Bhishma, the venerable patriarch of the families, lies fatally wounded on the plains of Kurukshetra. On his deathbed he offers Radheya, his nemesis, a chance to rule the Kuru kingdom by capturing Yudhishthira.In the Pandava camp, Yudhishthira, a reluctant warrior, tries desperately to hold his allies together and escape capture without appearing to be a coward. Meanwhile, his young and impulsive nephew, Abhimanyu, a warrior prince, dreams of glory and yearns for a chance to save the Pandava cause. The lives of these three warriors, Yudhisthira, Radheya and Abhimanyu, collide brutally on the thirteenth day. A story of how stories are created, how fact becomes fiction, how history becomes mythology and how men become legends, The Thirteenth Day re-imagines India's greatest epic like never before.

    But who amongst them all did Krishna love? Who ruled his heart and influenced his life?Not one, but there were eight women whom Krishna married solely on the basis of mutual love and respect. Each of these wives—the Ashtabharyas—contributed to making Krishna what he was. While their names figure in the text of the great epic Mahabharata, not much has been discussed about them. Who are these women and what was that special ‘something’ in each of them that won Krishna over? What were each of those relationships like?Radha Viswanath delves deep into the great Hindu epics, puranas and other ancient texts, weaving nuggets of information with rich imagination to give us a fascinating picture of Krishna’s life with these eight extraordinary women.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Written immediately after the partition of the Indian subcontinent, the play is a profound meditation on the politics of violence and aggressive selfhood. The moral burden of the play is that every act of violence inevitably debases society as a whole. Alok Bhalla's translation captures the essential tension between the nightmare of self-enchantment, which the story of the Kauravas represents, and the ever-present possibility of finding a way out of the cycle of revenge into a redemptive ethicality.

    Written with Sanjeev's trademark flair, the stories crackle with irreverence and wit. In 'The Troll', a presumptuous blogger faces his undoing when he sets out to expose an Internet phenomenon. In the title story, a young man loses his job in the financial crisis and tries to reset his life over two beers. In 'The Intellectuals', a foreign researcher spends some memorable hours with Kolkata's ageing intellectuals. From the vicious politics of a Mumbai housing society to the snobberies of Delhi's cocktail circuit, the stories in Life over Two Beers get under the skin of a rapidly changing India-and leave you chuckling.

    He turned forty, and his wife of fourteen years left him for another man, taking their only child with her. Now he is on a train to Dehradun, the town of his childhood, doing the one thing he feels he is still good at: running away. As he looks back on his imperfect past, crowded with personal and professional compromises, only a slim hope saves him from despair: perhaps this flight will give him a second chance to reclaim a long-lost love that could have been his, had he the courage of his convictions. And then he can start afresh. With uncommon sensitivity and a rare understanding of human emotions, Navtej Sarna has produced a poignant account of a life of missed opportunities and approximate loves.

    As she stares death in the face, her memories travel back to the beginning of her story, to life's unfairness at every point: A fiercely intelligent princess who wilfully blindfolded herself for the sake of her peevish, visually-impaired husband; who underwent a horrible pregnancy to mother one hundred sons, each as unworthy as the other; whose stern tapasya never earned her a place in people's hearts, nor commanded the respect that Draupadi and Kunti attained; who even today is perceived either as an ingratiatingly self-sacrificing wife or a bad mother who was unable to control her sons and was, therefore, partly responsible for the great war of the Mahabharata.In this insightful and sensitive portrayal, Aditi Banerjee rescues Gandhari from being reduced to a mere symbol of her blindfold. She builds her up, as Ved Vyasa did, as an unconventional heroine of great strength and iron will - who, when crossed, embarked upon a complex relationship with Lord Krishna, and became the queen who cursed a God.

    Story-Wallah gathers the finest South Asian voices in fiction for the first time in a single volume. As Shyam Selvadurai writes in his introduction, "The stories jostle up against each other . . . The effect is a marvelous cacophony that reminds me of . . . one of those South Asian bazaars, a bargaining, carnival-like milieu. The goods on sale in this instance being stories hawked by story-traders: story-wallahs." In this book, some of the world's best fiction writers hawk their wares from different parts of the South Asian diaspora -- Sri Lanka, India, the United States, Great Britain, Guyana, Malaysia, Trinidad, Fiji -- creating a virtual map of the world with their tales. These stories explore universal themes of identity, culture, and home, and Story-Wallah includes a rich array of experiences: a honeymoon in Sri Lanka, the trials of a Bangladeshi refugee in England, life on a sugar plantation in Trinidad, the attempts of an Indian family to arrange a marriage for their rebellious daughter. This anthology is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian writers and the dynamic, important tales they have to tell.

    It is a story based on the life of famous Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his wife Anna.

