An Indian woman with a China craze retraces the footsteps of a Chinese monk with an Indian obsession
In the seventh century AD, the Chinese monk Xuanzang (earlier spelt as Hiuen Tsang or Hsuan Tsang) set off on an epic journey to India to study Buddhist philosophy from the Indian masters. Travelling along the Silk Road, through the desolate wastes of the Gobi desert and the icy passes of Central Asia, braving brigands and blizzards, Xuanzang finally reached India, where his spiritual quest took him to Buddhist holy places and monasteries throughout the subcontinent. By the time he returned to China eighteen years later, carrying with him nearly 600 scriptures which he translated from Sanskrit into Chinese, Xuanzang had covered an astonishing 10,000 miles. He also left a detailed record of his journey, which remains a valuable source of historical information on the regions he traversed. Fourteen hundred years later, Mishi Saran follows in Xuanzang’s footsteps to the fabled oasis cities of China and Central Asia, and the Buddhist sites and now-vanished kingdoms in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan that Xuanzang wrote about. Travelling seamlessly back and forth in time between the seventh century and the twenty-first, Saran uncovers the past with consummate skill even as she brings alive the present through her vivid and engaging descriptions of people and places. Her gripping chronicle includes an extraordinary eyewitness account of Kabul under the Taliban regime, just one month before 9/11. Running parallel to the account of her travels is the moving story of the author’s inner journey towards a new understanding of her roots and her identity. With its riveting mix of lively reportage, high adventure, historical inquiry and personal memoir, this delightfully written book is a path-breaking travelogue.
Catagory: Non Fiction
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Seek
If I don’t crack this job, how will I repay my education loan?
If I join an IT company, will I be able to shift to banking after two years?
These questions seem very familiar, don’t they? Every student has similar concerns about which career path they should tread. Seek provides insights into the various fields and industries-Consulting, IT, Media, Oil and Gas, and others-by delving into stories of successful IIM-Bangalore alumni like Arun Balakrishnan, Malavika Harita, and Apurva Purohit who have made a dent in their respective professions and fields. Rakesh Godhwani offers smart, practical advice on following your passion and finding your dream job.
Not Just Grades
In the race to admit more and more children in privately run, English-medium schools and orient them to a world of cut-throat competition and grades-based performance, the quality of education is suffering. Children, teachers and, of course, educational institutions themselves are constantly struggling to survive in such an atmosphere.
However, while most schools play to the gallery, there are some that have attempted to swim against the current. They aim for the overall development of their students and try to establish a healthy learning environment.
Not Just Grades is about schools that have proved that it is possible to weave positive personal development together with academic excellence. Innovative and full of creative ideas, these schools have a made in difference in imparting education in the absence of extensive resources or capital.
Staggering Forward
There is a paradigm shift in India’s politics. With his clean reputation, proven track record as chief minister of Gujarat and formidable leadership qualities on display, Narendra Modi seemed the right fit for the prime minister’s job, and just the man to turn the country around after the decade-long UPA rule by the modest and tongue-tied Manmohan Singh.
Prime Minister Modi’s first term, however, raises troubling questions. How has his strongman persona and social background impacted policymaking? Has Modi delivered on the high expectations to advance India’s national interest and security? Has the country’s role in the region, in Asia and the world changed, become more meaningful? What has been the effect of Modi’s India First foreign policy on neighbours, and with respect to raising India’s stock in the world and showing the Indian military has teeth? Especially with regard to the UUS, Russia and China.
Analysing Prime Minister Modi’s foreign and military policies in the context of India’s evolving socio-political and economic milieu, this book offers a critical perspective that helps explain why India has not progressed much towards becoming a consequential power. Argumentative and thought-provoking, Staggering Forward is a must-read to understand India’s foreign and national security policies since 2014.
Kama: The Riddle of Desire
A riveting account of love and desire
India is the only civilization to elevate kama-desire and pleasure-to a goal of life. Kama is both cosmic and human energy, which animates life and holds it in place. Gurcharan Das weaves a compelling narrative soaked in philosophical, historical and literary ideas in the third volume of his trilogy on life’s goals: India Unbound was the first, on artha, ‘material well-being’; and The Difficulty of Being Good was the second, on dharma, ‘moral well-being’. Here, in his magnificent prose, he examines how to cherish desire in order to live a rich, flourishing life, arguing that if dharma is a duty to another, kama is a duty to oneself. It sheds new light on love, marriage, family, adultery and jealousy as it wrestles with questions such as these: How to nurture desire without harming others or oneself? Are the erotic and the ascetic two aspects of our same human nature? What is the relationship between romantic love and bhakti, the love of god?
