Alongside his highly acclaimed novels, Mohsin Hamid has over the years written superb pieces about politics, literature and his own life. Collected together for the first time, they show that Hamid is not just a great novelist but ‘a master critic of the modern global condition’. Provocative, dexterous and full of ideas—this is a sparkling collection.
Catagory: Non Fiction
non fiction main category
Pakistan under Siege
Much of the current work on extremism in Pakistan tends to study extremist trends in the country from a detached position-a top-down security perspective that renders a one-dimensional picture of what is at its heart a complex, richly textured country of 200 million people. In this book, using rigorous analysis of survey data, in-depth interviews in schools and universities in Pakistan, historical narrative reporting, and her own intuitive understanding of the country, Madiha Afzal gives the full picture of Pakistan’s relationship with extremism. The author lays out Pakistanis’ own views-on terrorist groups, jihad, religious minorities and non-Muslims, America, and their place in the world. The views are not radical at first glance, but are riddled with conspiracy theories. Afzal explains how the two pillars that define the Pakistani state-Islam and a paranoia about India-have led to a regressive form of Islamization in Pakistan’s narratives, laws, and curricula. These, in turn, have shaped its citizens’ attitudes.
Afzal traces this outlook to Pakistan’s unique and tortured birth. She examines the rhetoric and the strategic actions of three actors in Pakistani politics-the military, the civilian governments, and the Islamist parties-and their relationships with militant groups. She shows how regressive Pakistani laws instituted in the 1980s worsened citizen attitudes and led to vigilante and mob violence. The author also explains that the educational regime has become a vital element in shaping citizens’ thinking. How many years one attends school, whether the school is public, private, or a madrassa, and what curricula are followed, all affect Pakistanis’ attitudes toward terrorism and the rest of the world.
In the end, Afzal suggests how this beleaguered nation-one with seemingly insurmountable problems in governance and education-can change course.
Born with Wings
Raised in a progressive Muslim family in the shadows of the Himalayan mountains, where she attended a Catholic girls’ school, Daisy experienced culture shock when her family sent her to the States to attend high school in a mostly Jewish Long Island suburb. Ambitious and talented, she quickly climbed the corporate ladder after college as an architectural designer in New York City. Though she loved the freedom that came with being a career woman, she felt that something was missing from her life. One day a friend suggested that she visit a Sufi mosque in Tribeca. To her surprise, she discovered a home there, eventually marrying the mosque’s imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, and finding herself, as his wife, at the centre of a community in which women turned to her for advice. Guided by her faith, she embraced her role as a women’s advocate and has devised innovative ways to help end child marriage, fight against genital mutilation, and, most recently, educate young Muslims to resist the false promises of ISIS recruiters.
Born with Wings is a powerful, moving, and eye-opening account of Daisy Khan’s inspiring journey-of her self-actualization and her success in opening doors for other Muslim women and building bridges between cultures. It powerfully demonstrates what one woman can do-with faith, love, and resilience.
Laughter Yoga
BBC and Google have used it in their offices
Oprah Winfrey promoted it on her show
Aamir Khan loved it on Satyamev Jayate
Mira Nair filmed a documentary, The Laughing Club of India, on itLaughter yoga is a revolutionary idea: simple and profound. A practice involving prolonged voluntary laughter, it is based on scientific studies that have concluded that such laughter offers the same physiological and psychological benefits as spontaneous laughter.
Today, laughter yoga has become popular worldwide as a complete workout. It is practised in more than 100 countries, with as many as 2.5 lakh people laughing out loud in India alone.
This comprehensive book by the founder of the laughter yoga club movement, Dr Madan Kataria, tells you what laughter yoga is, how it works, what its benefits are and how you can apply it to everyday life.
Choices
Shivshankar Menon gives an insider’s account of the negotiations, discussions and assessments that went into the making of five pivotal choices in India’s recent history. These include the decision not to use overt military force against Pakistan after 26/11; the civil nuclear deal with the United States; the border agreement with China; the response to the last months of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war; and the thinking that underlay India’s No First Use nuclear policy. Drawing on his long and distinguished career as a diplomat holding critical positions in India’s external affairs ministry and in the prime minister’s office, Menon considers each situation against the backdrop of India’s evolving definition of her place in the changing global landscape. He brings out the history, politics and principles involved, while examining and dissecting the reasons for the outcome. Analytical, lucid and illuminating, Choices is an unmatched insight into the intellectual heft of foreign policy decision-making by one of India’s most formidable diplomatic practitioners who was actively engaged in these five defining moments.
