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The Fall and Rise of the Tamil Nation by V. Navaratnam
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Xin Loi, Viet Nam: Thirty-one Months of War: A Soldier's Memoir
Al Sever - 2005
He volunteered for the job well aware that hanging out of slow-moving choppers over hot LZs blazing with enemy fire was not conducive to a long life. But that wasn’t going to stop Specialist Sever.From Da Nang to Cu Chi and the Mekong Delta, Sever spent thirty-one months in Vietnam, fighting in eleven of the war’s sixteen campaigns. Every morning when his gunship lifted off, often to the clacking and muzzle flashes of AK-47s hidden in the dawn fog, Sever knew he might not return. This raw, gritty, gut-wrenching firsthand account of American boys fighting and dying in Vietnam captures all the hell, horror, and heroism of that tragic war.From the Paperback edition.
Stories I Must Tell: The Emotional Life of an Actor
Kabir Bedi - 2021
That first magical encounter with the Beatles as a student in Delhi. The sudden move to Bombay, away from home, friends and college. His exciting years in advertising, his extraordinarily successful career abroad and his many painful setbacks. His relationships with the irrepressible Protima Bedi and the dazzling Parveen Babi that changed the course of his life. Of the scars they left, and the trauma of three divorces, and how he finally found fulfilment. And why his beliefs have changed.These are tumultuous stories set in Hollywood, Bollywood and Europe. The joys of blazing new trails abroad, and the dangers of them. He also tells the fascinating love story of his Indian father, a philosopher in Europe, and his British-born mother, the world’s highest-ranked Buddhist nun. And most poignant of all, the battle to save his schizophrenic son.Stories I Must Tell is the unusually candid and compelling memoir of a man who holds nothing back, in love or in storytelling. It is the story of a middle-class boy from Delhi whose career now spans the globe. Equally, it is the tale of how he survived the roller-coaster journey of the making, unmaking and remaking of him as a person.
Delhi Anti-Hindu Riots 2020, The Macabre Dance of Violence Since December 2019: An OpIndia Report
Nupur J. Sharma - 2020
However, as is perhaps not very politically correct to point out, Islam as a religion calls Muslims to be a part of Ummah, which is to say, that all Muslims belong to the same theological ‘country’ regardless of political borders.That coupled with the intrinsic need of the Left to forever consider the Muslims as the victims, even under imaginary circumstances led to massive riots and violence in India. The perceived wrong here was that CAA left Muslims out, however, the truth was the CAA had nothing to do with Indians at all, let alone Indian Muslims.Another excuse for the rampant violence was that the proposed NRC would snatch away the citizenship of Muslims. That too, was a shameless canard. The NRC, when implemented and drafted, would be aimed to identify and deport Illegal Immigrants, and not Indian Citizens. No country in the world wantonly accepts indiscriminate influx of illegals, but the Left and Islamist nexus burnt the country because that is exactly what it expected of India.While many people wish to look at the Delhi Riots 2020 in isolation, the events that started right from the 1st December 2019 proves otherwise. It proves that the violence was a concerted effort to push Anarchy and Chaos in India. It proves that the Delhi Riots was no anti-Muslim pogrom, it was indeed, a well-oiled plan to tame ‘kafirs’.
Serpentine
Thomas Thompson - 1979
Sweeping back and forth over half the globe -- from the boulevards of Paris to the slopes of Mount Everest to the underbellies of Bangkok and Hong Kong -- Sobhraj left in his wake a trail of baffling mystery and inexplicable horror. He also led the police of a dozen nations on a chase that ended at least twelve and possibly twenty-four corpses later with a mere seven-year prison sentence in Delhi. Besides offering a riveting narrative of serial murder and a years-long manhunt, this singular volume examines the lives not only of the intelligent, charismatic, conscienceless, and thoroughly dangerous Sobhraj but also of the unsuspecting victims that he drugged, robbed, sometimes tortured, and without a qualm often killed. A chilling tale of deadly coincidences set in exotic, glamorous locales, Serpentine offers a reading experience as frightening as it is unforgettable.
