As he rises into the sky he spreads light and warmth all over the world. The great Ganga king, Narasimha Rao, commissioned 1200 artisans to recreate this scene in stone. The Konark Sun Temple is a place where the lines between fact, fiction and folklore have blurred over time. Amar Chitra Katha interweaves the history of the 13th century monument with some of the mythology associated with it.

    This novel describes a day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, as he searches for a meaning to the tragic existence he has been born into - and comes to an unexpected conclusion.

    All signs being auspicious, the villagers triumphantly assured Sampath's proud parents that their son was destined for greatness. Twenty years of failure later, that unfortunately does not appear to be the case. A sullen government worker, Sampath is inspired only when in search of a quiet place to take his nap. "But the world is round," his grandmother says. "Wait and see Even if it appears he is going downhill, he will come up the other side. Yes, on top of the world. He is just taking a longer route." No one believes her until, one day, Sampath climbs into a guava tree and becomes unintentionally famous as a holy man, setting off a series of events that spin increasingly out of control. A delightfully sweet comic novel that ends in a raucous bang, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is as surprising and entertaining as it is beautifully wrought.

    They are likely to make one exclaim, ‘This couldn’t have happened!’ even as the narrators swear they are nothing but pure fact. The bizarre chronicle of a lazy daughter-in-law, the court clerk who loved eating chaat, two cousins inseparable even in death, a blind teacher who fell in love with a woman with beautiful eyes and other wild tales from Bareilly, Lucknow, Hapur, Badaun, Sapnawat and Pilibhit, places big and small, in that fascinating part of India called Uttar Pradesh.

    No other contemporary humorist knew the South so well, loved it so passionately, or wrote about it so vividly.

    You live in a shitty flat in Detroit with a cupboard of stale coffee, a few bottles of light beer in the fridge, and a shoe box of pot that has probably been cut with cat shit. And until this week you have been slouching your way through life and pissing on anything meaningful. But that's all about to change. You are now given a final chance to make something out of this life, if only you can survive this one week.

    Ex-players, close friends, journalists, managers and former colleagues reveal their astonishing brushes with the greatest football manager England never had. The stories are cherry-picked from two acclaimed books - 150BC: Cloughie the Inside Stories and Clough: Confidential. An additional 242 stories can be found in these two volumes. So, enter the whirlwind world of Old Big 'Ead and prepare to be entertained.

    Gaimon gathers the best of his popular Q&A column—and pokes fun at his younger self.Despite the howling protests from his peers, no one’s ever been more willing to spill the beans on what it’s really like inside the pro cycling peloton than the sarcastic scribe Phil Gaimon. Building on the outrageous success of his hilarious 2014 debut, Pro Cycling on $10 a Day: From Fat Kid to Euro Pro, Gaimon gathers the absolute gems from his monthly Q&A feature column in VeloNews magazine into his new book, Ask a Pro: Deep Thoughts and Unreliable Advice from America’s Foremost Cycling Sage, adding a dose of fresh commentary and even more acerbic and sharp-eyed insights. With six years of material to work with—including his incredible rise into the pro ranks, the devastating loss of his contract for 2015, and his bold return to the Big League—Gaimon covers every possible topic from the team dinner table to the toilet with plenty of stops along the way. Gaimon offers wise-ass (and sometimes earnest) answers to fan questions like: · How much chamois cream should I use?· I’ve started shaving my legs. How can I be accepted by my friends?· What do you do to protect yourself when you know you’re about to crash?· How many bikes does my husband really need?· What’s the best victory celebration? Do you practice yours?· In women’s cycling, what is the proper definition of a pro?· What do you say to someone if they honk or almost hit you?· Do you name your bikes?· What do pros think when they see a recreational cyclist in a full pro kit or riding a pro-level bike?· Can you take your bike apart and put it back together?· How bad does the weather have to be to call off a training ride?· How do you know when it’s time to change a tire?· When you’re in a breakaway all day, do riders form a future friendship?· Riders keep complaining about "unsafe" weather at races. When did pro cyclists turn into such wussies?· How do the pros define a "crash"?Gaimon wields his outsider’s wit to cast a cock-eyed gaze at the peculiar manners, mores, and traditions that make the medieval sport of cycling so irresistible to watch. Ask a Pro includes new resources from Gaimon, too, including his Cookie Map of America, dubious advice on winning the race buffet, a cautionary guide for host housing, Phil’s pre-race warm-up routine, and a celebrity baker’s recipe for The Phil Cookie.

