The dramatic, entertaining story of the dream team that pioneered the Bollywood blockbuster
Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar reinvented the Bollywood formula with an extraordinary lineup of superhits, becoming game changers at a time when screenwriting was dismissed as a back-room job. From Zanjeer to Deewaar and Sholay to Shakti, their creative output changed the destinies of several actors and filmmakers and even made a cultural phenomenon of the Angry Young Man. Even after they decided to part ways, success continued to court them-a testament not only to their impeccable talent and professional ethos, but also their enterprising showmanship and business acumen.
Fizzing with energy and brimming over with enough trivia to delight a cinephile’s heart, Written by Salim-Javed tells the story of a dynamic partnership that transformed Hindi cinema forever.
Nation at Play is a novel history of India’s engagement with sport and a probing analysis of its cultural and political development under monarchy and the Raj, as well as in the decades after Independence. Interestingly, over time, some sports that originated in India have fallen out of favour, while others, such as cricket, a colonial import, have been adopted and made wholly India’s own.
Sen follows the transformation of sport from an elite, kingly pastime to a national obsession tied to colonialism, nationalism and free market liberalization. He pays special attention to two modern phenomena: the dominance of cricket in the Indian consciousness and the chronic failure of a billion-strong nation to compete successfully in international sporting competitions, such as the Olympics. Innovatively incorporating examples from popular media and other unconventional sources, Nation at Play not only captures the political nature of sport in India but also reveals the patterns of patronage, clientage, and institutionalization that have bound this diverse nation together for centuries.
‘A fine, lucid, engaging and constantly surprising study. Highly recommended’-Gideon Haigh
‘An informative and readable account of the Indian history of football, hockey, wrestling, boxing and cricket in the last two centuries’-Partha Chatterjee
‘An ingenious history of Indian sport . . . tells the story of India’s mostly failed love affair with competitive sport since the nineteenth century’-Mukul Kesavan
‘A fascinating, rich and thoroughly engaging history of sport in India’-Joseph S. Alter
Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karatas has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he’d hoped, at the age of twelve he comes to Istanbul—”the center of the world”—and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father’s trade, selling boza (a traditional, mildly alcoholic Turkish drink) on the street, hoping to become rich like the other villagers who have settled on the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut’s side. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have, he stumbles toward middle age in a series of jobs leading nowhere. His sense of missing something leads him sometimes to the politics of his friends and intermittently to the teachings of a charismatic religious guide. But every evening, without fail, Mevlut still wanders the streets of Istanbul, selling boza and wondering at the “strangeness” in his mind, the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else, until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for.
Told from different perspectives by a host of beguiling characters, a Strangeness in My Mind is a modern epic of coming of age in a great city, a brilliant tableau of life among the newcomers who have changed the face of Istanbul over the past fifty years. Here is a mesmerizing story of human longing, sure to take its place among Pamuk’s finest achievements.
This deeply felt memoir, translated from the acclaimed original in Malayalam, chronicles the endeavours of four generations of the Kandathil Varughese Mappillai family that set up the Malayala Manorama, the Travancore National and Quilon Bank and other enterprises. With great candour, K.M. Mathew describes how their fortunes changed when their support to the nationalist State Congress brought upon them the wrath of the Travancore dewan, leading to the bank’s collapse; and how through sheer persistence and diligence they could rebuild the paper and go on to establish huge companies. Mathew also shows that throughout the paper upheld the values of liberalism, credibility and democracy, which it continues to do until today. Featuring some of Kerala’s tallest figures over almost a century, The Eighth Ring is a rich portrait of a remarkable man, his family-clan and their stirring times.
Does your child revolt at the mere thought of eating greens? Are you running out of nutritious lunch-box ideas?
Parents today are constantly reminded of the need to give their children healthy, home-cooked meals instead of the fat-, salt- and sugar-laden fare in food courts and restaurants. Yet, busy lifestyles mean that family time is in short supply which makes it hard to balance this need with the practicality of cooking for every family member.
