He connects with the richness of the Urdu language, observes the syncretic evolution of mystical Islam in India and its deep connections with Hindustani classical music – so much a part of his own selfhood. And every so often, he returns to the refuge of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, the twelfth-century pir, whose dargah still reverberates with music and prayer every evening.His wanderings through Delhi lead Raza back in time to recollections of a long-forgotten Hindu ancestry and to comparisons with his own city of Lahore – in many ways a mirror image of Delhi. They also lead to reflections on the nature of the modern city, the inherent conflict between the native and the immigrant and, inevitably, to an inquiry into his own identity as a South Asian Muslim.Rich with history and anecdote, and conversations with Dilliwalas known and unknown,Delhi By Heart offers an unusual perspective and unexpected insights into the political and cultural capital of India.About the AuthorRaza Rumi is an international development professional based in Lahore. He has worked for national and international organizations such as the United Nations and the Asian Development Bank. He also edits and writes for the Friday Times and contributes to leading national dailies in Pakistan and abroad. He blogs at Jahane Rumi, a website devoted to Sufism and the arts and cultures of South Asia.

    The powerful district committee of Mityala routinely dismisses the suicide and refuses compensation to his widow. Gangiri, his brother, makes it his life’s mission to bring justice to the dead by influencing the committee to validate similar farmer suicides.Keyur Kashinath of the Democratic Party - first-time member of Parliament from Mityala, and son of Vaishnav Kashinath, the party’s general secretary - is the heir to his father’s power in Delhi politics. He faces his first crisis every suicide in his constituency certified by the committee as debt-related is a blot on the party’s image, and his competence.The brilliant farmer battles his inheritance of despair, the arrogant politician fights for the power he has received as legacy. Their two worlds collide in a conflict that pushes both to the limits of morality from where there is no turning back. At stake is the truth about ‘inherited’ democratic power. And at the end, there can only be one winner. Passionate and startlingly insightful, Shoes of the Dead is a chilling parable of modern-day India.A book that will make you stroll through India’s corridors of power and politics with a perfect portrayal of how its consequences creep into the lives of the farmers forcing them to commit suicide. Get ready to read a gripping tale by Kota Neelima.

    As Bonamy Dobree said, "It releases us into a different and quite complete world. Mr. Ahmed Ali makes us hear and smell Delhi...hear the flutter of pigeons’ wings, the cries of itinerant vendors, the calls to prayer, the howls of mourners, the chants of qawwals, smell jasmine and sewage, frying ghee and burning wood." The detail, as E.M. Forster said, is "new and fascinating," poetic and brutal, delightful and callous. First published by the Hogarth Press in 1940. Twilight in Delhi was widely acclaimed by critics and hailed in India as a major literary event. Long since considered a landmark novel, it is now available in the U.S. as a New Directions Classic. Twilight in Delhi has also been translated into French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Urdu.

    The lynchpin of India’s Test match side through the 2000s, he combined technical virtuosity with a legendary work ethic and near-yogic powers of concentration, and epitomised an old-school guts-before-glory approach in an age increasingly defined by flashy strokeplay and low attention spans.A collection of 30 pieces – new and previously published on ESPNcricinfo and its sister publications – this book features contributions from Dravid’s team-mates and peers, some of the finest cricket writers around, and interviews over the years with Dravid himself. It attempts to paint a picture of a cricketer who embodied the best traditions and values of the game, and a man who impressed the many people who came in contact with him.Greg Chappell remembers the India captain he worked alongside. Ed Smith, who shared a dressing room with Dravid at Kent, writes of a thorough gentleman. Sanjay Bangar relives the splendour of Headingley 2002. Jarrod Kimber tells of how Dravid became the reason for him getting married. Mukul Kesavan analyses how his technique allows for more style than one might assume. Sidharth Monga puts Dravid’s captaincy under the spotlight. Rohit Brijnath looks back at the twin peaks of Adelaide 2003. Vijeeta Dravid gives us a look at her husband the perfectionist. Those and other articles make Timeless Steel as much a celebration of a colossal cricketer as of an exceptional human being.