    He would choose as his minister the man who could keep a ram for one month without allowing it to lose or gain any weight. Jinadatta was a man who followed instructions blindly and found himself struggling with losses. These two characters feature in the two tales taken from Jain texts written in the 10th and 14th centuries.

    In this book, Nikhil continues taking his readers along for a journey which try to solve the riddles of basic human existence - riddles of love, of childhood's lost and found, of relationships and of our day to day trials.His characters vary from a gangster who chooses love over looting, a couple trying to steal their first kiss in a right-wing nightmare, children playing one-tip one-hand cricket to an early jobber trying to rise above his mundane job to an old man contemplating the purpose of life after getting replaced by technology.Nikhil's characters are immensely relatable and his stories are his voice speaking out your own stories. This book reminds you of the smell of summer sunshine hitting garden leaves and takes you to back to a kinder gentler and simpler time.

    He has given a humorous touch to different moods/shades & nature of people & their way of living life.

    But the world knew her as an evil, ugly and immoral seductress called Soorpanakha who had dared to fall in love with Lord Rama’s brother, Lakshmana. In this fascinating story, Ravana’s Sister (Meenakshi), best selling author of The Rise of Sivagami, Anand Neelakantan, tells the poignant tale of a woman whose ears, nose and breasts are chopped off by a man as punishment for seeking love from a superior being. Overturning what popular myths and legends may have endorsed about Meenakshi aka Soorpanakha, this story is about every woman who may have lost in love, but gained much more from life in general.

    Poems, sketches, cartoons, short prose pieces and doctored photos.

    On programmes such as My Word! and My Music his distinctive voice became familiar to millions as he displayed an astonishingly well-stocked mind and a genius for ad libbing and outrageous puns. Later, working at the BBC and then at London Weekend Television, he produced some of the best television comedy of the 1960s and 70s. He has written highly successful books for children, and two bestselling anthologies of humour.Frank Muir recalls, in glorious detail, a happy 1920s childhood in the seaside town of Ramsgate, where he was born in his grandmother's pub in Broadstairs, and in London, where he attended an inexpensive but excellent school of a kind no longer to be found. He remembers his very first joke at the age of six, when he knew that his destiny was to make people laugh. He also knew from an early age that he wanted to write, but it took a childhood illness for him to discover that humour and writing could be combined. The death of his father forced him to leave school at the age of fourteen and work in a factory making carbon paper. Then, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the RAF as an air photographer and his memories of the war years, as might be imagined, are engagingly different from the usual kind. It was during those years, with their rich fund of comic material, that he began his career as scriptwriter and performer. At his demob in 1945 he moved naturally to London and the Windmill Theatre, that remarkable breeding ground of talent where new comedians like Jimmy Edwards and Alfred Marks vied with nude girls for the attention of the audience. In story after story he recalls the lost world of London in the 1940s and early 50s, when the laughter and creative ideas seemed to explode out of post-war shabbiness and austerity. Then came the BBC, the legendary partnership with Denis Norden, and half a century of fulfilling the boyhood ambition of that Kentish lad. 'All I ever wanted to do was to write and amuse people.'

    It allegedly involved sexual exploitation, forced castrations, private militias, illegal trade in arms and opium, and land grab on an untold scale-until the self-styled godman was convicted for one of his many crimes in August 2017. The book opens with an anonymous letter which led to the first-ever journalistic investigation, in 2007-Tehelka's Operation Jhootha Sauda-into the reported criminal activities at the Dera. In the years that followed, the author continued to document the lonely battles for justice against the influential godman who had the might of the Dera's machinery and manpower behind him. This book is as much about the grit and determination of ordinary citizens fighting power systems as it is about the difficulty of investigating crimes committed by the rich and powerful in India today.