The Lord and Master of Gujarat is set four years after The Glory of Patan, and unfolds at dizzying speed, abounding in conspiracies, heroism and romance. In the book, the kingdom of Patan is under attack from the army of Avanti. People have fled their villages to seek refuge in the city. Amidst the mounting panic, the arrival of Kaak, a young warrior from Laat, sets in motion a frantic chain of events.
Arguably K.M. Munshi’s best-known work, The Lord and Master of Gujarat deftly weaves state politics and battles with personal trials and tribulations into one glorious tapestry.
Here is an excerpt from the book:
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It was a freezing night in the winter of Samvat, 1154. The solemnly flowing waters of the Saraswati resounded fearfully in the stillness of the night. The moist breeze rising from the river made the atmosphere closer to the monsoon than to winter. It was a night when one would prefer to curl up at home next to one’s beloved. Yet, the bank across the city of Patan was occupied by about 400 to 500 people. Some tried to ward off the cold with bonfires; others slept or tried to sleep around the scattered fires. A few, not planning to sleep, sat curled up anxiously. In the darkness, the flickering of the flames cast eerie shadows and filled the night with dread. The whole scene appeared to evoke a gathering of ghouls.
Beside one of the bonfires, a young man sat half-reclined. His head rested on his shield, which lay on the ground. The style of his turban indicated that he belonged to Sorath. His sword lay near his face, covered with his sash. There was no sleep in his eyes. He sat staring at the fire, aiming an occasional woodchip and feeding the fire. He was alone. At a distance sat two men huddled against the tree. They were not talking to each other.
The young man appeared to be about twenty-five years old. His face was dark yet attractive. His eyes were large and forbidding. They sparkled with mischief every now and then.
His physique was strong and shapely. His attire, the ornaments on his wrists and arms, his earrings and the gold chain around his neck suggested that he was a man of means. He had the nonchalant air of an aristocratic warrior.
In a little while, the sound of a fast-approaching camel was heard, followed by the thud of a camel sitting down. Silence fell once again. The young man by the fire sat unperturbed. It appeared that there was nothing more important to him than throwing woodchips into the fire.
A man appeared from the direction of the sound. He was in a hurry and, seeing the young man, turned to him.
The new arrival appeared to be in his early twenties. He was well-armed—sword and dagger at his waist, a shield on his back and a large staff in his hand. He turned towards the young man and for a moment both looked at each other. With the exception of their turbans, their attires were similar, although the newcomer had hardly any ornaments. Both were tall, wellbuilt and attractive. Their eyes shone with a similar sparkle; their broad foreheads were adorned with similar sandalwood marks. Both appeared to be Gujarati warriors who had fought under the glorious Solankis in their conquest of Gujarat. Yet there was a lot that distinguished the two. Their personalities were clearly different. The newcomer was slightly taller, his eyes smaller and sharper, his body firm and lithe. On the other hand, the man who sat there had a rounder face. The flare of his nostrils and large eyes gave him a leonine appearance. He exuded courage and power. The newcomer’s sharp eyes, chiselled jawline and aquiline nose lent him the countenance of a bird of prey. He exuded concentration and caution. If the former looked fearless and calm, the latter looked farsighted and composed. Both were exemplars of characteristics associated only with men of character—one leonine, the other aquiline—one the king of the jungle, and the other the king of the sky.
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Category: Excerpts
6 Exercises That Will Help You Give Birth Naturally
In light of the many complications that arise following a Caesarean-section delivery-such as infections, excessive blood loss, internal scarring –women are increasingly reverting to natural births. Antenatal exercises help in regaining your confidence to deliver naturally according to your own potential.
Here are a few antenatal exercises recommended by Dr. Mahima Bakshi in her latest book, Birthing Naturally.
Please note: Antenatal exercises should not be learnt from any untrained person as it might harm your baby if not done properly and an expert will know what has to be kept in mind before deciding the exercises that are safe for you.
