In the newly independent India - food production is at an all time low, Zamindars control the farms, Nehru is dead, the coalation bengal government is headed for the wall and a tiny village in West Bengal plays host to an uprising. From the tiny village of Naxalbari the story travels back and forth in time, as it takes you to pre-independence Hyderabad, post independence Andhra Pradesh and finally to the jungles of Dandkaranya (Bastar and surrounding regions) where the sparks of Naxalbari finally grew into the fire that today impacts India and its people.

    As recently as 1918, a pandemic of influenza claimed over 50 million lives worldwide. The advent of drugs and vaccines led to an era of hope when we thought our battles with infectious disease were won, but our optimism has been eroded by the recognition that many pathogens have the capacity to transform themselves and escape our efforts to eradicate them. Are we now facing an inevitable repeat of a calamity such as the 1918 influenza pandemic or the Black Death? Can we anticipate and thwart such an event, or are we wilfully creating the conditions that would promote the emergence of new and highly virulent human infectious disease?Sunetra Gupta is Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford specialising in infectious diseases. She holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She has been awarded the Scientific Medal by the Zoological Society of London and the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award for her scientific research. She is also a novelist whose books have been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, shortlisted for the Crossword Award, and longlisted for the DSC and Orange Prizes.

    Bonnie Henry has been called one of the most effective public health figures in the world by The New York Times. She has been called a calming voice in a sea of coronavirus madness, and our hero in national newspapers. But in the waning days of 2019, when the first rumours of a strange respiratory ailment in Wuhan, China began to trickle into her office in British Colombia, these accolades lay in a barely imaginable future.Only weeks later, the whole world would look back on the previous year with the kind of nostalgia usually reserved for the distant past. With a staggering suddenness, our livelihoods, our closest relationships, our habits and our homes had all been transformed.In a moment when half-truths threatened to drown out the truth, when recklessness all too often exposed those around us to very real danger, and when it was difficult to tell paranoia from healthy respect for an invisible threat, Dr. Henry's transparency, humility, and humanity became a beacon for millions of Canadians.And her trademark enjoinder to be kind, be calm, and be safe became words for us all to live by.Coincidentally, Dr. Henry's sister, Lynn, arrived in BC for a long-planned visit on March 12, just as the virus revealed itself as a pandemic. For the four ensuing weeks, Lynn had rare insight into the whirlwind of Bonnie's daily life, with its moments of agony and gravity as well as its occasional episodes of levity and grace. Both a global story and a family story, Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe combines Lynn's observations and knowledge of Bonnie's personal and professional background with Bonnie's recollections of how and why decisions were made, to tell in a vivid way the dramatic tale of the four weeks that changed all our lives.Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe is about communication, leadership, and public trust; about the balance between politics and policy; and, at heart, about what and who we value, as individuals and a society.The authors' advance from the publisher will be donated to charities with a focus on alleviating communities hit particularly hard by the pandemic: True North Aid with its Covid-19 response in Northern Indigenous communities, and First Book Canada, with its focus on reading and literacy for underserved, marginalized youth.

    These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. They now speak of their owner's pasts as they emerge as testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history. A string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman's determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her. A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced upon leaving Mymensingh zila, now in Bangladesh. Written as a crossover between history and anthropology, Remnants of a Separation is the product of years of passionate research. It is an alternative history of the Partition - the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later.

    Reclaimed from the sea, these would become the modern city of Bombay. A marriage of affluence and abject poverty, where a grey concrete jungle is the backdrop to a heady potpourri of ethnic, linguistic and religious subcultures, Bombay, renamed Mumbai after the goddess Mumbadevi, defies definition. Bombay, Meri Jaan, comprising poems and prose pieces by some of the biggest names in literature, in addition to cartoons, photographs, a song and a Bombay Duck recipe, tries to capture the spirit of this great metropolis. Salman Rushdie, Pico Iyer, Dilip Chitre, Saadat Hasan Manto, V.S. Naipaul, Khushwant Singh and Busybee, among others, write about aspects of the city: the high-rise apartments and the slums; camaraderie and isolation in the crowded chawls; bhelpuri on the beach and cricket in the gully; the women's compartment of a local train; encounter cops who battle the underworld; the jazz culture of the sixties; the monsoon floods; the Shiv Sena; the cinema halls; the sea. Vibrant, engaging and provocative, this is an anthology as rich and varied as the city it celebrates.

    Ad veteran Ambi Parameswaran looks at how advertising has evolved, reflecting the country's culture, politics and economy in the last fifty years. From sartorial taste and food habits to marriage and old age, music and language to celebrities and censorship, Ambi examines over a hundred ads to study how the Indian consumer has changed in the past five decades and how advertising and society have shaped each other. Combining anecdote and analyses to give us a slice of modern history, Ambi evaluates the relationship between affluence, aspiration and desire in India. Exploring trends and impacts, he covers the ads that captured the imagination of the entire country. From 'Only Vimal' and 'Jai Jawan Jai Kisan' to 'Jo biwi se kare pyaar' and the controversial Tuffs shoes campaign, the book is a memorable journey through brands, consumers and the world of advertising.

