Bhais of Bengaluru


Jyoti Shelar - 2017
    Kodigehalli Mune Gowda was crowned the city's first 'don' back in the 1960s, but it was in the '80s and the '90s that powerhouses like Muthappa Rai, Sreedhar, 'Boot House' Kumar aka Oil Kumar, Bekkina Kannu Rajendra and Srirampura Kitty emerged. In Bhais of Bengaluru, Jyoti Shelar, a print journalist with ten years of work experience as a field reporter, explores this mysterious and fascinating underbelly of India's Garden City.

Highway On My Plate


Rocky Singh - 2010
    Adapted from the hit TV series on NDTV Good Times, ‘Highway on my Plate’, it lists the top eats on almost every major Indian highway and routes as presented by the popular anchors Rocky and Mayur. Packed with information, Highway on my Plate is an indispensable guide for all road trips.About The AuthorRocky and Mayur are the highly popular anchors of ‘Highway on my Plate’ which is the hit TV show from NDTV Good Times.

The Punjab Story


K.P.S. Gill - 2005
    Called Operation Bluestar, the historic and unprecedented event ended the growing spectre of terrorism perpetrated by the extremist Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers once and for all. But it left in its wake unsolved political questions that continued to threaten Punjab???s stability for years to come. How, in a brief span of three years, did India???s dynamic frontier state become a national problem? Who was to blame: the Central Government for allowing the crisis to drift despite warnings, or the long-drawn-out Akali agitation, or the notorious gang of militants who transformed a holy shrine into a sanctuary for terrorists?First published two months after Operation Bluestar, The Punjab Story pieces together the complex Punjab jigsaw through the eyes of some of India???s most eminent public figures and journalists. Writing with the passion and conviction of those who were involved with the drama, they present a wide-ranging perspective on the past, present and future of the Punjab tangle, and the truth of many of their conclusions having been borne out by time.

Ashoka The Great


Wytze Keuning - 2011
    It is a fictional biography and more accurately can be called historical fiction. The original Dutch version was a trilogy, published separately in three volumes. The trilogy was written between 1937-1947 by a Dutch scholar Wytze Keuning in Groningen in the Netherlands. These three volumes Ashoka: The Wild Prince, Book I, Ashoka: The Wise Ruler, Book II and Ashoka: The World's Great Teacher, Book III are now brought together and presented in this single volume Ashoka The Great. The book is an exhilarating, spiritually edifying and deeply moving story of one of India's greatest emperors. It recreates the life and times of the Mauryas with an authenticity that is remarkable. The book presents a plausible vision of the past balanced by a captivating story. It is said that a great book if it is to endure cannot do without profound ideas. Keuning perfectly fuses facts and thoughts, Mauryan customs and mores, life and reflection on the meaning of life as seen through the vision of Ashoka's gurus and the history of personal influences upon Ashoka that marked his rule and legacy. This and more makes it a rare and distinguished book.About the AuthorWytze Keuning (Author) was a Schoolteacher and Headmaster of a primary school in the Netherlands since 1897, when, in 1937, he decided to dedicate his further career to writing the historical biography of Ashoka. The three-volume biography was published between 1941 and 1948. He died in 1957.Elisabeth Steur (Translator) worked as a Child Psychologist between 1962 and 1995 and was fascinated by Keuning's book and her experiences in the surroundings of one of India's great spiritual masters in the late eighties. She took upon herself the task to make these forgotten books available to the Indian reader by taking care of the translation after her retirement.

The Hitopadesa


Narayana Pandit
    Drawing on traditional sources, Narayana presents classic tales as narrated by animals, resulting in a work that is a fascinating blend of fable and satire.

Kitnay Aadmi Thay : Completely Useless Bollywood Trivia


Diptakirti Chaudhuri - 2012
    Packed with 50 lists and 500+ entries, it is a multiplex of pointless Bollywood gyaan. Separated in eight logicless sections and with out a contents page (or index), it is a book for dipping into and zipping through. Remember your favourite Bollywood film fast, actionpacked, mad, packed with colourful characters and a little bit of everything? Well, they made this book out of it. About the AuthorDiptakirti Chaudhuri has been a salesman for more than twelve years now having sold soaps, soft drinks, oils and newspapers all over India. His obsessive love for movies is a hereditary disease, which was nurtured during his engineering and MBA college days. When not watching or reading about mov ies, he writes about them on his blog, Calcutta Chro mosome (http://diptakirti.blogspot.com) or discusses them on Twitter (@diptakirti).He has published a book for children on the 2011 cricket World Cup. This is his second book.He lives in Gurgaon with his wife, a son and a daughter. None of them shares his obsessive love for the movies. Yet.

Countdown


Amitav Ghosh - 1999
    Countdown is partly a result of conversations with many hundreds of people in India, Pakistan and Nepal and Ghosh concludes, that "the pursuit of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent is the moral equivalent of civil war?"