Talent Wins: The New Playbook for Putting People First – An Excerpt
Turning conventional views on their heads, talent and leadership experts Ram Charan, Dominic Barton and Dennis Carey provide leaders with a new and different playbook for acquiring, managing and deploying talent–for today’s agile, digital, analytical, technologically driven strategic environment and for creating the HR function that business needs. Filled with examples of forward-thinking companies that have adopted radical new approaches to talent (such as ADP, Amgen, BlackRock, Blackstone, Haier, ING, Marsh, Tata Communications, Telenor and Volvo), as well as the juggernauts and the start-ups of Silicon Valley, this book shows leaders how to bring the rigor that they apply to financial capital to their human capital–elevating HR to the same level as finance in their organizations.
Here’s an excerpt from the book.
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The top of the company also must align behind something else: the story you’re going to tell investors. If you’re leading a talent-driven organization but talking strategy-first to Wall Street, there’s a disconnect between your company’s public and private personae. That’s not good for investors, your company, or your workforce.
Telling investors about talent seems like a risky tactical change. Why would a company in, say, the semiconductor industry want to position itself in a way that seems more suited to a movie studio announcing its latest slate of star-driven features?
There are several answers to this question. For starters, shifting to a story built around talent is a sign of the times. Some companies already include slides about their key talent in their quarterly presentations. Financial analysts know the impact people like Jony Ive, Astro Teller, Sheryl Sandberg, and Andy Rubin can have on a company’s valuation. The phenomenon is hardly limited to tech: the performance or career peregrinations of Wall Street stars, fashion leaders, and even manufacturing pros can affect share prices as well.
But your company’s talent narrative isn’t just a story of stars. In fact, in times of great turbulence it can be a sign of stability. GE has made its deep talent-development efforts part of its narrative for years. GE stock has had its challenges, of course. But the company’s education efforts at its Crotonville, New York, facility and its history of always having great talent at the ready give investors confidence in GE’s management pipeline. Google’s track record of giving great leeway to its talented employees is equally well known. At one point, employees were even encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time working on their own pet projects. Investors have applauded CEO Larry Page’s effort to rein in some of the company’s more outlandish experiments, but they wouldn’t want to see the company reduce its commitment to innovation. Analysts have come to expect the unexpected from companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple, and are apt to forgive the occasional failure, because the companies’ talent-first models have produced one unexpected innovation after another. At these companies, there’s a well established narrative history of the power of talent.
The Unseeing Idol of Light by K.R. Meera; Excerpt
K.R. Meera is a multi-award-winning writer and journalist. She has published short stories, novels and essays, and has won some of the most prestigious literary prizes. The Unseeing Idol of Light, K.R. Meera’s latest book is a haunting tale that explores love and loss, blindness and sight, obsession and suffering-and the poignant interconnections between them.
Here’s an excerpt from the book:
Deepti had gone missing one day before the TV centre in Thiruvananthapuram was commissioned. On their last day together, Prakash and Deepti had mostly talked about TV.
‘Considering the state of affairs here, we’ll probably get to watch TV by the time our son goes to college! Though I sometimes wonder whether we will ever really be so lucky.’ Deepti laughed, the rich timbre of her voice reminiscent of a finger knocking softly against a bronze pitcher.
That laughter and her question had resounded so often in Prakash’s ears that he had refused to purchase a TV in his home for a very long time. TV, to Prakash, was inexplicably associated with misfortune. In the shock of losing Deepti, the nerves controlling his vision had separated, making him blind. As it turned out, he never really had the luck to watch TV, just as Deepti had predicted.
Much later, when cable TV came into vogue, Prakash had two unexpected visitors at the town’s government college, where he was employed as the chief librarian. A young woman and a man had dropped in, carrying a camera and a microphone.
‘We would like to interview you since you are a blind librarian.’ The young woman brusquely extended the microphone towards him.
‘Where did you get such pretty lips, my girl?’ Prakash’s brazen query stunned the woman.
‘Ah, you are not blind, are you?’
‘Aren’t we all blind in some way or the other?’
Opening Chekov’s Collected Stories and turning to page 132, Prakash started reading out from ‘The Husband’, the book held close to his nose.
‘It makes me sick to look at her!’ he muttered. ‘Going on for forty and nothing to boast of at any time, she must powder her face and lace herself up!’
