The Battle for Pakistan showcases a marriage of convenience between unequal partners. The relationship between Pakistan and the United States since the early 1950s has been nothing less than a whiplash-inducing rollercoaster ride. Today, surrounded by hostile neighbours, with Afghanistan increasingly under Indian influence, Pakistan does not wish to break ties with the US. Nor does it want to become a vassal of China and get caught in the vice of a US-China rivalry, or the Arab-Iran conflict.
Internally, massive economic and demographic challenges as well as the existential threat of armed militancy pose huge obstacles to Pakistan’s development and growth. Could its short-run political miscalculations in the Obama years prove too costly? Can the Trump administration help salvage this relationship?
Based on extensive travel in the region, frequent policy interactions and many on-the-record interviews with key leaders, The Battle for Pakistan untangles the complex US relationship in the past decade. Shuja Nawaz identifies the path forward, provided US and Pakistani leaders make the right choices for the longer term.
The sex workers of Kotha No. 300 raise their children, cook for their lovers, visit temples, shrines and mosques, complain about pimps and brothel owners, listen to film songs, and solicit and entertain customers.
By following the daily lives of the denizens of one kotha, Mayank Austen Soofi paints an intimate portrait of women for whom sex is work-a way to make a living.
With precise details and haunting photographs, Soofi delicately and carefully etches the everyday world of those who inhabit the peripheries of society.
Sufi is the story of two boys who grew up in Dongri, Mumbai.
One of them, Iqbal Rupani, aided and abetted by a corrupt policeman, is drawn towards criminal activities in his teens. As he becomes powerful and influential as a racketeer and smuggler, he creates a puritan code of conduct for himself: no drinking, no smoking and no murders. He comes to be known as ‘Sufi’ because of his principles and philosophical manner of speaking.
The other boy, Aabid Surti, grows up to become a famous author.
How did the lives of these two boys, which began on such a similar note, diverge so drastically? This book presents an astonishing real-life story, with the sweep and scale of Kane and Abel, told by one of India’s most beloved storytellers.
As the intellectual fountainhead of the ideology of Hindutva, which is in political ascendancy in India today, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar is undoubtedly one of the most contentious political thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century. Accounts of his eventful and stormy life have oscillated from eulogizing hagiographies to disparaging demonization. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between and has unfortunately never been brought to light. Savarkar and his ideology stood as one of the strongest and most virulent opponents of Gandhi, his pacifist philosophy and the Indian National Congress.
An alleged atheist and a staunch rationalist who opposed orthodox Hindu beliefs, encouraged inter-caste marriage and dining, and dismissed cow worship as mere superstition, Savarkar was, arguably, the most vocal political voice for the Hindu community through the entire course of India’s freedom struggle. From the heady days of revolution and generating international support for the cause of India’s freedom as a law student in London, Savarkar found himself arrested, unfairly tried for sedition, transported and incarcerated at the Cellular Jail, in the Andamans, for over a decade, where he underwent unimaginable torture.
From being an optimistic advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity in his treatise on the 1857 War of Independence, what was it that transformed him in the Cellular Jail to a proponent of ‘Hindutva’, which viewed Muslims with suspicion?
Drawing from a vast range of original archival documents across India and abroad, this biography in two parts-the first focusing on the years leading up to his incarceration and eventual release from the Kalapani-puts Savarkar, his life and philosophy in a new perspective and looks at the man with all his achievements and failings.
Renowned journalist Jyotirmoy Dey-fondly known as J, Dey-was murdered by members of the Chhota Rajan gang in 2011. A few months later, a fellow journalist and crime reporter Jigna Vora was arrested in connection with the murder. Seven years later, some of which were spent in prison, Jigna was acquitted of all charges. This is her story in her own words, of the time in prison, the court hearings and her years as a crime reporter of breaking many front-page stories.
Jigna’s work brought her in contact with people like Himanshu Roy, the former additional director general of police of Maharashtra, while her time in jail put her in the company of inmates such as Pragya Thakur. Behind Bars in Byculla traces the intricate web of power dynamics that govern the inmates of a prison and what it takes to survive behind bars.
