While some of them form part of the main story and are well known, there are some hidden gems scattered throughout the epic that make for insightful reading. This book contains fifty-one of these hidden gems, including the tales of: - Barbarik- Uttanka- Kartikeya- The Battle between Krishna and Arjuna- The Blinding of ShukracharyaAnd many more. Whether you're a casual reader or a die-hard fan of the Mahabharata, you will find in here tales that will delight and amaze you.

    Saki's sharp satire pierces the polite veneer of country house parties, hunting meets and evenings round the pianola. Wild beasts stampede through the drawing room, servants suffer murderous delusions and sinister children plot revenge on their elders. These witty, macabre and sometimes bizarre stories cut through the social conventions of the Edwardian upper classes.

    A prostitute, her lover and a policeman play for high stakes in BombDay. Injectionwala exposes chilling medical malpractices and a lovelorn vigilantes twisted game plan. In Coma Man, a man awakens from coma after twenty years, and sets out in search of his wife and himself. Gritty love stories, manipulative cops and hard-boiled slumlords form the backdrop of this unputdownable thriller. Its MUMBAISTAN all the way. Mumbai, a city of dreams for many. But for others, a nightmare. Behind the façade of lustre and glamour churns a seething underbelly of squalor, corruption and crime. Mumbaistan’s three explosive crime novellas unravel the subterranean secrets of maximum city—from the teeming maw of Dharavi and the wanton streets of Kamathipura to the swank high-rises of Bandra. A prostitute, her lover and a policeman play for high stakes in Bomb-Day. Injectionwala exposes chilling medical malpractices and a lovelorn vigilante’s twisted game plan. In Coma Man, a man awakens from coma after twenty years, and sets out in search of his wife— and himself. Macabre love stories, conniving cops and hard-boiled slumlords form the backdrop of a schizophrenic city that is brooding...dying. Welcome to Mumbaistan; a gritty, compelling take on the megalopolis that lives on the edge.

    Written in a colloquial style, the original Tamil version overturns the decorum and aesthetics of upper-caste, upper-class Tamil literature and culture and, in turn, projects a positive cultural identity for Dalits in general and for Dalit women in particular. Sangati flouts received notions about what a novel should be and has no plot in the normal sense. It relates the mindscape of a Dalit woman who steps out of her small town community, only to enter a caste-ridden and hierarchical society, which constantly questions her caste status. Realizing that leaving her community is no escape, she has to come to terms with her identity as an educated, economically independent woman who chooses to live alone. In relating this tale, Bama turns Sangati into the story not just of one individual, but of a pariah community.23p intro + 126p

    . . 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.

    All that there was then, was earth… There are raconteurs and mischief-mongers in our ranks and I have no doubt they shall pervert the truth with their self-serving versions. The events of history – this history of our land – shall thus inevitably have many versions, doubtless. But, I was there with General Ramm, I fought by his side…”-Sanjaay, official chronicler of General RammAround 12000 B.C., Hindustan (or Hind) as we know it today, comprised five kingdoms of man, sandwiched between Parbat – the kingdom of the Gods in the north, and Lunka – the kingdom of the demons in the south. The ‘Legend of Ramm’ unravels the story of the military general called Ramm in the kingdom of Ayodh and how his actions came to define our world as we know it today.

    Often used to get around the provisions of constitutions and legal codes.A late-night phone call from his ex-girlfriend Anasuya forces writer Arjun Kumar to leave his wife and home in Delhi and travel to the mofussil town of Noma on the UP-Bihar border. The reason — Anasuya's husband, Rafique Neel, a college professor and theatre director, has mysteriously disappeared.Soon after he arrives, Arjun realizes that things are not as they seem: the police are refusing to register a missing-persons case, Rafique's student Janaki has also disappeared, and the locals are determined to turn it into a case of 'love jihad'. And when Arjun begins to dig deeper, what he finds endangers him and everyone around him.Inspired by true events from today's India, Legal Fiction is a brilliant existential thriller and a chilling parable of our times.

    However, though Brahma has created the universe and Shiva can destroy it, it is up to the great god Vishnu to keep all creatures within it well and happy. Always compassionate, he is also the wisest of the trinity. It is he who good-naturedly sorts out the mess the others create. And above all, Vishnu always favours the good and the pure.

    In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant.

    Filmmaker and writer Anungla Zoe Longkumer brings together, for the first time, a remarkable set of stories, poems, first-person narratives, and visuals that showcase the breadth of Naga women’s creative and literary expression. The essays are written in English, a language the Nagas—who had no tradition of written literature—made their own after the arrival of Christianity in the region during the nineteenth century. In The Many That I Am, each writer speaks of the many journeys women undertake to reclaim their pasts and understand their complex present.

    The play is a political satire, written as historical drama. Based on the life of Nana Phadnavis (1741–1800), one of the prominent ministers in the court of the Peshwa of Pune. Its theme is how men in power give rise to ideologies to serve their purposes, and later destroy them when they become useless.

    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.

    Centuries ago, it was proclaimed of the Mahabharata: "What is not in it, is nowhere." But even now, we can use the same words about it. He who knows it not, knows not the heights and depths of the soul; he misses the trials and tragedy and the beauty and grandeur of life. The Mahabharata is not a mere epic; it is a romance telling the tale of heroic men and women, and of some who were divine. It is a whole literature in itself, containing a code of life, a philosophy of social and ethical relations, and speculative thought on human problems that is hard to rival.

    Combative and lyrical, moving and relentlessly inquiring, "Ammi" offers a way of seeing our history and our future that is impossible to ignore.

    enthralling’ BIBEK DEBROY‘A magical and thought-provoking adventure, Ahalya will intrigue and mesmerize readers’ CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI‘An enigmatic tale about purity, chastity, seduction and redemption’ NAMITA GOKHALE‘Brilliant and intriguing’ ANAND NEELAKANTANIt is known that Ahalya was cursed by her husband, Gautam, for indulging in a physical relationship with Indra. But is there another story to Ahalya's truth? Who was Indra anyway? A king? A lover? A philanderer? The first book of the Sati series, Ahalya hinges on these core questions, narrating the course of her life, from innocence to infidelity.In the Sati series, Koral Dasgupta explores the lives of the Pancha Kanyas from Indian mythology, all of whom had partners other than their husbands and yet are revered as the most enlightened women, whose purity of mind precedes over the purity of body. The five books of the Sati series reinvent these women and their men, in the modern context with a feminist consciousness.