The young woman peeked into the book and, seeing that he was perfectly correct, beat a hasty retreat. However, after they had left, Prakash regretted sending them away. Deepti might have seen the TV programme in some corner of the world, recognized him and returned to spread light again in his life. Immersed in this thought, he became extremely frustrated.
Even after so many years he had not been able to reconcile himself to Deepti’s departure. He had been completely prepared to be a father, and eager to play with his little son, when Deepti disappeared. In his mind’s eye, he repeatedly saw how, on that evening, seated in the kitchen, Deepti and he had enjoyed platefuls of ada with their tea.
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Dera Sacha Sauda and Gurmeet Ram Rahim by Anurag Tripathi – An Excerpt
Anurag Tripathi is an investigative journalist with sixteen years of experience spanning print, electronic and digital media. Tripathi’s book, Dera Sacha Sauda and Gurmeet Ram Rahim, involves his decade long investigation into reported criminal activities undertaken at the Dera Sacha Sauda headed by Gurmeet Ram Rahim.
Let’s read an excerpt from the book.
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For twenty-one-year-old Anshul, life was moving at a pace that any youngster from a small town envisions. He was good at his studies and dreamt of studying to be a lawyer. It was his father’s dream that he was pursuing diligently. With two siblings—a fourteen-year-old brother, Aridman, and sixteen-year-old sister, Shreyasi—mother Kulwant Kaur and father Ram Chander Chhatrapati, Anshul was content and secure. Little did he know that life as he knew it and expected it to be was about to change forever.
After 8.15 p.m. on 24 October 2002, he would embark on the journey of a relentless legal battle, fought amid constant threats to him and his family. He was not to know that for the next fifteen years, he would have to put aside his own dreams and fight tooth and nail for justice for his family.
On that fateful day, in their small, single-storeyed house at Govind Nagar in Sirsa, Anshul was watching a television show along with his brother and sister. He was also chopping vegetables for the dinner that was yet to be made. His mother had had to leave in a hurry that morning for Guru Har Sahai in Firozpur, Punjab, to attend the funeral of a close family member. Before leaving, she had instructed Anshul to take care of his younger siblings for she was aware of her husband’s routine of returning home late from work.
‘After writing his reports and sending the newspaper to press, my father had a habit of meeting his old friends at a tea shop in town. There, he would discuss the latest news making the rounds, and also take feedback on major events taking place at the Dera.’
That day, however, was not a usual one. Chhatrapati, to his children’s surprise, reached home at around 7.15 p.m., which was early for him. He was elated as he told Anshul about a major lead in his investigation against Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. He announced that he would try his culinary skills and busied himself in the kitchen.
At around 8.05 p.m., the family heard a motorcycle stop at their gate and someone call for Ram Chander Chhatrapati by name from the small alley outside their house. Asking his children to stay indoors, he went out to meet the visitor. The house has two gates—a bigger one, which opens out into the main alley of the locality to the west, and a smaller one, which opens into an adjoining alley to the north of the house. Normally, the main gate was kept closed most of the time, and it was the smaller gate that was used by the family to enter and exit the house.
As was his habit, this time too, Chhatrapati used the smaller gate to get out of the house. The killers, who had obviously been tracking his and his family’s movements, knew that it was the small gate that was in frequent use. If they waited for him at that gate, Chhatrapati might not open it. So they hid themselves behind the main gate on the west side, and waited for him to emerge from the small gate and walk out towards the main alley.
When a few minutes had passed, Anshul thought of going out and calling his father back in for dinner. He was about to open the main door when they all heard five consecutive gunshots. The assailants, two in number, fled the spot on a motorcycle. As the nearest police post at Khairpur was barely 200 metres from the house, one of the assailants, Kuldeep Singh, was apprehended by a constable who had heard the gunshots and was heading towards the alley. The other assailant, Nirmal Singh, managed to flee the crime scene.
Meanwhile, Anshul locked the main door of the house and rushed towards the small gate.
‘By the time I reached the main alley, all I could see was my father lying in a pool of blood.’ He started screaming for help as he rushed to help his father. Chhatrapati, though grievously wounded, with two gunshots in the abdomen and one each on the shoulder, the back and the thigh, was trying to stand up. The entire neighbourhood had heard the gunshots and people had started gathering in the alley. A neighbour brought his car out and rushed the badly wounded Chhatrapati to the nearest hospital in Sirsa.