In Picky Eaters, celebrity chef and culinary expert Rakhee Vaswani guides parents and kids on how they can make everyday food fun, exciting and yummy. From delicious, healthy recipes to party-planning and cooking together, this book will tell you how to get your child to eat right. So banish all those mind-boggling questions about what to feed your children—and start cooking!
Doctors are trained to keep their patients alive as long as possible. But they are never taught how to prepare people to die. And yet for many patients, particularly the old and terminally ill, death is a question of when, not if. Should the medical profession rethink its approach to them? And in what way? With aging populations and hospital costs rising globally, these questions have become increasingly relevant.
In his new book, Atul Gawande argues that an acceptance of mortality must lie at the center of the way we treat the dying. Using his experiences (and missteps) as a surgeon, comparing attitudes toward aging and death in the West and in India and drawing a powerful portrait of his father’s final years-a doctor who chose how he should go-Gawande has produced a work that is not only an extraordinary account of loss but one whose ideas are truly important.
Questioning, profound and deeply moving, Being Mortal is a masterpiece.
Naseeruddin Shah’s sparkling memoir of his early years, ‘from zero to thirty-two’, spans his extraordinary journey from a feudal hamlet near Meerut to Catholic schools in Nainital and Ajmer, and finally to stage and film stardom in Mumbai. Along the way, he recounts his passages through Aligarh University, the National School of Drama
and the Film and Television Institute of India, where his luck finally began to change.
And Then One Day tells a compelling tale, written with rare honesty and consummate elegance, leavened with tongue-in-cheek humour. There are moving portraits of family members, darkly funny accounts of his schooldays, and vivid cameos of directors and actors he has worked with, among them Ebrahim Alkazi, Shyam Benegal, Girish Karnad, Om Puri and Shabana Azmi.
The accounts of his struggle to earn a living through acting, his experiments with the craft, his love affairs, his early marriage, his successes and failures are narrated with remarkable frankness and objective self-assessment. Brimming with delightful anecdotes as well as poignant, often painful revelations, this book is a tour de force, destined to become a classic of the genre.
Buried resentments, unexpected disappointments, new friendships, small acts of cruelty, journeys that take you back to where you started. With trademark compassion and tender irony, Anita Desai’s short stories give us familiar worlds made unfamiliar, to wonderful effect.
An ageing couple is stranded in a stultifying Delhi summer by the visit of a roguish old Oxford friend, who trades on his charm; an American woman turns to hippies living in the Indian hills, homesick for the farmlands of Vermont; a dog terrorizes the neighbourhood but is cherished by his stern master; a Delhi girl of slender means finds a new kind of freedom with her young friends, in her barsati home; a peaceful game of hide and seek turns into a nightmare; a businessman sees his own death.
In one masterly volume, for the first time ever, here are Anita Desai’s collected stories —including Diamond Dust and Games at Twilight.
Time is scarce and precious in today’s world and we seek solutions that are quick. While allopathic medicine tends to focus on the management of disease, the ancient study of Ayurveda provides us with holistic knowledge for preventing disease and eliminating its root cause.
Dr Bhaswati Bhattacharya takes you through a day in the life of Ayurvedic living.
China and Pakistan, India’s two most powerful neighbours, share an ‘all-weather’ relationship that is as reputed for its depth as it is layered in secrecy. Based on years of research and interviews, Andrew Small has put together the story of China and Pakistan’s growing, and in parts troubled, friendship.
The China-Pakistan Axis is essential to understanding the economic, political and security map of Asia, especially India’s neighbourhood. It explains Beijing’s extraordinary support to Pakistan’s nuclear programme and defence planning, their strategic cooperation on India, the United States and Afghanistan, and the implications for counter-terrorism efforts.
A special chapter for this Indian edition brings the book up to date on China’s involvement in the Taliban talks.
