A week passed. President Amin then summoned the minister and asked, 'Did you carry out my orders?' He replied saying that there was a problem. 'What problem?' the president inquired. 'Your Excellency, there is a country called Cyprus.The people are called Cypriots. If Uganda were to be called Idi, we would be called Idiots.' There are few leaders that K. Natwar Singh, in a diplomatic career spanning more than three decades, has not known -and fewer still about whom he has no story to tell. In Walking with Lions: Tales from a Diplomatic Past, Singh puts together fifty episodes that entertain, inform and illuminate.Featured here is Indira Gandhi as a statesman and friend, alongside other renowned figures such as Fidel Castro, Haile Selassie and Zia-ul-Haq. Singh analyses some personalities with disarming candour, among them Morarji Desai and Lord Mountbatten; at other times, his admiration for leaders like C. Rajagopalalchari and Nelson Mandela shines through. In these pages you will also find a rare, fascinating glimpse of Godman Chandraswami and his cohort Mamaji, and their interaction with a surprisingly submissive Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher. Besides, there are short tributes to artists, writers, cricketers and film stars, like M.F. Husain, Nadine Gordimer, Don Bradman and Dev Anand. Recounted with empathy and humour, this collection of stories from contemporary history is a warm, unaffected and reassuring reminder that the great too can be as fallible as the rest of us.

    Weaving tales of India and of the new settlers in America, Chitra Divakaruni's stories explore themes of solitude, expectations, love and betrayal, as well as other reflections on life in both the East and the West.

    The narrator, Indian born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of World War II to the late twentieth century, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.

    For most ordinary Englishmen, venturing off into the depths of unexplored America would have been a once in a lifetime adventure: but not for Stephen. By the time he turned forty, he had already survived a hurricane, been shipwrecked in the Bermuda Triangle, been written into a Shakespearean play, witnessed the famine and abandonment of Jamestown Colony, and participated in the marriage of Pocahontas. He was once even sentenced to death! He got himself and his family onto the Pilgrims' Mayflower, and helped found Plymouth Colony. He signed the Mayflower Compact, lodged the famous Squanto in his house, participated in the legendary Thanksgiving, and helped guide and govern the early colonists. Yet Stephen was just an ordinary man, with a wife, three sons, seven daughters, a small house, some farmland for his corn, and cows named Motley, Sympkins, Curled, and Red. These are the extraordinary adventures of an ordinary man.

    Gita's beloved Aunty has consulted her astronumerologist and, according to the stars, Gita is soon destined to meet her jori--or, as they say in America, Mr. Right.

    She raised her children with the income from just a few acres of land that she managed on her own, tending to the cattle and crops with maternal concern, all the while minding her unruly husband. Every obligation met, all accounts squared up, each meal cooked to satiate the tongue and heart—Amma never rested, not even when bedridden with Parkinson’s. She lived a farmer’s life and died a farmer’s death.Amma is a homage to a way of life and values—simplicity, honesty and hard work—lost to us today. Peppered with unsentimental nostalgia and delightful humour, and vividly documenting village and farming life in the Kongu region, Amma tugs at generational memory. Murugan’s non-fiction writing, his first to appear in English, is as deeply affecting as his fiction.

    He was also a distinguished author, educator, social reformer, and philosopher. Today, Tagore along with Mahatma Gandhi is prized as the foremost intellectual and spiritual advocates of India's liberation from imperial rule. This inspiring collection of Tagore's poetry represents his "simple prayers of common life." Each of the seventy-seven prayers is an eloquent affirmation of the divine in the face of both joy and sorrow. Like the Psalms of David, they transcend time and speak directly to the human heart. The spirit of this collection may be best symbolized by a single sentence by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the renowned philosopher and statesman who served as president of India: "Rabindranath Tagore was one of the few representatives of the universal person to whom the future of the world belongs."

    For millennia it has been worshipped as a god; for centuries used as a tool of imperial expansion; today it is the cement of Pakistans fractious union. Five thousand years ago, a string of sophisticated cities grew and traded on its banks. In the ruins of these elaborate metropolises, Sanskrit-speaking nomads explored the river, extolling its virtues in Indias most ancient text, the Rig-Veda. During the past two thousand years a series of invaders Alexander the Great, Afghan Sultans, the British Raj made conquering the Indus valley their quixotic mission. For the people of the river, meanwhile, the Indus valley became a nodal point on the Silk Road, a centre of Sufi pilgrimage and the birthplace of Sikhism. Empires of the Indus follows the river upstream and back in time, taking the reader on a voyage through two thousand miles of geography and more than five millennia of history redolent with contemporary importance.

