aware of the horrific consequences of forced marriages on the young girls in her village. Having observed how her friends were married off and sent to live with their mothers-in-law, where they were often treated like slaves, she was determined not to suffer the same miserable fate.
At the age of eleven, Rekha caused a sensation when she refused to be a child bride. Furious, her mother locked her up and even starved her, but the young girl’s spirit could not be broken. It took an incredible amount of bold determination for Rekha to persuade her family not to marry her off against her will. Ever since, she has actively campaigned for the rights of young girls, and has emerged as a crusader for justice. She also went on to become a recipient of India’s National Bravery Award in 2010.
The Strength to Say No is a powerful portrait of one girl’s monumental struggle against oppression as well as a heartrending and inspiring story about the triumph of the human spirit.
The Automobile Club Of Egypt
A rollicking, exuberant and powerfully moving story of a family swept up by social unrest in post–World War II Cairo
Abd el-Aziz Gaafar, formerly a well-respected landowner now in the grip of penury, moves his family to Cairo and takes on menial work at the Automobile Club—a place of refuge and luxury for its European members, but one where Egyptians may appear only as servants. Alku, the lifelong Nubian servant of Egypt’s corrupt king, runs the show in all but name. The servants, a squabbling, humorous, and deeply human group, live in a perpetual state of fear: beaten for their mistakes, their wages dependent on Alku’s whims.
When Abd el-Aziz’s pride gets the better of him and he stands up for himself, his death—as much from shame as from his injuries after Alku has him beaten—leaves his widow further impoverished and two of his sons obliged to work in the Club. As the family is drawn into the turbulent politics of Egypt—public and private—both servants and masters are subsumed by the country’s social upheaval. Soon, the Egyptians of the Automobile Club face a stark choice: to live safely but without dignity as servants, or to fight for their rights and risk everything.
Success Is A Thief
Graduation is a magical time—it is liberating and petrifying in equal measure. It is tradition to invite a noted personality to deliver an address that can rouse the students to step into the real world with courage, motivation and enthusiasm.
This book brings together twenty convocation speeches delivered at the greatest management institutes in this country by eminent personalities like A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Deepak Parekh, Subroto Bagchi, Indra K. Nooyi and Anand Mahindra. It also offers reflections from experts who analyse these speeches, and delves into the art of inspiring communication. Stimulating and inspiring, Success Is a Thief is a must on every bookshelf.
The Bridal Diet
Are you a Bride-to-be?
Do you want to get into fabulous shape before your wedding?
As weddings in the country grow more and more glamorous each year, brides face immense pressure to look their best on D-Day. But in the days leading up to the wedding, most brides get into a frenzy to shed the kilos fast, making them resort to heavy gym sessions and crash diets which ultimately leaves them with little time for anything else. What if there was a way to shed the kilos without feeling stressed, deprived or having sleepless nights over whether you’ll fit into your dress on time?
From Delhi’s top dietician and the bestselling author of Lose a Kilo a Week comes another weight loss book that will outline a diet programme aimed at brides-to-be so that the days leading up to their wedding can be stress-free. And even if you aren’t getting hitched, you can still use this book to get in shape and get fit.
From exclusive diet plans, workouts, recipes, strategies to avoid temptation, motivators and much more, The Bridal Diet contains everything you need to look and feel your best.
Karma Cola
From the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Westerners descended upon India, disciples of a cultural revolution that proclaimed that the magic and mystery missing from their lives could be found in the East. Recording her observations of these ‘pilgrims’ interacting with their hosts, Gita Mehta skewers the entire spectrum of seekers: The Beatles, homeless students, Hollywood rich kids in detox, British guilt-trippers and more. Brilliantly irreverent, Karma Cola displays Mehta’s gift for weaving old and new, common and bizarre, history and current events into a seamless and colorful narrative that is at once witty, shocking, and poignant.