Understanding the Founding Fathers: An Enquiry into the Indian Republic's Beginnings
Rajmohan Gandhi - 2016
R. Ambedkar, Subhas Chandra Bose and Vallabhbhai Patel steered the new nation in a direction that ensured it wasn t destroyed by sectarianism, casteism and authoritarianism. Because their wisdom found widespread acceptance, every time it seemed that the country would succumb to religious hatred, fissiparous tendencies or caste violence, disaster was averted as its leaders and its people stayed more or less true to the values on which the republic was founded. In recent times, however, attempts have been made to discredit these great Indians and devalue their contribution to the modern Indian state. In this thought-provoking book, award-winning biographer and historian Rajmohan Gandhi sets the record straight on the founding fathers as well as their great opponent, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Along the way, he answers questions of perennial interest Who was really responsible for Partition? Were Gandhi and Ambedkar enemies? Did the Mahatma weaken the country s Hindus? Was he anti-Muslim? Should India have been a Hindu Rashtra? Could the Kashmir issue have been dealt with differently? Would Bose and Patel have led the independent nation better than Gandhi and Nehru? Erudite, forthright and brilliantly argued, Understanding the Founding Fathers will help us know ourselves and our nation, and how we came to be this way.
My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir
Jagmohan - 1993
The present Sixth edition updates the book to February 18, 2002. It deals not only with the Pokhran Nuclear Test and Kargil war and the events leading to the Vajpayee-Musharraf Summit but also with the ever-increasing dimensions of international terrorism which resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Center and attack on the Indian Parliament.
In the Valley of Mist: Kashmir: One Family in a Changing World
Justine Hardy - 2009
If there is a paradise on earth, it is definitely here, here and only here," said the early seventeenth-century Mughal Emperor Jehangir when describing the Kashmir Valley. But for nearly twenty years this delicate mountain region has been torn by a brutal conflict that has pitched idealism against Islamist militancy and military crackdown. In the tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski, this is an intimate story told by the author, journalist, and aid worker Justine Hardy. Having lived and worked in Kashmir for many years, she draws the reader beyond the headlines into the world of In the Valley of Mist. A family portrait, the book describes a unique and gentle culture that has been shattered by the impact of insurgency, repression, and Islamic extremism in a place once famous for the warmth between its Hindu and Muslim residents. "If you want people to know do not tell stories that will make them hold their breath like in a made-up film. Tell them the truth. It is strong enough," she was told when she asked permission of her Kashmiri friends to tell this story. Revealing and disturbing, In the Valley of Mist paints Kashmir as the template for the changing face of Islam.
Supreme Whispers: Conversations with Judges of the Supreme Court of India 1980-89
Abhinav Chandrachud - 2018
Based on 114 intriguing interviews with nineteen former chief justices of India and more than sixty-six former judges of the Supreme Court of India, Abhinav Chandrachud opens a window to the life and times of the former judges of India's highest court of law and in the process offers a history that largely remained in oblivion for a long time.
India: A Short History
Andrew Robinson - 2014
To Alexander the Great, the country was a place of clever naked philosophers and massive armies mounted on elephants – which eventually forced his army to retreat. To ancient Rome, it was a source of luxuries, mainly spices and textiles, paid for in gold—hence the enormous numbers of Roman gold coins excavated in India. At the height of the Mughal empire in 1700, India boasted 24 percent of the world economy—a share virtually equal to Europe’s 25 percent. But then its economy declined. Colonial India was known for its extremes of wealth and poverty, epitomized by the Taj Mahal and famines, maharajas and untouchables, and also for its spirituality: many-armed Hindu gods and Buddhist philosophy, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.India: A Short History places as much emphasis on individuals, ideas and cultures as on the rise and fall of kingdoms, political parties and economies. Anyone curious about a great civilization, and its future, will find this an ideal introduction, at times controversial, written by an author who has been strongly engaged with India for more than three decades.
The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing
Sonia Faleiro - 2021
Sixteen-year-old Padma sparked and burned. Fourteen-year-old Lalli was an incorrigible romantic.They grew up in Katra Sadatganj, an eye-blink of a village in western Uttar Pradesh crammed into less than one square mile of land. It was out in the fields, in the middle of mango season, that the rumors started.Then one night in the summer of 2014 the girls went missing; and hours later they were found hanging in the orchard. Who they were, and what had happened to them, was already less important than what their disappearance meant to the people left behind.In the ensuing months, the investigation into their deaths would implode everything that their small community held to be true, and instigate a national conversation about sex and violence. Slipping deftly behind political maneuvering, caste systems and codes of honor in a village in northern India, The Good Girls returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli's short lives and shameful deaths, and dares to ask: what is the human cost of shame?
