Catagory: Non Fiction

Ever been intrigued by the Indian Fashion Industry—its stereotypes of drugged models, gay designers, and fascinating but unaffordable clothes?
Join Shefalee Vasudev, former editor of Marie Claire and an acclaimed fashion journalist, on a deep-sea dive into the gagging depths of Indian fashion. In Powder Room, she offers an insider’s view of people who make the industry what it is—from a lower middle class girl who sells global luxury for a living to a designer who fights the inner demons of child sexual abuse yet manages to survive and thrive in the business of fashion, or a Ludhiana housewife on a perpetual fashion high.
Besides candid interviews of known names in Indian fashion, Shefalee provides a commentary on new social behaviour, urban culture, generational differences, and the compulsions behind conspicuous consumption in a country splitting at the seams with inequalities of opportunity and wealth. From Nagaland to Patan, Mumbai, Delhi, and Punjab, Powder Room mirrors how and why India ‘does’ fashion.

It is unusual to come across a life so rich in varied experiences as the one that Bijoya Ray, wife and constant companion to the renowned film-maker Satyajit Ray, has lived. Despite being closely related, Satyajit-‘Manik’ to his friends and family-and Bijoya fell in love and embarked on a life together years before Ray’s groundbreaking film Pather Panchali was made, and their long, happy married life lasted right until Ray’s death in 1992.

Bijoya Ray never felt the urge to write her memoirs, but was finally persuaded to pick up the pen when she was well into her eighties. Manik and I brims over with hitherto unknown stories of her life with Satyajit Ray, told in candid, vivid detail.

A report from the epicenter of the Naxalite war

In its war against the Maoists, it is the Indian state that usually gets to tell its side of story. But official explanations are not meant to convey truth. Most often they attempt to cover up the reality and obscure it. The claim that only one warring side has the right to propagate its views whereas the other does not because they are projected as ‘enemy’ is questionable when we know there are two sides to any conflict and where both sides comprise our own people.

In this situation of internal war, not satisfied with the knowledge offered by books and documents, Gautam Navlakha went into the heart of Bastar to get to know the Maoists first hand. This book is an account of the fortnight he spent in the guerilla zone where the Maoists run their people’s government, the Jantana Sarkar. His enquiry unflinching and his perspective critical but partisan, Navlakha succeeds in the difficult task of making the demonized human, laying bare the heartland of rebellion.

Indian culture and spiritualism have exerted a strong hold over the world’s greatest intellectuals-from psychologists like Carl Jung to poets like T.S. Eliot, from orators like Swami Vivekananda to philosophers like Sri Aurobindo, from statesmen like Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to writers like H.G. Wells. Compiled by Salil Gewali, Great Minds on India is a remarkable collection of the thoughts and views of these world-renowned opinion-makers on India’s cultural inheritance and glorious legacy.
Indian culture and spiritualism have exerted a strong hold over the world’s greatest intellectuals-from psychologists like Carl Jung to poets like T.S. Eliot, from orators like Swami Vivekananda to philosophers like Sri Aurobindo, from statesmen like Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to writers like H.G. Wells. Compiled by Salil Gewali, Great Minds on India is a remarkable collection of the thoughts and views of these world-renowned opinion-makers on India’s cultural inheritance and glorious legacy.

André Béteille’s memoir, spanning his childhood, his schooldays and his early years as a sociologist, encompasses many worlds-that of colonial Chandannagar, where he spent his early years; of Patna and Calcutta, where he went to Englishmedium as well as Bengali-medium schools; and of his college days, where he started off as a physicist and then turned to sociology-a fi eld in which he was to win international renown.
There are unforgettable descriptions of his colonial childhood and his two grandmothers, one French and the other Bengali; and of momentous events he lived through such as famine, communal riots and Partition. Equally compelling are his portraits of family members, his neighbourhood, school friends, teachers and Calcutta’s intellectual stars, among them Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen. With its lucid and eloquent prose infused with acute sociological observations and insights into family relationships, childhood and adolescence, caste, class and community, this is a book that illumines the evolution of a brilliant teacher and scholar, even as it deepens our understanding of universal human dilemmas and desires.

