Rabindranath Tagore was a key figure of the Bengal Renaissance. He started writing at an early age and by the turn of the century had become a household name. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and his verse collection, Gitanjali came to be known internationally. His works include novels; plays; essays on religious, social and literary topics; some sixty collections of verse; over a hundred short stories; and more than 2500 songs, including the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. Tagore’s eminence as India’s greatest modern poet remains unchallenged to this day.
Here are six quotes from his books, Chokher Bali and The Home and The World that show how brave and fierce Tagore’s protagonists were.
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The Hate U Give: 5 Things You didn’t Know About Starr
“What’s the point of having a voice if you’re going to be silent?”
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
Here are 5 things you didn’t know about Starr, from Angie Thomas’s book The Hate U Give:
Books to Keep Busy with This May
This May, Penguin brings some interesting reads to you! From books that give a glimpse into the world of Supreme Court Judges to the best-loved stories from Sudha Murty to solving murder mysteries to taking an intimate tour of online sex cultures and discovering fitness secrets of Bollywood stars, we’ve got you covered.
Let’s take a look at the list of books we have for you this May!
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1. The Lord and Master of Gujarat
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. This is an epic novel in the grand tradition of Alexandre Dumas. Arguably K.M. Munshi’s best-known work, it deftly weaves state politics and battles with personal trials and tribulations into one glorious tapestry.
2. Supreme Whispers: Conversations with Judges of The Supreme Court of India 1980-1989
This book yields a fascinating glimpse into the secluded world of the judges of the Supreme Court in the 1980s and earlier.
Over the course of a decade, George H. Gadbois, Jr. met judges of the Supreme Court of India who gave him astonishing details: about what they actually thought of their colleagues, about the inner workings and politics of the court, their interactions with the government and the judicial appointments process, among many other things.
3. Devlok with Devdutt Pattanaik 3
In, Devlok with Devdutt Pattanaik 3 you will read about the various versions of the Ramayana found across Asia. There are chapters on Buddhism and Jainism and their fascinating histories. Learn where the concept of marriage comes from, the reasons behind the many riti-riwaz in Hinduism and the place of fathers and fatherhood in Indian mythology, among myriad other topics and lesser-known tales – all tackled by Devdutt in a Q&A format.
4. Murder at the Happy Home for the Aged
The inhabitants of the Happy home for the aged are first perplexed when a body is found hanging in the garden, then decide to come together to solve the murder that has suddenly brought the violence of the world into their Goan arcadia.
Patiently, and with flashes of inspiration, the unlikely detectives follow the clues and in doing so emerge from the isolated and separate worlds they had inhabited for so long.
5. Cyber Sexy
In this intrepid, empathetic and nuanced account of the sexual shopping cart that is the internet today, Richa Kaul Padte takes readers on an intimate tour of online sex cultures. From camgirls to fanfiction writers, homemade videos to consent violations, Cyber Sexy investigates what it means to seek out pleasure online.
And as for whether or not something counts as porn? You’ll know it when you see it.
6. Life Over Two Beers and Other Stories
Sanjeev Sanyal, bestselling author of Land of the Seven Rivers, returns to enthral readers with a collection of unusual stories. Written with Sanjeev’s trademark flair, the stories crackle with irreverence and wit. From the vicious politics of a Mumbai housing society to the snobberies of Delhi’s cocktail circuit, the stories in Life over Two Beers and Other Stories get under the skin of a rapidly changing India – and leave you chuckling.
7. Here, There and Everywhere: Best-loved stories of Sudha Murty
Wearer of many hats – philanthropist, entrepreneur, computer scientist, engineer, teacher – Sudha Murty has above all always been a storyteller extraordinaire. Here, There and Everywhere is a celebration of her literary journey and is her 200th title across genres and languages. Bringing together her best-loved stories from various collections alongside some new ones and a thoughtful introduction, here is a book that is, in every sense, as multifaceted as its author.
8. Laughter Yoga: Daily laughter practices for health and happiness
A practice involving prolonged voluntary laughter, laughter yoga is based on scientific studies that have concluded that such laughter offers the same physiological and psychological benefits as spontaneous laughter.
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.
9. Birthing Naturally
Birthing Naturally is a comprehensive book on pregnancy wellness that aims to increase the chances of expecting mothers in giving a successful and less-stressful natural birth. This book will help you as a friend and as an antenatal caregiver so you can enjoy your pregnancy, and provide valuable tips for your postnatal period to complete your experience of motherhood.
10. Fitness Secrets of the Stars
With detailed daily workouts, diets and plans followed by Bollywood actors for specific roles, Fitness Secrets of the Stars will show you how to get in shape like your favourite movie star. The authors also provide a peek into each star’s fitness philosophy along with interesting personal anecdotes and the ways in which they motivate themselves to not only achieve great bodies but also maintain them. Whether you’re just starting your fitness journey or looking to ramp it up a notch, this book is sure to help you look like a star.
11. A Cage of Desires
Renu had always craved love and security, and her boring marriage, mundane existence somehow leads her to believe that, maybe, this is what love is all about. Maya, on the other hand, is a successful author who is infamous for her bold, erotic books.
What do these two women have in common? How are their lives intertwined?
12. Dancing with Swans: A Book Of Quotes
Words have the power to move and motivate; to inspire as well as compel one to rethink their life choices. And often, a very short phrase is enough to set one on the right path. When you read and reread every word of Dancing with Swans, each quote opens up pathways within, helping you to lead your day-to-day life in the most spiritual manner. They shall help you give each moment your Divine Best and empower you to go through whatever is in store for you gracefully.