‘The 200–km drive from Sirsa to Rohtak seemed like the longest I have ever had to drive in my life. All throughout, I was holding my father’s hand. He was conscious and was looking into my eyes. I felt utterly miserable and helpless,’ said the son, for whom his father was the greatest role model.
Meanwhile, Anshul’s sister and brother were at home, crying and clueless about why their father had been shot. The news of the brutal attack also reached Firozpur. Kulwant Kaur composed herself and started for Rohtak. ‘He was an upright man. He was fighting against a monster and he knew its consequences,’ Kaur told me while recalling that night of horror. ‘He would always tell us that no one has left this earth alive. “Neither will I. But I can’t sit back and see my city go to ruin because of Gurmeet Ram Rahim.”
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Five Areas Where India Has Witnessed Immense Growth In The Past Seven Decades
Has democracy in India fulfilled the aspirations of its people? Is the country secure on its external borders? Will India become an economic powerhouse?
All these and many more integral questions loom large as India completes seven decades of independence. The book, Seven Decades of Independent India, edited by Vinod Rai and Amitendu Palit, reflects on the India of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, by gathering rare and candid insights from some of the most distinguished experts, practitioners and scholars on India.
Here are five areas where India has progressed notably-
Eleven Ways to Love: An Excerpt
Love stories coach us to believe that love is selective, somehow, that it can be boxed in and easily defined. Eleven Ways to Love: Essays, is a collection of eleven remarkable essays that widen the frame of reference: transgender romance; body image issues; race relations; disability; polyamory; class differences; queer love; long distance; caste; loneliness; the single life; the bad boy syndrome . . . and so much more.
Here is the foreword of the book written by well-known poet Gulzar.
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Is love selective? No. There is no ideal love, and there is certainly no ideal lover. In this wonderful collection of essays on love, I welcome you to dip into eleven kinds of love: eleven individuals who have had their lives transformed by this very thing.
Here then are eleven ways to love from eleven unusual lovers. I’d like to leave you with a parting thought . . . and a poem of my own.
I have seen the wafting aroma of those eloquent eyes
Do not touch it with your hands and stamp it with a relationship
It’s just a sensation, caress it with your soul
Let love be love, do not label it.
Love is not words, love is not sounds
Love is just a silence that speaks, that hears
Love is unstoppable, love is inextinguishable
Love is a droplet of light shimmering through the ages
Something like a smile is in bloom somewhere in those eyes
Something like sunshine lingers around those eyelids
The lips don’t say a word, but numerous unspoken stories
Hover around their quivering edges
I have seen the wafting aroma of those eloquent eyes . . .
Translated by Sunjoy Shekhar
First published in 100 Lyrics by Gulzar (Penguin India, 2012)
Gulzar
A Day In The Life by Anjum Hasan – An Excerpt
Anjum Hasan is the author of two critically acclaimed novels- Lunatic in my Head that was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award and Neti Neti, shortlisted for the Hindi Best Fiction Award. She has also written the short fiction collection Difficult Pleasures along with a book of poems titled Street on the Hill. Currently, she is the Books Editor at Caravan Magazine. In her latest book, A Day in the Life, Hasan gives us fourteen well-crafted short stories that provide an insight into the daily life of her characters. With protagonists like a non-conformist living by choice in a small town or a middle class woman’s bond with her maid. Hasan shows that there is an unusual charm in normal, everyday life too.
Let’s read an excerpt from the short story The Stranger from Hasan’s latest book- A Day in the Life.
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There were no new ideas to be found in the city so I retired last year to this small town—an experiment to see if I could live in a house with a tiled roof that sometimes leaked and little storybook windows that muffled rather than let in light. Four months straight it rained with pounding urgency, bookended by two of drizzle. Sentences that I thought had no currency any more, not in the twenty-first century, still applied here, in this drenched hill town. It was a dark and stormy night. Or, The wind howled in the trees and loudly rattled the windowpanes.