    She has lost her family in a landslide and flash floods. But the people in the hamlet look out for one another and she is not alone. She starts helping the vaidya (the doctor practicing native medicine) and learns the uses of medicinal herbs and roots. During the harsh winters, many residents leave the hamlet for the plains. Daksha stays back and her skills are put to use in the most unexpected way. This brings about a change in Daksha's life. The problem is, Daksha doesn't want her life to change. She is happy living in the mountains, among the deodar trees, gathering and distilling herbs. Excerpt: Sarsati told Hamid about Daksha. Even during the summer months, where she went with the other children to put the animals to graze, she never had much to say. While the children played something or the other, she was apt to drift away to some secluded part and watch the animals frolicking around. She was especially fond of studying the lambs. Very often she'd hold a lamb in her lap and hand feed it. While it nibbled at the grass, she'd trace its bones with her hand. She was always curious to know the bone structure of animals. The way the lambs moved, the play of muscle and bone fascinated her. She moved her own slim hands and arms and tried to imagine the way the bones meshed.

    Indira is an heiress for her father's estate called Belli Moda. A young man called Mohan is engaged to her and dreams about owning Belli Moda when Indira's father passes away. Indira's father returns from US discovering that his wife has given birth to a son who is going to inherit Belli Moda. This shatters Mohan's dreams of owning the estate and refuses to marry Indira. One day,Mohan gets into a car accident and is severely injured. He is taken care of by Indira. Mohan falls truly in love with her and proposes for marriage. However,this time, Indira refuses to marry him and breaks his heart because he only cared about her money.

    Farmaiyen, Sheelaji!’Among the first female journalists in India to investigate crime andthe underworld, Sheela Raval has had an eventful three-decade-longcareer in print media and television that has seen her track India’smost notorious criminals across different parts of the globe. Alwayshot on the trail of a story, Raval broke the news about Chhota Rajansurviving a brutal assassination attempt in Bangkok in 2000, attendedDawood Ibrahim’s daughter’s wedding in Dubai and is the only personto have interviewed Samira Jumani, noted gangster Abu Salem’s firstwife, after Salem’s arrest and extradition.Now, in a candid memoir of fearless reportage, Raval recounts herinteractions with the much-feared dons, and the revelations theybrought forth about the intricate workings of organized crime withinIndian borders and beyond. Raval’s bold writing gives fresh and sofarunpublished insight into the D Company’s evolution as a criminalorganization with transnational influence and connections withforeign governments; the much-talked-about split between Dawoodand Chhota Rajan; a once-promising cricketer who became one ofMumbai’s most-feared dons; the Abu Salem–Monica Bedi affair; andthe circumstances that led her to appear as a state witness in the highprofilecase against film producer Bharat Shah and Chhota Shakeel.Chilling and revelatory, Raval’s stories provide a fascinating glimpseinto the minds of organized criminals who have long haunted India’ssecurity forces. Godfathers of Crime is a chronicle of men who havelived outside the boundaries of the law for most of their lives, toldthrough the personal experiences of an intrepid journalist.

    Their lives are hard—regulated by the seasons and by the ceaseless annual labours of hoeing and digging, planting and harvesting. But it is also a life of peace, lived in a well-knit community of wise elders and caring—though sometimes overbearing—neighbours and relatives. This peace is shattered when Kevi, a young hunter, lithe and possessed of an animal magnetism, better looking than any other man in the village, comes to them at harvest time offering help and a hunk of venison. Kevi falls in love with Atuonuo and proposes marriage. Atuonuo, young in years and unsure of her heart, turns him down. But love becomes menacing when Kevi, angered by the rejection, viciously turns on Atuonuo, and reveals a side of himself that neither mother nor daughter could have imagined in their worst nightmares.With grace and in restrained, lyrical prose, Easterine Kire draws upon legend and a profound understanding of human nature to weave a compelling tale of love and the demons it sometimes conjures.

    Then, one day, her husband fails to come home. Overnight, Meera, disoriented and emotionally fragile, becomes responsible not just for her two children, but also her mother, grandmother and the running of Lilac House, their rambling old family home in Bangalore.A few streets away, Professor J.A. Krishnamurthy or Jak, cyclone studies expert, has recently returned from Florida, to care for his nineteen-year-old daughter, the victim of a tragic accident. What happened on her holiday in a small beachside village? The police will not help, Smriti's friends have vanished, and a wall of silence and fear surrounds the incident. But Jak cannot rest until he gets to the truth.Meera and of Jak's paths intertwine as they uncover the truth about the secrets of their pasts and the promise of the future. The Lilac House is a sweeping story of redemption, forgiveness and second chances.

    Over 21 days five murder cases were discovered that led to the unravelling of a spine-chilling tale of cold-blooded crime. Half-naked bodies; missing suspects; a desperate manhunt; connections with the underworld, police and Bollywood; and a seductress who lured victims - all led to a man named Vijay Palande.Palande, who targeted dreamers, mainly Bollywood aspirants in Mumbai, had an uncomplicated modus operandi - he would befriend the target, gauge his wealth, murder him, hack his body into pieces, and abandon the remains in the Western Ghats. Equipped with the sophistication of Charles Sobhraj, the nonchalance of serial-killer Raman Raghav and the cruelty of Jack the Ripper, Palande had the country hooked.In The Front Page Murders, Puja Changoiwala, who covered the story as it came to light, recounts in gripping detail one of the most sensational cases in India’s recent history and the personalities involved in it. In doing so, she delves into the functioning of daily crime reporting and police investigations, providing startling insights into the worlds of journalism and crime