Bunch Of Thoughts


Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar - 1966
    

Ashoka: the Search for India's Lost Emperor


Charles Allen - 2012
    In his quest to govern India by moral force alone Ashoka turned Buddhism from a minor sect into a world religion and set up a new yardstick for government which had huge implications for Asia. But his brave experiment ended in tragedy and his name was cleansed from the record so effectively that he was forgotten for almost two thousand years. But a few mysterious stone monuments and inscriptions survived, and the story of how these keystones to the past were discovered by British Orientalists and their mysterious lettering deciphered is every bit as remarkable as their author himself. Bit by bit, fragments of the Ashokan story were found and in the process India's ancient history was itself recovered. In a wide-ranging, multi-layered journey of discovery that is as much about Britain's entanglement with India as it as about India's distant past, Charles Allen tells the story of the man who was arguably the greatest ruler India has ever known.

Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi's Last Battle


Mark Tully - 1985
    The book captures rise of Bhindranwale whose extremism played wedge between Sikh and Hindu, Sikh and Sikh and Punjab and India, the indecisiveness of Indira Gandhi who paid for the catastrophic aftermath with her life. Tully and Jacob bring tragedy of Sikh from many arresting angles. They met Bhindranwale and many other central characters in the drama. They gathered eye witness account from every quarter to fill in this remarkable picture of what occurred and present their thought provoking analysis of what happened.

The Srinagar conspiracy


Vikram A. Chandra - 2000
    Based on the present political situation in Kashmir valley.

On Hinduism


Wendy Doniger - 2013
    Comprising a series of connected essays, On Hinduism examines many of the most crucial and contested issues in Hinduism, from the time of the Vedas to the present day: Are Hindus monotheists or polytheists? Is it possible to reconcile images of god with qualities (saguna) and without qualities (nirguna)? How can atheists be Hindu, and how can unrepentant Hindu sinners obtain salvation? Why have Hindus devoted so much attention to addictions, and why have they always been ambivalent about non-injury (ahimsa)? How have Hindu ideas about death, rebirth and karma changed in the course of history, and what do dogs and cows tell us about Hinduism? How and under what conditions does a pluralistic religion remarkable for its intellectual tolerance foster intolerance?The book closes with short autobiographical essays in which Doniger looks back upon her academic career complete with its Orientalist heritage, self-critiques and controversies and talks eloquently and movingly about the influence of Hinduism on her own philosophy of life.Drawing upon Donigers writing over forty years, On Hinduism is scholarship of the highest order, and a compelling analysis of one of the worlds great faiths.About the AuthorWendy Doniger is the author of several translations of Sanskrit texts and books on Hinduism, which include the acclaimed bestsellers The Hindus: An Alternative History; Siva, the Erotic Ascetic; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology and translations of the Rig Veda and the Kamasutra. She is currently the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago.

A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes


Sam Miller - 2014
    Sam Miller investigates how the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, Arabs, Africans, Europeans and Americans - everyone really, except for Indians themselves - came to imagine India. His account of the engagement between foreigners and India spans the centuries from Alexander the Great to Slumdog Millionaire. It features, among many others, Thomas the Apostle, the Chinese monk Xuanzang, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Vasco da Gama, Babur, Clive of India, several Victorian pornographers, Mark Twain, EM Forster, Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles and Steve Jobs. Interspersed between these tales is the story of Sam Miller's own 25-year-long love affair with India. The result is a spellbinding, 2500-year-long journey through Indian history, culture and society, in the company of an author who informs, educates and entertains in equal measure, as he travels in the footsteps of foreign chroniclers, exposes some of their fabulous fantasies and overturns longheld stereotypes about race, identity and migration. A tour de force that is at once scholarly and thought-provoking, delightfully eccentric and laugh-out-loud funny, this book is destined to become a much-loved classic.

The Lost Decade (2008-18): How India's Growth Story Devolved into Growth Without a Story


Puja Mehra - 2019
    The economic boom impacted a large section of Indians, even if unequally. With sustained high growth over an extended period, India could have achieved what economists call a 'take-off' (rapid and self-sustained GDP growth). The global financial meltdown disrupted this momentum in 2008. In the decade that followed, each time the country's economy came close to returning to that growth trajectory, political events knocked it off course.In 2019, India's GDP is growing at the rate of 7 per cent, making it the fastest-growing major economy in the world, but little on the ground suggests that Indians are actually better off. Economic discontent and insecurity are on the rise, farmers are restive and land-owning classes are demanding quotas in government jobs. The middle class is palpably disaffected, the informal economy is struggling and big businesses are no longer expanding aggressively.India is not the star it was in 2008 and in effect, the 'India growth story' has devolved into 'growth without a story'. The Lost Decade tells the story of the slide and examines the political context in which the Indian economy failed to recover lost momentum.

The Cases That India Forgot


Chintan Chandrachud - 2019
    Written in a lively, riveting style, this book has a cast of characters that includes the who’s who of the Indian legal system. It also paints an unexpected picture of the Indian judiciary: the Courts are not always on the right side of history or justice, and they don’t always have the last word on the matters before them. This entertaining book is an incisive look into the functioning of Indian institutions.