Descendant of an African slave and a Gujarati trader, Kamal Punja grew up in the ancient town of Kilwa, on the coast of East Africa. Kamal, who never knew his father, is given away by his mother to better his prospects. Years later, after a flourishing career as a doctor in Canada, he returns in search of Saida, his childhood sweetheart. But where is Saida, and why are his efforts to find her being thwarted? Feverish, delirious, and perhaps delusional, Kamal is haunted by the past as he struggles to trace the woman he thinks he betrayed. Along the way, he must face the truth of his mixed lineage and be accountable for a chain of events he had unwittingly set off.
Set in the vivid world where Africa, Arabia and India meet, where history, poetry and magic combine, The Magic of Saida is a haunting story of enduring love and lost childhood.

In this illuminating memoir Javid Chowdhury shares his varied experiences over four decades in the IAS: the years in training when he imbibed the service’s ethos and values; his initiation into the rural universe as the District Development Officer and the District Magistrate; and further on, to his handling of the infamous Bank Securities and Jain Hawala scams as Director of Enforcement and Union Revenue Secretary.
With a light pen, Chowdhury describes the changing social profile and attitudes of entrants to the higher civil services; the nepotism, in many garbs, that he encountered as Establishment Officer; and the stranger-than-fiction tortuous investigations of crimes. He also offers his nuanced reflections on the dubious legacy Gujarat acquired as a result of the communal carnage in 2002.
Chowdhury further examines how policymaking within government came to be whittled away under the neo-liberal theology, with key scrutiny being left to external expert think tanks and ad hoc groups. As a consequence, he perceives that public accountability came to be inordinately diffused, resulting in the roller-coaster governance that we witness today.
Sharp and insightful, replete with telling anecdotes and amusing sketches of icons, colleagues and ministers, The Insider’s View is a compelling portrait of the author, a self-confessed welfare socialist, besides being an X-ray of the innards of the bureaucracy.

What happens within us when we read a novel? And how does a novel create its unique effects, so distinct from those of a painting, a film, or a poem?

In this fascinating set of essays, based on the talks he delivered at Harvard University as part of the distinguished Norton Lecture series, Pamuk presents a masterful theory of the novel. Drawing on Friedrich Schiller’s famous distinction between ‘naïve’ writers-those who write spontaneously-and ‘sentimental’ writers-those who are reflective and aware-Pamuk reveals two unique ways of processing and composing the written word. He takes us through his own literary journey and looks at the works of writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Mann, and Naipaul to describe the singular experience of reading. Unique, nuanced, and passionate, this book will be beloved by readers and writers alike.

At the age of eighteen, a shy and timid Mohandas Gandhi leaves his home in Gujarat for a life on his own. At forty-five, a confident and fearless Gandhi, ready to boldly lead his country to freedom, returns to India.
What transforms him?
The law.
The Man before the Mahatma is the first biography of Gandhi’s life in the law. It follows Gandhi on his journey of self-discovery during his law studies in Britain, his law practice in India and his enormous success representing wealthy Indian merchants in South Africa, where relentless attacks on Indian rights by the white colonial authorities cause him to give up his lucrative representation of private clients for public work—the representation of the besieged Indian community in South Africa.
As he takes on the most powerful governmental, economic and political forces of his day, he learns two things: that unifying his professional work with his political and moral principles not only provides him with satisfaction, it also creates in him a strong, powerful voice. Using the courtrooms of South Africa as his laboratory for resistance, Gandhi learns something else so important that it will eventually have a lasting and worldwide impact: a determined people can bring repressive governments to heel by the principled use of civil disobedience.
Using materials hidden away in archival vaults and brought to light for the first time, The Man before the Mahatma puts the reader inside dramatic experiences that changed Gandhi’s life forever and have never been written about—until now.