    . . The collection is astonishingly diverse . . . Tyrewala’s anthology [offers] a sampling of brand-new authors and [a] superb introduction. It might provide a fictional contrast to Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers."--Library Journal (Starred review)"Most of the 14 short stories in Akashic’s workmanlike Mumbai volume draw inspiration from the criminal networks and the sordid underbelly the city is infamous for . . . Armchair travelers will find plenty of amusement in touring the seedier parts of this island city in perfect safety."-- Publishers Weekly “The fifteen contributors to Mumbai Noir . . . provide a cool composite narrative of a unique human-intensive metropolitan system, whose magnitude, complexity, diversity, and pace can hardly be captured in writing or, for that matter, any other medium. [Mumbai Noir is] rich and diverse in character and characterization.”-- Rain Taxi Review of Books Featuring brand-new stories by: Annie Zaidi, R. Raj Rao, Abbas Tyrewala, Avtar Singh, Ahmed Bunglowala, Smita Harish Jain, Sonia Faleiro, Altaf Tyrewala, Namita Devidayal, Jerry Pinto, Kalpish Ratna, Riaz Mulla, Paromita Vohra, and Devashish Makhija.Bombay’s communal riots of 1992--in which Hindus were alleged to be the primary perpetrators—were followed by retaliatory bomb blasts in 1993, masterminded by the Muslim-dominated underworld. Over a thousand citizens lost their lives in these internecine bouts of violence and thousands more became refugees in their own city. In a matter of months, Bombay ceased to be the cosmopolitan, wholesome, and middle-class bastion it had been for decades. When the city was renamed Mumbai in 1995, it merely formalized the widespread perception that the Bombay everyone knew and remembered had been lost forever.Today Mumbai is like any other Asian city on the rise, with gigantic construction cranes winding atop upcoming skyscrapers and malls . . . Right-wing violence, failing electricity and water supplies, overcrowding, and the ever-looming threat of terrorist attacks—these are some of the gruesome ground realities that Mumbai’s middle and working classes must deal with every day, while the city’s super-rich . . . zip from roof to roof in their private choppers. Abandoned by its wealthy, mistreated by its politicians and administrators, Mumbai continues to thrive primarily because of the helpless resilience of its hardworking, upright citizens.The stories in Mumbai Noir depict the many ways in which the city’s ever-present shadowy aspects often force themselves onto the lives of ordinary people. . . . What emerges is the sense of a city that, despite its new name and triumphant tryst with capitalism, is yet to heal from the wounds of the early '90s, and from all the subsequent acts of havoc wreaked within its precincts by both local and outside forces.

    A collection of eleven fairy tales from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union retold by a noted English author.

    First, there is the child Mallika, brimming with romantic fantasies and bemoaning the lack of passion in the lives of her mother, Padma, and her mother's contemporaries - women whom she nevertheless loves fiercely. Mallika renders her fantasies through a highly wrought imagination, re-creating for the reader the events that came to devastate her childhood. Then, we revisit the events Mallika has described as they are retold from the points of view of Padma and Padma's sister, mother and friends. The story that slowly emerges is not the same as the one Mallika told. For the world of these women is one where secrets grow like fungus, where guilt roots and ripens, where anger burns and smolders. Every one of them carries the burden of secrets that may or may not be known by the others - some secrets obvious, others subtler and more insidious - and that have for them become a way of life. And so they tell their stories, stories by no means as prosaic as the child Mallika believes. Layer after layer of concealing silence is relentlessly peeled off, till, at last, the truth behind the greatest secret of all is laid bare - the story of Padma's love.