13. Disrupt and Conquer: How TTK Prestige Became a Billion-Dollar business
In this book, the current chairman of The TTK Group, T.T. Jagannathan, along with Sandhya Mendonca, takes us through the journey of this extraordinary company which fought off bankruptcy and rose like a phoenix to become a highly profitable, successful entity.
With invaluable business lessons, decades of experience and innovation distilled in these pages, Disrupt and Conquer is a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs, executives and business leaders.
14. The Fuzzie and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts will Rule the Digital World
If you majored in the humanities or social sciences, you were a fuzzy. If you majored in the computer sciences, you were a techie, Scott Hartley first heard the terms ‘fuzzy’ and ‘techie’ while studying at Stanford University. This informal division has quietly found its way into a default assumption that has misled the business world for decades: that it’s the techies who drive innovation.
Scott Hartley looks inside some of today’s most dynamic new companies, reveals breakthrough fuzzy-techie collaborations, and explores how such collaborations are at the center of innovation in business, education, and government, and why liberal arts are still relevant in our techie world.
15. Born with Wings: The Spiritual Journey of a Modern Muslim Woman
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.
16. Calling Sehmat
Inspired from real events, this is the story of a young college-going Kashmiri girl, Sehmat, who gets to know her dying father’s last wish and can do little but surrender to his passion and patriotism and follow the path he has so painstakingly laid out. It is the beginning of her transformation from an ordinary girl into a deadly spy.
Things you didn’t know about Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote, one of the best contemporary poets popular for his use of finely wrought, luminous and sensuous metaphors is also an art theorist, independent curator and was previously an assistant editor with The Hindu. He has been an independent writer and curator for 11 years. He has published five collections of poetry. His latest collection, Jonahwhale, is a set of brilliant annotations on the giant landmass of history, captured in three movements.
Here are 6 things you didn’t know about the poet.
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Aren’t these fascinating?
What’s In Store for Our Young Readers this Summer?
Hello, we’d like to introduce you to some new people and take you to some exciting places! First we meet the little girl with an uncanny sense of her own destiny who grew up to be the brave queen of Jhansi. Another little girl named Rahi amuses us with her story as she learns to deal with people who refuse to help her with her troubles i.e. needing to pee.
We then embark upon a vivid journey to learn about the origins and evolution of art in India, and another to explore the different states in India with our dear friends Mishki, Pushka and Daadu Dolma.
Travel back in time with us to meet interesting people like the Mughal princess Jahanara Begum and Raja Ram Mohan Roy and join Aditya and Anjali in a poignant and moving story of bereavement and healing.
Puffin brings the following exciting books for our young readers. Which one will you grab first?
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5 Unbelievable Facts about the Tax Havens of the Rich and the Mighty
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is a senior journalist. Till recently, he was the editor of the Economic and Political Weekly. Shinzani Jain is an independent researcher and law graduate from Indian Society Law College, Pune. This book, Thin Dividing Line: India, Mauritius and Global Illicit Financial Flows, looks at the India-Mauritius Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement in the global context of growing illicit financial flows.
Let’s look at 5 astounding facts about the tax havens.
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In recent times, the governments of many developed and developing countries have been seeking to discourage the use of tax havens. One of the most talked-about such moves is the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD is a grouping of some of the richest countries in the world.
They also stated that there was ‘no economic justification’ for tax havens’ existence, as they diminished the power of governments to collect taxes.
The Tax Free Tour, a documentary by Marije Meerman, that covers useful ground, begins by detailing the round-tripping of funds carried out by multinational companies such as Apple. The figures are startling: James S. Henry is interviewed in the film about the details of Apple’s evasion of taxes, and he claims that it sells 20 million iPads a year for about $500 each (which comes to about $10 billion) while paying Chinese labourers $800 million to make these products.
It is also common knowledge that Mauritius hosts several distinguished lawyers and accountants from India itself who help set up shell companies and hide the trail of beneficial ownership through processes known as ‘layering’ and round-tripping, wherein illicit funds are transmitted through multiple tax havens and ultimately the black money thus gets ‘laundered’ white.
On 2 October 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States had arrested Ulbricht, who went by the moniker Dread Pirate Roberts. He was the elusive creator and proprietor of a huge illegal online market Silk Road. Ulbricht was a small part of a much larger network of a shadow economy. On the other hand, take the case of Jack Ma, said to be one of the richest men in the world and his brainchild, the Alibaba corporate empire. In May 2016, the net worth of the Alibaba group was $23.3 billion. His corporate conglomerate was able to become gigantic thanks to the ‘ease of doing business’ out of the Cayman Islands, a 264-sq. km British overseas territory comprising three islands located in the western Caribbean Sea south of Cuba.
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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6 Things you didn’t know about Andaleeb Wajid
Andaleeb Wajid is a Bangalore based writer and has published fifteen novels, of which three are e-books. She is the author of My Brother’s Wedding, The Crunch Factor, More than Just Biryani, The Tamanna Trilogy, Asmara’s Summer and When She Went Away.
Her most recent book, Twenty-nine going on Thirty is about four friends who are brought together by family drama, boy trouble, and of course, their fast approaching thirtieth birthdays.
Listed below are five things you didn’t know about Andaleeb Wajid.
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Six Things You Didn't Know About Judy Moody
Judy Moody, from the international bestselling series created by Megan McDonald, is a third grader with plenty of attitude and a mood for every occasion. You know she is funny, intelligent and caring, but here are six things we bet you don’t know about Judy Moody.
Get to know them here.
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