Rajesh Khanna
In the 1970s, Rajesh Khanna achieved the kind of fame that no film star had ever experienced before-or has since. But then he saw it all vanish. They say superstardom destroyed him. But was it something else buried deep in his past?
In this riveting biography, award winning journalist Yasser Usman examines Rajesh Khanna’s dramatic, colourful life in its entirety: from little-known facts about his childhood to the low-down on his relationships and rivalries, from his ambitious hopes to his deep-seated insecurities. What emerges is a tantalizingly written, meticulously researched chronicle of a fascinating and mercurial man-one who was both loved and feared by those closest to him. It is a story that encapsulates the glittering, seductive, cut-throat world of Bollywood at its best and its worst.
Mother Earth, Sister Seed
In Mother Earth, Sister Seed, landscape designer Lathika George looks at India’s traditional agricultural communities and the changes-some good, some not-that modernization and urbanization have wrought. Paying tribute to the ancient systems of farming, George talks about the men and women whose livelihoods are derived from the land and the sea. An organic gardener herself, she takes you through the changing seasons of agriculture as she travels around the country, from Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu and Coorg in Karnataka to the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya and Chamba in Himachal Pradesh, documenting the celebrations, rituals, folklore and recipes associated with each.
Mother Earth, Sister Seed is a lyrical journey dedicated to ways of life that are vanishing. It captures the myriad ways in which the food we eat is produced and brings to life the industrious farmers, fi shermen and forest folk behind it.
What I Did Not Learn At IIT
Every year, graduating engineers are told that they are destined for success. But what are the habits and behaviours that actually lead to success? In What I Did Not Learn at IIT, Rajeev Agarwal, founder and CEO of MAQ Software, distils decades of life experience into one accessible and informative guide. In simple language, he explains the success techniques he applied and what worked for him.
Encouraging graduates to look at their careers over a forty-year span, Rajeev explains that successful people choose to be passionate about every job they have. Using a skilful combination of personal stories and checklists, What I Did Not Learn at IIT provides students, young and old, with a roadmap for success.
Demonetization and the Black Economy
On 8 November 2016, the prime minister announced the immediate cancellation of all
Rs 500 and Rs 1000 denomination notes, wiping out 86 per cent of the currency in
circulation. India’s well-functioning economy went into a tailspin.
This move, it was claimed, was made to wipe out corruption, deter the generation of black
money, weed out fake Indian currency notes and curb terrorism. Overnight, people in India realized that the cash in their pockets had no value. A window of fifty days was granted to 1.3 billion people to convert their old notes into new ones.
Businesses, especially in the unorganized sectors, came to a grinding halt. Patients in hospitals faced huge problems, farmers had difficulty buying inputs, weddings were scaled down, and fishermen watched their catch rot. Many lost their jobs and could not support their families.
A year later, the RBI announced that 99 per cent of the old currency notes had been deposited with
it. India continues to grapple with the effects of this move. The black economy has not been
dented; counterfeiting and terrorism continue; the credibility of the RBI, banks and currency is
damaged; the accountability of the Parliament and the prime minister has been eroded; and the social divide
has widened. There have been many arguments and counter-arguments from both sides, but they have
missed the complete picture.
Demonetization and the Black Economy, for the first time, lucidly explains the story
of demonetization along with its effects on the economy.
Dera Sacha Sauda and Gurmeet Ram Rahim
A journalist’s account of investigating Gurmeet Ram Rahim and his empire of exploitation
How did a nondescript young man from a farming family become the head of a quasi-religious sect with a million followers willing to die and kill for their ‘Pitaji’?
The story of the rise of Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan of the wildly popular Dera Sacha Sauda is anything but ordinary. It allegedly involved sexual exploitation, forced castrations, private militias, illegal trade in arms and opium, and land grab on an untold scale-until the self-styled godman was convicted for one of his many crimes in August 2017.
The book opens with an anonymous letter which led to the first-ever journalistic investigation, in 2007-Tehelka‘s Operation Jhootha Sauda-into the reported criminal activities at the Dera. In the years that followed, the author continued to document the lonely battles for justice against the influential godman who had the might of the Dera’s machinery and manpower behind him.
This book is as much about the grit and determination of ordinary citizens fighting power systems as it is about the difficulty of investigating crimes committed by the rich and powerful in India today.