The Story of a Brief Marriage
Anuk Arudpragasam - 2016
Amongst the evacuees is Dinesh, whose world has contracted to a makeshift camp where time is measured by the shells that fall around him like clockwork. Alienated from family, home, language, and body, he exists in a state of mute acceptance, numb to the violence around him, till he is approached one morning by an old man who makes an unexpected proposal: that Dinesh marry his daughter, Ganga. Marriage, in this world, is an attempt at safety, like the beached fishing boat under which Dinesh huddles during the bombings. As a couple, they would be less likely to be conscripted to fight for the rebels, and less likely to be abused in the case of an army victory. Thrust into this situation of strange intimacy and dependence, Dinesh and Ganga try to come to terms with everything that has happened, hesitantly attempting to awaken to themselves and to one another before the war closes over them once more.Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage is a feat of extraordinary sensitivity and imagination, a meditation on the fundamental elements of human existence—eating, sleeping, washing, touching, speaking—that give us direction and purpose, even as the world around us collapses. Set over the course of a single day and night, this unflinching debut confronts marriage and war, life and death, bestowing on its subjects the highest dignity, however briefly.
Gandhi
Demi - 2001
An adamant idealist and a courageous thinker, Gandhi identified himself with the struggles of the common people. He became the sole voice of the downtrodden and the exploited and believed fervently in the notion that "hatred can only be overcome by love." He vowed to instigate social and political change through nonviolent means and succeeded in changing India's prejudicial caste system and winning India's independence from British rule.Gandhi's teachings inspired Martin Luther King's nonviolent civil rights movement in the United States and Nelson Mandela's anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Gandhi's philosophies of nonviolence and peaceful protest continue to inspire people around the world.In beautiful language and exquisite illustrations inspired by Gandhi's own belief in the simplicity and truth of life, Demi captures the spirit that was Mahatma Gandhi and pays homage to this great man.
Run Through the Jungle: Real Adventures in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade
Larry J. Musson - 2015
Share the experiences of fighting men under punishing conditions, extreme temperatures, and intense monsoon rains as they search for the enemy in the rugged mountains and teeming lowlands. Relive all the terror, humor, and sadness of one man’s tour of duty with real-life action in spectacular stunning detail.
East of India
Erica Brown - 2018
When Nadine learns that the Indian woman she thought her nanny is, in fact, her mother, she rebels against her English father and he arranges for her to be wed to an Australian merchant many years older. She is whisked off to her new husband's plantation in Malaya but as the Second World War rages throughout the East, Nadine is taken captive by the Japanese. She is held at a camp in Sumatra with other women and forced to entertain the soldiers and satisfy their desires. In the most unlikely circumstances, Nadine finds an ally and protector in a Japanese—American major caught up in the war. The two bond over their conflicted identities and gradually fall in love. But can Nadine survive long enough to find happiness?
Don't miss this emotional and powerful saga about a woman's determination to beat the odds, perfect for fans of Renita D'Silva, Dinah Jefferies and Julia Gregson.
Challenging Destiny A Biography of Chhatrapati Shivaji
Medha Deshmukh Bhaskaran - 2016
Darkness engulfs the Indian subcontinent. The 17th century is destined to be an era of brutal wars, incessant oppression, and physical and spiritual carnage in the name of religion. Shivaji, a warrior and thinker far ahead of his times, rises and renders a rousing dream - respect and dignity for human life, economic equity, and empowerment. Destiny does not favour him; he faces terribile odds - a fallen and defeated populace, the might of the Mughal Empire, and naval supremacy of the Western powers. Thus begins a battle of conflicting ideologies, contrasting belief systems, and sharply different visions of India - a stake is the future of most ancient civilization. Witness the beginnings of the momentous events that will send thunderbolts across centuries, the echoes of which still haunt the subcontinent.