In both it is ultimately the women who suffer, whether, paradoxically, from a surfeit of feasting and family life in India, or from self-denial and starvation in the US. or both. Uma, the plain, older daughter still lives at home, frustrated in her attempts to escape and make a life for herself. Her Indian family is difficult , demanding but mostly, good hearted. Despite her disappointments, Uma comes through as the survivor, avoiding an unfulfilling marriage, liek her sister's or a suicidal one, like that arranged for her pretty cousin. And in America, where young Arun goes as a student, men in the suburbs char hunks of bleeding meat while the women don't appear to cook or eat at all - seems bewildering and terriying to the young Indian adolescent far from home.

    The narrator of this story, a precocious nine-year old child, is sent to visit an aunt. This aunt, ignored by a husband whose only interest seems to lie in entertaining slim-waisted young boys, suffers from a relentless bodily itch, an itch, her niece discovers, no doctor can cure and only her maidservant can relieve. Frank and often wickedly comic, Chughtai's stories were the imaginative core of her life's work, drawn from memories of the sprawling Muslim household of her childhood. With her mastery of the spoken language, economy of form, and her fine eye for the details of the intricate and hidden world of women's experience, Chughtai captured the evolving conflicts of Muslim India. Her exploration of the myriad and subtle tyrannies of middle-class gentility, and, equally, of those unexpected moments of sexual liberation and spirit, is unrivalled in contemporary Urdu literature.

    Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find—through love or through exacting maternal appraisal—a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.

    It relates the political development of that age with current geography in a very interesting way. It also brings out a new perspective on Ravana, his rise and his fall.

    Now Vicky Rai is dead, killed at his farmhouse at a party he had thrown to celebrate his acquittal. The police search each and every guest. Six of them are discovered with guns in their possession.In this elaborate murder mystery we join Arun Advani, India's best-known investigative journalist, as the lives of these six suspects unravel before our eyes: a corrupt bureaucrat; an American tourist; a stone-age tribesman; a Bollywood sex symbol; a mobile phone thief; and an ambitious politician. Each is equally likely to have pulled the trigger. Inspired by actual events, Vikas Swarup's eagerly awaited second novel is both a riveting page turner and an insightful peek into the heart and soul of contemporary India.

    From the painted faces of a child's nightmare to discovering what we really put in our bodies in the name of health. Here are 10 tales to read with the light on.TALE #1 - "Roll up, Roll up"TALE #2 - "Late Shift"TALE #3 - "You call that music?"TALE #4 - "Whose face is this anyway?"TALE #5 - "Pink Bow"TALE #6 - "Careful what you wish for"TALE #7 - "Recycling can be hazardous to your health"TALE #8 - "Mommy's little soldier"TALE #9 - "Trick or Treat"TALE #10 - "You are what you eat"

    As he sets about reducing her to his idealised version of a kept woman, bullying her out of her life as an academic and writer in the process, she attempts to push back - a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape. Smart, fierce and courageous When I Hit You is a dissection of what love meant, means and will come to mean when trust is undermined by violence; a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos; and a scathing portrait of traditional wedlock in modern India.

    The empire he inherited was weak from two messy dynastic succession, and ambitious enemy kings loomed large on all sides – a haughty king of Orissa in the east, five upstart Deccan Sultans to the North, revolting Tamil rajas in the South and enterprising Portuguese soldiers from the West. But Krishnadevaraya quickly rose to the challenge, and in the course of his remarkable twenty-year reign, he changed history forever. He won every single battle he fought and unified the whole of South India under his banner. Krishnadevaraya is remembered today as one of India’s greatest kings, not only because of his successes on the battlefield or the dazzling splendour of his empire, but because he was India’s first truly global leader. He had to confront very modern problems, such as building international alliances and negotiating overseas trade deals, while grappling with the challenges of globalism and multiculturalism. The Deccan of his time was a cosmopolitan place where Hindus and Muslims, North Indians and South Indians, Persians and Portuguese, all intermingled as they made their lives and fortunes. This cultural dynamism also inspired Krishnadevaraya to look back at India’s past and reflect on her histories and traditions. As a philosopher-king who was also a celebrated poet in his own right, he presided over an Indian Renaissance, when ancient texts and traditions were reinvigorated and infused with a fresh and modern vitality. Five hundred years after krishnadevaraya’s death, he is still remembered and loved as a compassionate and wise king, one who is immortalised in films and folk tales, poems and Ballads. This fascinating and riveting book is meticulously researched and beautifully written. Based on Portuguese and Persian chronicles, as well as many overlooked Telugu literary sources, Raya is the definitive biography of one of the world’s greatest leaders.

    This is an exclusive collection of only 8 stories based on some whimsical characters. Every main character in all these stories has one thing in common. In a true sense, they are not whimsical; actually they have set their own doctrines and have stuck to them, no matter whatever happens. In one of the stories, the hero dies just because of his doctrines. The other story is based on the mentality of being lame; it proves that many a times those who are physically disabled are more firm than those who are physically capable of doing everything but have a lame and limp mind. One story is based on the insecurity; here the heroine who had refused someone whom she loved so much comes into contact with him again. She feels that he will blackmail her but fails to understand him, at the end, though very beautiful, her insecure mind shows its ugliness. Each and every story has some splendid felling or other to share with us, to reveal the vastness and the insularity of the mind.

    It is the story of notorious gangsters like Haji Mastan, Karim Lala, Varadarajan Mudaliar, Chhota Rajan, Abu Salem, but above all, it is the story of a young man who went astray despite having a father in the police force. Dawood Ibrahim was initiated into crime as a pawn in the hands of the Mumbai police and went on to wipe out the competition and eventually became the Mumbai police’s own nemesis.The narrative encompasses several milestones in the history of crime in India, from the rise of the Pathans, formation of the Dawood gang, the first ever supari, mafia’s nefarious role in Bollywood, Dawood’s move to Karachi, and Pakistan’s subsequent alleged role in sheltering one of the most wanted persons in the world. This story is primarily about how a boy from Dongri became a don in Dubai, and captures his bravado, focus, ambition, and lust for power in a gripping narrative. The meticulously researched book provides an in-depth and comprehensive account of the mafia’s games of supremacy and internecine warfare.

    . . 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.

    1 bestseller in India—a young American travels to India and finds himself tested physically, emotionally, and spiritually.Max Pzoras is the poster child for the American Dream. The child of Greek immigrants who grew up in a dangerous New York housing project, he triumphed over his upbringing and became a successful Wall Street analyst. Yet on the frigid December night he’s involved in a violent street scuffle, Max begins to confront questions about suffering and mortality that have dogged him since his mother’s death.His search takes him to the farthest reaches of India, where he encounters a mysterious night market, almost freezes to death on a hike up the Himalayas, and finds himself in an ashram in a drought-stricken village in South India. As Max seeks answers to questions that have bedeviled him—can yogis walk on water and live for 200 years without aging? Can a flesh-and-blood man ever achieve nirvana?—he struggles to overcome his skepticism and the pull of family tugging him home. In an ultimate bid for answers, he embarks on a dangerous solitary meditation in a freezing Himalayan cave, where his physical and spiritual endurance is put to its most extreme test.By turns a gripping adventure story and a journey of tremendous inner transformation, The Yoga of Max's Discontent is a contemporary take on man's classic quest for transcendence.

    But a vengeful ancient spirit has returned to shatter the peace. With the help of magical powers, he has possessed a young man and mobilised black yogis to destroy the NINE. Plucked from their ordinary lives, empowered with special abilities, Tara, Akash and Zubin are swept into an occult world of kala yogis and siddhis to fight an ancient warrior spirit...NINE will take you on a riveting journey from Europe to India to America and a deadly climax in Cambodia.http://amzn.to/2xZhvKn

    As the action spirals up through the floors of the building, the dramas of the residents' lives unfold: Mr. Jalal's obsessive search for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja's longing for the wife he has lost; the comic elopement of Kavita Asrani, who fancies herself the heroine of a Hindi movie.Suffused with Hindu mythology, this story of one apartment building becomes a metaphor for the social and religious division of contemporary India, and Vishnu's ascent of the staircase parallels the sours progress through the various stages of existence. As Vishnu closes in on the riddle of his own mortality, he begins to wonder whether he might not be the god Vishnu, guardian not only of the fate of the building and its occupants, but of the entire universe.

    After a whirlwind of innocent encounters, their teenage romance blossoms but the two never confess their love for each other. Friends and even a few teachers approve of their relationship which is no secret to anyone thanks to Rahul's flaunting nature.Seema, on the other hand, finds it difficult to handle the unnecessary attention she gets due to Rahul's ostentatiousness. What follows is a series of misunderstandings and ego clashes causing them to drift apart.Rahul loses his popularity, his numero uno status, his sanity and ultimately his love. By the time he realizes what he has lost, it's too late. He takes desperate measures to woo her back and win back her love. But will Rahul ever get back Seema? And will Seema ever realize how much Rahul loved her and all the misunderstandings that transpired between them? Is there really any room for misunderstandings in love? In today's world, can a person's first love ever be his last?This teenage love story seeks answers to all these and more as it alternates between the past and the present events in the life of Rahul and makes you wonder; do all love stories have a happy ending? Or do all love stories end, ever?TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY promises to be a heart-warming and emotion filled tale that will captivate the reader's heart and fascinate his mind and leave him pondering—DOES LOVE TRULY CONQUER ALL ODDS?