India Memoir

The modern world is increasingly becoming an urban world. Although lush with ever-increasing avenues of creative expression, the urban world is getting increasingly homogenized. It is very hard, for example, to guess which country a supermarket is from. This brings monotony and people want freedom in the old lap of nature, as the trends in newly industrialized countries show. After all, a luxury house or a yatch can cost millions of dollars, but we can venture a guess that it is absolutely incomparable to the air, water and skies the nature has to offer. Here we take a look in this regard ...

Decades after his death, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar continues to uniquely influence India's political scenario. An optimistic advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity in his treatise on the 1857 War of Independence, what was it that transformed him into a proponent of "Hindutva"? A former president of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar was a severe critic of the Congress's appeasement politics.

La primera autobiografía completa y en primera persona de Carlos Alberto "El Indio" Solari (Paraná, 1949), fundador junto con Skay Beilinson de Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota. Mediante el recorrido de su vida y una obra (sus influencias y sus temas) que lo convirtió en icono de la escena contracultural del rock argentino, nos acercamos al contenido de sus letras y sus melodías, sus ídolos, la relación con su público y con la prensa (su renuencia a aparecer en medios masivos), con sus compañeros de bandas y también con los músicos de su generación.

Never Cheat a Holy Man is my memoir about the three enlightening adventure-filled years in the mid-60s when my family and I lived in East Pakistan. As "memsahib", my job was to supervise a Muslim all-male household workforce. When the cook warmed the toast in his armpits and chilled the chicken in the refrigerator - still alive, I realized I was not communicating adequately. I acquired new skills mediating between cook and laundryman who were at constant odds.

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was an established Urdu short story writer and a rising screenwriter in Bombay at the time of India's partition in 1947, and he is perhaps best known for the short stories he wrote following his migration to Lahore in newly formed Pakistan. Ayesha Jalal draws on Manto's stories, sketches, and essays, as well as a trove of his private letters, to present an intimate history of partition and its devastating toll.

A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments - his success in seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor.

In Sisters of Mokama, Jyoti Thottam draws upon 20 years’ worth of research to tell this inspiring story of six intrepid Kentucky nuns, their journey to build a hospital in the poorest state in India, and the Indian nurses whose lives would never be the same.

In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes. Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages. Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years.

Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960’s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union, a revolutionary act, results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.

Dara Shukoh - the emperor Shah Jahan's favourite son, and heir-apparent to the Mughal throne prior to being defeated by Aurangzib - has sometimes been portrayed as an effete prince, incompetent in military and administrative matters. But his tolerance towards other faiths, and the myths and anecdotes surrounding him, continue to fuel the popular imagination. Even today, over 350 years after his death, the debate rages on: if this 'good' Mughal had ascended the throne instead of his pugnacious younger brother, how would that have changed the course of Indian history?

Gandhi's nonviolent struggles against racism, violence and colonialism in South Africa and India had brought him to such a level of notoriety and adulation that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself. He feared the enthusiasm for his ideas tended to exceed a deeper understanding of his quest for truth rooted in devotion to God.

An African American woman doctor, fresh from her residency training in 1975, Dr. Cornelia Davis chose a less traveled path, a decision that would have profound global ramifications In a historic endeavor by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox, a disease that had tormented humanity for millennia, Davis was thrust into the heart of India. There, she confronted deeply ingrained sexism and caste discrimination while relentlessly hunting for the last vestiges of this brutal illness.

Rumours of Spring is the unforgettable account of Farah Bashir's adolescence spent in Srinagar in the 1990s. As Indian troops and militants battle across the cityscape and violence becomes the new normal, a young schoolgirl finds that ordinary tasks - studying for exams, walking to the bus stop, combing her hair, falling asleep - are riddled with anxiety and fear.

While almost always overlooked, the 1.5 million Indian soldiers who served the British Empire in World War I played a crucial role in the eventual Allied victory. Despite their sacrifices, Indian troops received mixed reactions from allies and enemies alike - some were treated as liberating heroes, some as mercenaries and conquerors themselves, and all as racial inferiors and a threat to white supremacy. Yet even as they fought as imperial troops under the British flag, their broadened horizons fired in them new hopes of racial equality and freedom on the path to Indian independence.

In this concluding volume of the Savarkar series, exploring a vast range of original archival documents from across India and outside it, in English and several Indian languages, historian Vikram Sampath brings to light the life and works of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the most contentious political thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century.

The year was 1991. Vivek was eight. He realized he was gay. Only he didn't: he just figured that he wanted to be different. And that he was in love - for want of a better word - with Deepak, his best friend. Then Mast Kalandar released, with Anupam Kher playing Pinku, a stereotypical gay character. And Vivek realized he didn't want to be Pinku. So he tried to walk differently, gesticulate differently, and speak in as gruff a voice as he could - all to avoid being Pinku.

The photographs of three young men had stood in his grandmother's house for as long as he could remember, beheld but never fully noticed. They had all fought in the Second World War, a fact that surprised him. Indians had never figured in his idea of the war, nor the war in his idea of India. One of them, Bobby, even looked a bit like him, but Raghu Karnad had not noticed until he was the same age as they were in their photo frames. Then he learned about the Parsi boy from the sleepy south Indian coast, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the colonial forces and onto the front line.

A schoolteacher who killed multiple paramours with cyanide; a mother who trained her daughters to kill children; a thug from the 1800s who slaughtered more than 900 people, a manservant who killed girls and devoured their body parts. If you thought serial killers was a Western phenomenon, think again! These bone-chilling stories in The Deadly Dozen will take you into the hearts and heads of India's most devious murderers and schemers, exploring what made them kill and why.

Dr Kalam, who was India's 11th president and has been a scientist and a teacher, has written more than 20 books. Ranging from inspirational and spiritual thoughts, to autobiographical reflections, to his vision statements for a developed India, these works bear the imprint of a mind that is deeply reflective. For the first time, some of the most thoughtful, inspiring and educative of these writings have been compiled in one place in The Righteous Life.

It was their shared empathy for homeless dogs that sparked an unlikely friendship. In 2014, Shantanu Naidu, an automobile design engineer in his early 20s, developed an innovation to save the local strays from being run over by speeding cars. Ratan Tata, himself known for his compassion for stray dogs, took note. Impressed, he not only decided to invest in the venture, but over the years became a mentor, boss, and an unexpectedly dear friend to Shantanu.