The Accidental Prime Minister
When The Accidental Prime Minister was published in 2014, it created a storm and became the publishing sensation of the year. The Prime Minister’s Office called the book a work of ‘fiction’, the press hailed it as a revelatory account of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s first term in the UPA. Written by Singh’s media adviser and trusted aide, the book describes Singh’s often troubled relations with his ministers, his cautious equation with Sonia Gandhi and how he handled the big crises from managing the Left to pushing through the nuclear deal. Insightful, acute and packed with political anecdotes, The Accidental Prime Minister is one of the great insider accounts of Indian political life.
Heart
The spark of life, fount of emotion, house of the soul–the heart lies at the centre of every facet of our existence. It’s so bound up in our deepest feelings that it can physically change shape when we experience emotional trauma.
For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As the cardiologist and bestselling author Sandeep Jauhar shows in Heart: A History, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and devised the transformative procedures that have changed the way we live.
Deftly alternating between key historical episodes and his own work, combining his family’s own moving history of heart disease with gripping scenes from the operating theatre, Jauhar tells the colourful and little-known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal our most vital organ. He introduces us to Daniel Hale Williams, the African American doctor who performed the world’s first open heart surgery in Gilded Age Chicago. We meet C. Walton Lillehei, who connected a patient’s circulatory system to a healthy donor’s, paving the way for the heart-lung machine. And we encounter Wilson Greatbatch, who saved millions by inventing the pacemaker?by accident. Jauhar deftly braids these tales of discovery, hubris, and sorrow with moving accounts of his family’s history of heart ailments and the patients he’s treated over many years. He also confronts the limits of medical technology, arguing that future progress will depend more on how we choose to live than on the devices we invent.
Affecting, engaging, and beautifully written, Heart: A History takes the full measure of the only organ that can move itself.
The Non Violent Struggle for Freedom 1905-1919
In recent years, there has been a surge of writing on the technique and practice of non-violent forms of resistance. Much of this has focused on movements that occurred after the end of the Second World War, many of which have been extremely successful. Although the fact that such a method of resistance was developed in its modern form by India is acknowledged, there has not until now been an authoritative history available to show exactly how this occurred.
This book provides such a study. Although non-violence is associated above all with the towering figure of M.K. Gandhi, David Hardiman shows that civil forms of resistance were already being practiced by nationalists in British-ruled India under the rubric of ‘passive resistance’. In this, there was no principled commitment to non-violence as such.
It was Gandhi, first in South Africa and then in India, who both evolved a technique that he called ‘satyagraha’ that he characterised in terms of its ‘non-violence’. In this, ‘non-violence’ was forged as both a new word in the English language, and as a new political concept.
The Non-violent Struggle for Freedom brings out in graphic detail exactly what this entailed, and the formidable difficulties that the pioneers of such resistance encountered in the years 1905-19.
What We Talk about When We Talk about Rape
Sohaila Abdulali was the first Indian survivor to speak out about rape. Gang-raped as a teenager in Bombay and indignant at the deafening silence on the issue in India, she wrote an article for a woman’s magazine questioning how we perceive rape and rape victims. Thirty years later, she saw the story go viral in the wake of the fatal 2012 Delhi rape and the global outcry that followed.
Writing from the viewpoint of a survivor, writer, counsellor and activist, and drawing on three decades of grappling with the issue personally and professionally and her work with hundreds of survivors, Sohaila Abdulali looks at what we-women, men, politicians, teachers, writers, sex workers, feminists, sages, mansplainers, victims and families-think about rape and what we say.
She also explores what we don’t say. She asks pertinent questions: Is rape always a life-defining event? Does rape always symbolize something? Is rape worse than death? Is rape related to desire? Who gets raped? Is rape inevitable? Is one rape worse than the other? Who rapes? What is consent? How do you recover a sense of safety and joy? How do you raise sons? Who gets to judge?
Zero to Zenith
Kurian John’s helplessness in the face of his father’s sudden death due to cardiac arrest spurred him on to help those without access to proper medical care, leading to the establishment of the Melam Foundation in 1986. As the number of poor patients who approached him increased, he dealt with the issue of fundraising by creating his own source of income, which resulted in the institution of the Melam Group of Companies in 1992.
Though Kurian John’s spices and curry-powder business began with zero capital-a classic yet unique and innovative example of bootstrapping-it enjoyed spectacular growth and rose to become the largest exporting spice brand in India.
In Zero to Zenith, Kurian John retraces his entrepreneurial journey, detailing how the Melam Foundation has helped innumerable poor patients through a strong network of over 1000 hospitals, and elucidates on the lessons that life taught him and the various business skills he picked up along the way. This heartwarming account of a man with a clear vision-as a businessman and a philanthropist-and a business venture with a difference is sure to instruct and inspire.