Is Narendra Modi’s government innovative and free of vote-bank politics? How did Narendra Modi bring 24-hour, three-phase domestic power supply to 18,000 villages in Gujarat? How did Modi turn the forlorn Kutch into a top tourist destination?
One of the most hotly debated topics in the general elections has been the development and governance of Narendra Modi’s government in Gujarat. In Centrestage, Uday Mahurkar tries to present a balanced assessment of Narendra Modi’s government by uncovering and analysing the Modi mantra of governance. With chapters on energy, technology, agriculture, finance and innovation, to name a few, Mahurkar aims at understanding and revealing the ground reality through facts and research beyond the media hype. Has Gujarat really made progress under Narendra Modi? Is Narendra Modi really a visionary and a good administrator? Read Centrestage to find out and get an insider’s view of Narendra Modi’s governance from a man who has followed him closely for the past three decades.
Winner of Publishing Next’s Printed Book of the Year Award and featuring on the Green Literature Festival Honour List.
Native and imported, sacred and ordinary, culinary and floral, favourites of various kings and commoners over the centuries, trees are the most visible signs of nature in cities, fundamentally shaping their identities. Trees are storehouses of the complex origins and histories of city growth, coming as they do from different parts of the world, brought in by various local and colonial rulers. From the tree planted by Sarojini Naidu at Dehradun’s clock tower to those planted by Sher Shah Suri and Jahangir on Grand Trunk Road, trees in India have served, above all, as memory keepers. They are our roots: their trunks our pillars, their bark our texture, and their branches our shade. Trees are nature’s own museums.
Drawing on extensive research, Cities and Canopies is a book about both the specific and the general aspects of these gentle life-giving creatures.
Will Modi pass the litmus test of governance? Does his performance match his promises?
In Marching with a Billion, Uday Mahurkar analyses the Modi government’s three years in power against the backdrop of years of policy paralysis and corruption before he came to power, leaving him with a stiff salvaging job. Focusing on key areas of governance like infrastructure, foreign affairs, power, the social sector, finance, digital technology and agriculture, the author showcases the work of the present government and the monumental changes the prime minister has brought about, including digital innovation and the uprooting of middlemen, which has resulted in an unprecedented level of transparency, and a resolute assault on poverty. He also points out some of the shortfalls of Modi’s government, subjecting it to critical evaluation. Will Modi become a great institution builder, a prerequisite to becoming a nation builder? What will be the long-term impact of demonetization on the economy? This book has the answers.
Set in London, The Sandglass tells the story of two feuding families whose lives are interlinked by the changing fortunes of postcolonial Sri Lanka. After his mother’s death, Prins Ducal is driven to re-examine his family’s history. In doing so, he discovers questionable circumstances surrounding another death in his family—his father’s—and sets about unravelling the secrets shrouding it. In this beautifully constructed novel, Romesh Gunesekera expertly weaves together the fabric of 1990s London and post-war Sri Lanka, moving seamlessly between past and present.
‘A driver’s job is to stay in control behind the wheel and that is all. The past is what you leave as you go. There is nothing more to it.’
Vasantha retired early, bought himself a van with his savings and now works as a driver for hire in Sri Lanka. As he ferries new entrepreneurs, charity workers and itinerant families around the country, he reveals with self-deprecating wit and folksy wisdom their uncertain lives after the end of a decades-long war.
On his journey from the army camps of the north to the moonlit beaches of the south, he begins to wonder if the past can be left behind—especially his own, and his country’s—and what the future might hold for a lovelorn soldier out on the ramparts, a fast-moving hotelier in a bombed-out town, an eager Jaffna student of Italian, or a desperate librarian of empty shelves?
A superb collection of interlinked stories—perceptive, sombre, finely tuned—Noontide Toll draws an extraordinary portrait of post-war Sri Lanka grappling with the ghosts of its troubled past.
