India Memoir

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.

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.

An iconic figure in the world of cricket in the 1970s and 1980s, Mohinder Amarnath started his career as a batsman who was found suspect against short-pitched fast bowling and finished it as one of the finest and bravest players of pace. He is still remembered with awe for hooking fearsome pace attacks on bouncy Caribbean and Australian tracks-without wearing a helmet. Grit, guts and gumption defined Amarnath's rollercoaster career. According to both Sunil Gavaskar and Imran Khan, Amarnath was the best batsman of their era.

Kept: An American Househusband in India is a hilarious, heart-warming tale of a company man turned trailing spouse when his wife gets his dream job and drags him halfway around the globe. World travelers and armchair tourists alike will marvel as Greg and Dana dine with royalty, smash an immigrant smuggling ring, flee angry mobs, foil a terrorist plot, and survive a Russian rocket assault. When they adopt an Indian girl, Greg embarks on an altogether new career, and India becomes a part of their lives forever.

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.

Thrissur, on the coast of Kerala, is known as India's 'gold town'. It was here that Puthussery Alukka Joseph Varghese moved into jewellery retail from his umbrella business in the late 1950s. One of his ­fifteen children, Joy Alukkas, seemed to have inherited his father's entrepreneurial spirit. In 1986, the quest for his personal El Dorado took Joy to the modern 'city of gold': Dubai.

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?

Alexander Frater spent the first six years of his life on a South Pacific island, where his father, the only doctor within a thousand square miles, encouraged his fascination with and respect for the volatile play of the elements. Frater brings this heritage to his observations on the monsoon, following it from its burst on the beaches of Trivandrum through Delhi and Calcutta, across Bangladesh, to its finale in the town of Cherrapunji, the "wettest place on Earth".

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 ...

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.

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.

When Bhagat Singh was executed by the British after a sham trial for his involvement in the Lahore Conspiracy Case at the age of 23, he was glorified by the Indians as a martyr for his youth, his defiance and his reckless bravery. It was only many years later, after Independence in 1947, that his writings came to light. Today, it is these that set Bhagat Singh apart and reveal him as not just a hot-headed revolutionary who believed in the cult of the bomb but a widely-read intellectual inspired by the writings of Marx and Lenin.

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.

John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the first to survey the northern approach to the summit of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers - W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender - achieved literary fame, they vied for a place on an expedition that would finally conquer Everest, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain’s efforts to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine each man’s wartime loyalties.

Sally, a beautiful young pregnant woman, came to the hospital supposedly for pre-term labor pains but delivered a fully mature, healthy boy. Her face, smiling with relief after the stress of delivery, quickly changed to apprehension. “Doctor, what will you tell my husband and family? Can you please tell them that the baby is premature?” She asked. “How can I?” Dr. Thomas replied helplessly. “The baby is fully grown and mature, as anyone can see.”

First-hand reports of the most riveting anti-terror encounters in the wake of the 2016 surgical strikes, the men who hunted terrorists in a magical Kashmir forest where day turns to night, a pair of young Navy men who gave their all to save their entire submarine crew, the Air Force commando who wouldn't sleep until he had avenged his buddies, the tax babu who found his soul in a terrifying Special Forces assault on Pakistani terrorists, and many more. Their own stories, in their own words. Or of those who were with them in their final moments.

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 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs. Exiled to England, the dispossessed Maharajah transformed his estate at Elveden in Suffolk into a Moghul palace. Sophia, god-daughter of Queen Victoria, was raised a genteel aristocratic Englishwoman: presented at court, afforded grace-and-favour lodgings at Hampton Court Palace and photographed wearing the latest fashions for the society pages. But when, in secret defiance of the British government, she travelled to India, she returned a revolutionary.

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.

While a young man, Devi Mukherjee worked with Mahatma Gandhi in the Indian resistance movement and was imprisoned for five months. After release, Devi began a spiritual quest throughout India, traveling some 45 years at various times.