    They can both confine or release a consciousness. I Am Vidya is the story of one such journey: that of a declaration, of the claiming of an identity. It is an assertion of a consciousness that has suffered the agony of being trapped in a mould it does not belong to, a body it does not identify with. Vidya has lived through all the indignities forced upon a tirunangai, a transgender, by a society which divides and defines itself as men and women in terms of biology alone. From being spurned by her family, to begging on the streets as a social outcast, from donning a woman's clothes, to undergoing excruciating surgery to lose her 'manhood', from suffering emotional and physical harassment, to arriving at her true identity. A compelling narrative about a woman trapped within a man's body, this is a story of extraordinary courage and perseverance.

    In addition to the basic theme of the Muslim nationalist movement, Khalid Sayeed has also focused on the workingand development of the British vice-regal system, and argues that the vice-regal system that Pakistan inherited from the British sustained Pakistan through the on-going political and cultural tensions that it has faced ever since its establishment.

    . . [A] mega-ambitious project' —The Hindu 'A gem of a book that is a joy to read . . . You can almost touch and feel the centuries and millennia as they pass by' —Tony Joseph'Deepens our sense of the wonder that was India' —Pankaj Mishra'Illuminating, absorbing and a joy to read. I defy anyone to peruse it and not feel richly rewarded by its insights' —John KeayA BRILLIANT, ORIGINAL BOOK THAT REVEALS INDIA'S RICH AND DIVERSE HISTORIESWhat do we really know about the Aryan migration theory and why is that debate so hot?Why did the people of Khajuraho carve erotic scenes on their temple walls?What did the monks at Nalanda eat for dinner?Did our ideals of beauty ever prefer dark skin?——————————Indian civilization is an idea, a reality, an enigma. In this riveting book, Namit Arora takes us on an unforgettable journey through 5000 years of history, reimagining in rich detail the social and cultural moorings of Indians through the ages. Drawing on credible sources, he discovers what inspired and shaped them: their political upheavals and rivalries, customs and vocations, and a variety of unusual festivals. Arora makes a stop at six iconic places—the Harappan city of Dholavira, the Ikshvaku capital at Nagarjunakonda, the Buddhist centre of learning at Nalanda, enigmatic Khajuraho, Vijayanagar at Hampi, and historic Varanasi—enlivening the narrative with vivid descriptions, local stories and evocative photographs. Punctuating this are chronicles of famous travellers who visited India—including Megasthenes, Xuanzang, Alberuni and Marco Polo—whose dramatic and idiosyncratic tales conceal surprising insights about our land.In lucid, elegant prose, Arora explores the exciting churn of ideas, beliefs and values of our ancestors through millennia—some continue to shape modern India, while others have been lost forever. An original, deeply engaging and extensively researched work, Indians illuminates a range of histories coursing through our veins.

    We were life-going-to-seeders.' Living in a sunny barsati in south Delhi, Saurav Jha and Devapriya Roy are your average DINK couple, about to acquire a few EMIs and come of age in the modern consumerist world. Only, they don't. They junk the swivel chairs, gain a couple of backpacks and set out on a transformational journey across India. On a very, very tight budget: five hundred rupees a day for bed and board. And the Heat and Dust project begins.Joining the ranks of firang gap-year kids and Israelis fresh out of compulsory army service, they travel across a land in which five thousand years of Indian history seem to jostle side by side. It is, by turns, holy and hectic, thuggish and comic, amoral and endearing. In buses that hurtle through the darkness of the night and the heat of the day, across thousands of miles, in ever new places, the richness of this crowded palette spills over into their lives. From rooms by the hour to strange dinner invitations, from spectacular forts to raging tantrums, this is a youthful account of wanderlust and whimsy, of eccentric choices that unfold into the journey of a lifetime ... and a supreme test of marriage.

    

    In The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib: Selected Poems of Ghalib, poet Robert Bly and Urdu scholar Sunil Dutta collaborate to bring the delicacy and intensity of Ghalib's poetry to readers of English. This collection of thirty ghazals by Ghalib also serves as an introduction to the ghazal, the elegant and amazing poetic form revered for centuries in the Muslim world.

    These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. They now speak of their owner's pasts as they emerge as testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history. A string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman's determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her. A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced upon leaving Mymensingh zila, now in Bangladesh. Written as a crossover between history and anthropology, Remnants of a Separation is the product of years of passionate research. It is an alternative history of the Partition - the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later.