One could imagine a very old place, a sparser and hardier monsoon existence hidden in the folds of the green valleys, even though they’d been killing off the vestiges in recent years— building hotels over the Christian graveyards and glassy shopping complexes where there’d been trees and empty space. Still, a few bungalows with compounds and driveways from a hundred years ago remained, and in the bazaar lots of those crooked little two -storey split-level shophouses with wooden casements, which too must have been here at least since the British, were writing in their gazetteers about who was up to exactly what business in the district. With the rain and the daily power-cuts, the Gothic mist creeping over everything all the time in season and the silence that lay over the hedgerows in the lanes away from the town centre, this was still a place where you could play at being someone else.
I’d seemed to be coasting along like everyone else in the city but was really eyeing something deeper—a love affair or a glittering friendship. I was lonely and didn’t see it. When this hit me, when I turned forty, then forty-five, and still felt unmade and unresolved, still chasing something just around the corner, I stopped. I had some money from two decades in the industry—if not scaling the heights of the corporate ladder, then not sliding down it either. Enough to ride on for a few years if I yielded all ambition, so that’s what I decided to do. Become nobody or, at least, a sincerely regular man. Cease thinking I was going to get anywhere either in the realm of intellectual achievement or human relations.
What can better aid coming down to earth than a half-forgotten small town: that stained suburban air, the permanent emanations of open sewers and busy bakeries? A whole population’s worth of people with reduced hopes, happy to cut their coats according to their cloth.
I’ve been here almost a year now, one monsoon to the next, and I have a house of three small rooms which is too big for me, a talkative cook in a burka and a target of getting through all the mouldy books in the back rows of the local library, which no one seems to have touched since circa Independence. I do try to give some kind of shape to my days—watching the blackbirds with my morning coffee; walking with the late afternoon sun when there is one; helping, because I was inveigled into it, the landlord’s middle-school-going boy and girl with their homework; just sitting around reading in the evenings as I drink brandy with hot water, or bad wine, or whisky with ice on summer nights when it’s really warm and I’m feeling like I might start to be sorry for myself. Who was it who said Proust’s pinings and dissatisfaction represented the illness of the cultivated classes in a capitalistic society? I’m trying, with the benevolent aid of my neighbourhood liquor store, to undo my cultivation and sometimes casting off these chains can hurt.
I wake up in the dark: it could be 4 a.m. or well past seven. The clacking rhythm of rain on the roof seems to be saying, I’m here to stay. Okay, I tell it. I can live with you. It’s all right to wake up in an indeterminable darkness, not knowing what day of the week it is, and no longer needing to call up the thought of the project I’m working on or dwell on the inexorable nature of modern work. I stay in bed till Amina bangs on the door. The bell’s stopped working.
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The Different Types of Divorces in Muslim Society
Almost all men and women with access to newspapers would have heard of triple talaq. Not many, though, would have heard of khula, the woman’s inalienable right to divorce. Worse, even Muslim women seem unaware of this right.
Under khula, a woman has a right similar to that of a man to dissolve the marriage. What’s more, she has to specify no grounds for effecting the divorce. She has to furnish no proof of harassment or ill treatment. Something as simple as a dislike for her husband’s looks can be reason enough for khula to take place, as proven in Islamic history.
In Till Talaq Do Us Part, Ziya Us Salam explains that the women’s right to dissolve a marriage is well protected by the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, and the Dissolution of Muslim Marriage Act, 1938. They, in addition, enjoy at least five other ways of getting rid of incompatible, violent or slanderous husbands. The conditions for this cover everything from dowry demands to casting aspersions on the character of the wife, or simply the inability to fulfil marital obligations.
They are as follows:
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8 Quotes From 'Will You Still Love Me' That Will Break Your Heart
Ravinder Singh is the bestselling author of several books such as I Too Had A Love Story, Can Love Happen Twice, Your Dreams Are Mine Now and This Love That Feels Right.
Singh’s latest novel, Will You Still Love Me is about Lavanya Gogoi, from the scenic hills of Shillong and Rajveer Saini who belongs to the shahi city of Patiala. Worlds apart from one another, the two land up next to each other on a flight from Mumbai to Chandigarh. It’s love at first flight, at least for one of them. It is a deeply moving story showcasing love at its worst and its best.
Here are eight quotes from the book- Will You Still Love Me that will break your heart:
