He finally finds the peace and tranquility which come with self-knowledge when he meets and studies with the great sage Sri Ramana Maharishi.

    Little did his family realize that Soordas could often see more than anyone else. He could direct a shepherd to his lost goat and a father to his missing son. He could describe exactly how the idol of his beloved Lord Krishna was dressed in the temple each day. The Mughal emperor Akbar personally came to invite him to his court. The poet Tulsidas visited him. The powerful, the wise and the ordinary flocked to him for his all-seeing wisdom and his soul-stirring songs of devotion.

    It was at such a time that, in a quaint village in south India, a young boy was found in deep meditation. He would say, ‘I have family everywhere. People are waiting for me.’ Nobody believed him then. Time revealed the destiny of the millions who came to him to discover themselves. Over the years, his sublime presence and pragmatic teachings would foster the values of joy, peace and love across the world. His transformative art of breathing, the Sudarshan Kriya, became a household practice, an alternative way of life that inspired people to seek self-realization. He became the guru who made the ethereal tangible, who brought about a profound shift in every sphere of human endeavour—from art to architecture, health care to rehabilitation, inner peace to outer dynamism. From a carefree child to a teenager often found in the company of saints, from a young meditation teacher to a revered spiritual Master, this book is an intimate and affectionate account of the life of Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar by his sister Bhanumathi Narasimhan, who witnessed his mystical life unfold up-close. Gurudev: On the Plateau of the Peak is an attempt to fit the ocean in a teacup, offering readers a sip of infinity.

    You will find yourself in the middle of a torrid liaison in The Affair , revel in the euphoria of budding romance in Just One Glance and discover what it means to let go of your loved one in The Impasse .Love can also be brutal and unconventional as The Unseen Boundaries of Love and Something about Karen will show you. But most of all, as Death of a Widower and Siddharth show, you will see that love is all about hope and taking the leap of faith.Selected from a nationwide Romance Contest conducted by Rupa Publications, this heart-warming collection of stories urges you to believe that love is eternal...and forever.

    Here in these seventy-five seminal myths are the many incarnations of Vishnu, who saves mankind from destruction, and the mischievous child Krishna, alongside stories of the minor gods, demons, rivers and animals including boars, buffalo, serpents and monkeys. Immensely varied and bursting with colour and life, they demonstrate the Hindu belief in the limitless possibilities of the world - from the teeming miracles of creation to the origins of the incarnation of Death who eventually touches them all.

    Emotionally rich yet philosophically precise, sumptuously enigmatic yet crisply structured, these poems are as sensuously evocative as they are charged with an ecstatic devotion. Stripping away a century of Victorian-inflected translations and paraphrases, and restoring the jagged, colloquial power of Lalla’s voice, in Ranjit Hoskote’s new translation these poems are glorious manifestos of illumination.

    Returning thirty years later as the bureau chief for The New York Times, she found a vastly different country: one defined as much by aspiration and possibility—at least by the illusion of possibility—as it is by the structures of sex and caste. The End of Karma is an exploration of this new India through the lens of young people from different worlds: a woman who becomes a Maoist rebel; a brother charged for the murder of his sister, who had married the “wrong” man; a woman who opposes her family and hopes to become a police officer. Driven by aspiration—and thwarted at every step by state and society—they are making new demands on India’s democracy for equality of opportunity, dignity for girls, and civil liberties. Sengupta spotlights these stories of ordinary men and women, weaving together a groundbreaking portrait of a country in turmoil.

    I shall release you -SAKUNTALA When?KING When?When, like a bee, I kiss the bud of your unbruised lipAnd flood my thirsting mouth with nectar.Kalidasa's play about the love of King Dusyanta and Sakuntala, a hermitage girl, their separation by a curse, and eventual reunion, is the supreme work of Sanskrit drama by its greatest poet and playwright (c.4th century CE). Overwhelmingly erotic in tone, in peformance The Recognition of Sakuntala aimed to produce an experience of aesthetic rapture in the audience, akin to certain types of mystical experience.The pioneering English translation of Sakuntala in 1789 caused a sensation among European composers and writers (including Goethe), and it continues to be performed around the world. This vibrant new verse translation includes the famous version of the story from the Mahabharata, a poetic and dramatic text in its own right and a likely source for Kalidasa. The introduction discusses the play in the aesthetic and cultural context of ancient India.

    Work is. Leila Janah, social entrepreneur and founder ofSamasource, is shaping the future of business: give work and access to income,and empower the world's most destitute citizens with the resources to change theirlives forever.When asked if they'd rather receive aid or work, the world's poorest peoplechoose work every time. According to Leila Janah, giving dignified, steady,fair-wage work is the most effective way to eradicate poverty. Samasource, anonprofit she founded with the express purpose of outsourcing work from thetech industry to the bottom billions, has provided over $10 million in directincome to tens of thousands of people the world had written off, changing thetrajectory of their lives for the better. Janah and her team go into the world'spoorest communities--from the refugee camps of Kenya to rural Arkansas to theblighted neighborhoods of California--and train people to do digital work fromcompanies like Google, Walmart, and Microsoft.Picking up where Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid leaves off, Give Work debunkstraditional and cutting edge aid models and literature--and then, critically, offerssolutions. Based on Janah's firsthand experience, from a school for the blind inGhana to the World Bank, she has tested various Give Work business models in allcorners of the world, offering a blueprint to change it for good. AHarvard-educated former management consultant, Janah shares herentrepreneurial journey as well as the poignant stories of thousands who havebenefited from Samasource's work.We can end extreme poverty. And in Give Work, Leila Janah shows readers thatthe best way is to give people economic agency through work. Give work and yougive the poorest people on the planet a chance at happiness. Give work, and yougive people the freedom to choose how to develop their own communities. Givework, and you create infinite possibilities.

    Hated and feared by many, he schemed to win the love of the beautiful goddess Parvati . . . but learned an important lesson when he invited her elephant-headed son Ganesha over for lunch one day . . . So goes one of the many delightful tales in this decidedly grown-up book of traditional Indian stories, retold for the modern reader. Author Kamla Kapur is well known in her native India as a poet and playwright, and her connection to these age-old stories is the reverent yet individualistic one we might expect from someone whose introduction tells of her hometown, where naked, dreadlocked holy men speed about on motorbikes. To collect these stories, Kapur relied on ancient sacred texts, modern scholarship, and chance encounters with interesting people who just happened to know a really good one about this time that Vishnu sank into the ocean, was incarnated as a pig, and had a really wonderful time. Like myths around the world, these are teaching stories that offer both a window into a fascinating culture that has endured for thousands of years, and a code for living that can be applied to the modern world.

    It will soon only get murkier as she is determined to divorce one and marry another. Five years ago, a mistake committed in name of love cost Gina her family, friends and everything she held dear. She even had to move countries. But now she is back in India, determined to divorce her cad of a husband. However, she is forgetting that a true cad never fights decent nor fair. Work and women have kept the reclusive and retired Colonel Ojas Purohit busy. Fate left him scarred, crippled and robbed him of a career that was his passion and his life. For him, fate has a name—Gina Bansal, his estranged wife of five years. And now she is back, wanting a divorce. Ojas is determined to put her through hell before he even gives her a minute of his time, forget a divorce. And this time luck is on his side for his enemy needs him more than he needs her. Or so he thinks. Will Gina and Ojas survive each other? Will memories of their past complicate their present? Is desire forgotten same as desire dead? And who are these Gina’s BFFs, the Wallflowers? What roles do they play in this Hasty Hookup? All these answers and more in ‘A Hasty Hookup,’ first book in the Wallflower Series by Varsha Dixit. It is a story full of unexpected twists, wit, sizzling chemistry, cliffhanger ending, mature language and content.

    The military establishment has locked the country in an enduring rivalry with India, with the primary aim of wresting Kashmir from it. To that end, Pakistan initiated three wars over Kashmir-in 1947, 1965, and 1999-and failed to win any of them. Today, the army continues to prosecute this dangerous policy by employing non-state actors under the security of its ever-expanding nuclear umbrella. It has sustained a proxy war in Kashmir since 1989 using Islamist militants, as well as supporting non-Islamist insurgencies throughout India and a country-wide Islamist terror campaign that have brought the two countries to the brink of war on several occasions. In addition to these territorial revisionist goals, the Pakistani army has committed itself to resisting India's slow but inevitable rise on the global stage.Despite Pakistan's efforts to coerce India, it has achieved only modest successes at best. Even though India vivisected Pakistan in 1971, Pakistan continues to see itself as India's equal and demands the world do the same. The dangerous methods that the army uses to enforce this self-perception have brought international opprobrium upon Pakistan and its army. And in recent years, their erstwhile proxies have turned their guns on the Pakistani state itself.Why does the army persist in pursuing these revisionist policies that have come to imperil the very viability of the state itself, from which the army feeds? In Fighting to the End, C. Christine Fair argues that the answer lies, at least partially, in the strategic culture of the army. Through an unprecedented analysis of decades' worth of the army's own defense publications, she concludes that from the army's distorted view of history, it is victorious as long as it can resist India's purported drive for regional hegemony as well as the territorial status quo. Simply put, acquiescence means defeat. Fighting to the End convincingly shows that because the army is unlikely to abandon these preferences, Pakistan will remain a destabilizing force in world politics for the foreseeable future.

    What makes an Indian recognizably so to the rest of the world, and, more importantly, to his or her fellow Indians? For, as the authors point out, despite ethnic differences that are characteristic more of past empires than modern nation states, there is an underlying unity in the great diversity of India that needs to be recognized.Looking at what constitutes a common Indian identity, the authors examine in detail the predominance of family, community and caste in our everyday lives, our attitudes to sex and marriage, our prejudices, our ideas of the other (explored in a brilliant chapter on Hindu-Muslim conflict), and our understanding of health, right and wrong, and death. In the final chapter, they provide fascinating insights into the Indian mind, shaped largely by the culture’s dominant, Hindu world view.Drawing upon three decades of original research and sources as varied as the Mahabharata, the Kamasutra, the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Bollywood movies and popular folklore, Sudhir and Katharina Kakar have produced a rich and revealing portrait of the Indian people.

    Within the space of two months in 1947 more than twelve million people were displaced. A million died. More than seventy-five thousand women were abducted and raped. Countless children disappeared. Homes, villages, communities, families, and relationships were destroyed. Yet, more than half a century later, little is known of the human dimensions of this event. In The Other Side of Silence , Urvashi Butalia fills this gap by placing people—their individual experiences, their private pain—at the center of this epochal event.Through interviews conducted over a ten-year period and an examination of diaries, letters, memoirs, and parliamentary documents, Butalia asks how people on the margins of history—children, women, ordinary people, the lower castes, the untouchables—have been affected by this upheaval. To understand how and why certain events become shrouded in silence, she traces facets of her own poignant and partition-scarred family history before investigating the stories of other people and their experiences of the effects of this violent disruption. Those whom she interviews reveal that, at least in private, the voices of partition have not been stilled and the bitterness remains. Throughout, Butalia reflects on difficult questions: what did community, caste, and gender have to do with the violence that accompanied partition? What was partition meant to achieve and what did it actually achieve? How, through unspeakable horrors, did the survivors go on? Believing that only by remembering and telling their stories can those affected begin the process of healing and forgetting, Butalia presents a sensitive and moving account of her quest to hear the painful truth behind the silence.

    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.