    Around the pilgrim's neck is a Sri Chakra amulet which looks like one that belonged to Saroja, Shastri's first wife. But Shastri thought he had killed Saroja years before, believing she was pregnant by another man. If the amulet is Saroja's, then she might have survived, and the pilgrim (Dinakar, a television star) could be Shastri's son. A similar story is revealed when Dinakar visits his old friend Narayan: either could be the father of Prasad, a young man destined for spiritual attainment. The interwoven lives of three generations play out variations on the same themes. Whose son am I? Whose father am I? Where are my roots? These mysteries of the past and present are explored, but there are no clear answers. And while significant in daily ???being', such questions lose urgency in the flux of ???becoming' (???bhava' means both being and becoming). So we are led to consider that samsara??"the world of illusion and embodiment??"may not be very different from sunya , the emptiness from which everything arises. At times a drama of cruelty and lust, at times a lyrical meditation on love and transformation, Bhava is an exceptional novel by one of India's most celebrated writers. Translated from the Kannada by Judith Kroll with the author

    In fact, it describes how screwed up things can get if you don’t think straight.”Three hostelmates – Alok, Hari and Ryan get off to a bad start in IIT – they screw up the first class quiz. And while they try to make amends, things only get worse. It takes them a while to realize: If you try and screw with the IIT system, it comes back to double screw you. Before they know it, they are at the lowest echelons of IIT society. They have a five-point-something GPA out of ten, ranking near the end of their class. This GPA is a tattoo that will remain with them, and come in the way of anything else that matters – their friendship, their future, their love life. While the world expects IITians to conquer the world, these guys are struggling to survive.Will they make it? Do under performers have a right to live? Can they show that they are not just a five-point-somebody but a five-point-someone?

    

    In Like A Charm, the cream of British and American crime writers combine for a must-have collection. From nineteenth-century Georgia, where the bracelet is forged in fire, to wartime Leeds, a steam train across Europe, the violent backstreets of 1980s Scotland, present-day London, a Manhattan taxi, the Mojave desert and back to Georgia, each writer weaves a gripping story of murder, betrayal and intrigue.

    The Butterfly That Stamped, and How the Alphabet Was Made..

    The simple and lively stories compel you to take a look back at your own life, and remember when you put these incidences at the back of your mind. Its not just a collection of stories and a true incident, but also a reflection of what every one of us has seen sometime or the other, in our lives. The characters come alive, time and again as people we may have met, or as a persona of our own self.Not too many works in recent years have managed to capture the nuances of ordinary, daily lives as effortlessly and fluently as Terms and Conditions Apply has done. A wonderful assortment of 13 short stories and a true incident, Whether it is highs and lows of a relationship, chaos and bedlam of school life, petty or harmless office gossips, or the buzz of a salon; all stories are strongly steeped in reality and yet they take a superb flight of fancy in the hands of a master craftsman. Rich in imagination, broad in its scope and elegant in its style, Terms and Conditions Apply is arguably one of the best debut works in recent Hindi literature.

    This book brings together a selection of these stories, along with fascinating historical details about the Mughal court, the emperor and his witty courtier. With well-researched introductions to each aspect of Mughal life, Amita Sarin recreates Akbar’s court in all its grandeur and vitality. The stories in this collection are both amusing and thought-provoking, both historical and timeless

    She is a perplexed botch, who never thinks before she talks. Megha realises that she fancies the creative course of action involved in making ad films, rather than her current job of creating marketing strategies for products. Her ornery boss is not electrified with the idea of brand managers turning into ad conceptualizing officers, though.Megha then meets the creative head of the company, Yudhistir Joshi. Yudi seems to bring out Megha’s atrocious side. Although he’s an exceptionally good looking man, Megha and Yudi publicly fight and argue. He hates her guts and she vice-versa. Yudi apprises her to quit from the creative team every single time, however, Megha, who’s finally in a blissful atmosphere, refuses to abandon her ecstatic ship. Little does she know that their friction will give way to sparks!Concurrently, ‘Vile’ Varun, Megha’s boss, puts her down in front of his bosses at every opportunity. He claims that she is inadequate for her profile.On the other hand, there is a crowd of eligible NRI bachelors on her list of problems, as Megha’s mother decides to put her up on the marriage market.No Deadline For Love is a first person narrative by the protagonist, Megha. The book reads almost like a journal entry, and is full of icy observations. The occasional hilarious quotes lighten up the reader’s mood, and the elementary pinch in the storyline, apart from her spontaneous description of the events, are the comical nicknames given to characters.