    Ebola. "Killer microbes." All around us the alarms are going off, warning of the danger of new, deadly diseases. And yet, as Nancy Tomes reminds us in her absorbing book, this is really nothing new. A remarkable work of medical and cultural history, The Gospel of Germs takes us back to the first great "germ panic" in American history, which peaked in the early 1900s, to explore the origins of our modern disease consciousness.Little more than a hundred years ago, ordinary Americans had no idea that many deadly ailments were the work of microorganisms, let alone that their own behavior spread such diseases. The Gospel of Germs shows how the revolutionary findings of late nineteenth-century bacteriology made their way from the laboratory to the lavatory and kitchen, with public health reformers spreading the word and women taking up the battle on the domestic front. Drawing on a wealth of advice books, patent applications, advertisements, and oral histories, Tomes traces the new awareness of the microbe as it radiated outward from middle-class homes into the world of American business and crossed the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, and race.Just as we take some of the weapons in this germ war for granted--fixtures as familiar as the white porcelain toilet, the window screen, the refrigerator, and the vacuum cleaner--so we rarely think of the drastic measures deployed against disease in the dangerous old days before antibiotics. But, as Tomes notes, many of the hygiene rules first popularized in those days remain the foundation of infectious disease control today. Her work offers a timely look into the history of our long-standing obsession with germs, its impact on twentieth-century culture and society, and its troubling new relevance to our own lives.

    Delving into the fascinating early history of South Asia, this original book reveals how migration, both external and internal, has shaped all Indians from ancient times. Through a first-of-its-kind and incisive study of languages, such as the story of early Sanskrit, the rise of Urdu, language formation in the North-east, it presents the astounding argument that all Indians are of mixed origins. It explores the surprising rise of English after Independence and how it may be endangering India’s native languages.

    The sole India–China conflict that remains etched in our collective memory is the 1962 war, which India tragically lost. But five years later, in 1967, India and China faced off once again in the heights of Cho La and Nathu La at the Sikkim border.This time, overcoming the odds, India triumphed. The fallout of these forgotten battles was immense. China shied away from actively allying with Pakistan and the US during the 1971 India–Pakistan war. And despite several stand-offs in the half century since then, Beijing has never again launched a military offensive against India. This incredible book tells us why these battles ushered in an era of peace.Full of thrilling international intrigue and nail-biting battle scenes, this book is based on extensive research and interviews with army officers and soldiers who participated in these historic battles. It aims to rectify a blind spot in history and shine the spotlight on a story of incredible bravery that India should be proud of.

    How this extraordinary change in perception came about is the subject of this fascinating book. The story, here reconstructed for the first time, is one of painstaking scholarship primed by a succession of sensational discoveries. The excitement of unearthing a city twice as old as Rome, the realization that the Buddha was not a god but a historical figure, the glories of a literature as rich as anything known in Europe, the drama of encountering a veritable Sistine chapel deep in the jungle, and the sheer delight of categorizing ‘the most glorious galaxy of monuments in the world’ fell, for the most part, to men who were officials of the British Raj. Their response to the unfamiliar – the explicitly sexual statuary, the incomprehensible scripts, the enigmatic architecture – and the revelations which resulted, revolutionized ideas not just about India but about civilization as a white man’s prerogative.A companion volume by the author of the highly praised India: A History and The Great Arc.

    Historical novel that explodes all the myths that surround Mastani who was the second wife of Peshwa Baji Rao I in Central India in the 1700s.

    We were life-going-to-seeders.' Living in a sunny barsati in south Delhi, Saurav Jha and Devapriya Roy are your average DINK couple, about to acquire a few EMIs and come of age in the modern consumerist world. Only, they don't. They junk the swivel chairs, gain a couple of backpacks and set out on a transformational journey across India. On a very, very tight budget: five hundred rupees a day for bed and board. And the Heat and Dust project begins.Joining the ranks of firang gap-year kids and Israelis fresh out of compulsory army service, they travel across a land in which five thousand years of Indian history seem to jostle side by side. It is, by turns, holy and hectic, thuggish and comic, amoral and endearing. In buses that hurtle through the darkness of the night and the heat of the day, across thousands of miles, in ever new places, the richness of this crowded palette spills over into their lives. From rooms by the hour to strange dinner invitations, from spectacular forts to raging tantrums, this is a youthful account of wanderlust and whimsy, of eccentric choices that unfold into the journey of a lifetime ... and a supreme test of marriage.

    From Zanjeer to Deewaar and Sholay to Shakti, their creative output changed the destinies of several actors and filmmakers and even made a cultural phenomenon of the Angry Young Man. Even after they decided to part ways, success continued to court them-a testament not only to their impeccable talent and professional ethos, but also their enterprising showmanship and business acumen. Fizzing with energy and brimming over with enough trivia to delight a cinephile's heart, Written by Salim-Javed tells the story of a dynamic partnership that transformed Hindi cinema forever.

    Nobody has done more harm to me than Jawaharlal Nehru,' wrote Subhas Chandra Bose in 1939.Had relations between the two great nationalist leaders soured to the extent that Bose had begun to view Nehru as his enemy? But then, why did he name one of the regiments of the Indian National Army after Jawaharlal? And what prompted Nehru to weep when he heard of Bose's untimely death in 1945, and to recount soon after, 'I used to treat him as my younger brother'?Rudrangshu Mukherjee's fascinating book tracks the growth of these two towering figures against the backdrop of the independence movement, delicately tracing the contours of a friendship that did not quite blossom as political ideologies diverged, and delineates the shadow that fell between them-for, Gandhi saw Nehru as his chosen heir and Bose as a prodigal son.Nehru and Bose: Parallel Lives brings to light the riveting story of two contrasting personalities who would go on to define modern India.

    Soldiers, mercenaries, free-booters. Europeans all, braving the heat and dust of India. They fought for wealth, for glory, and for sheer fun. Their glorious and inglorious exploits are full of thrill, romance, and violence. Ruskin Bond has recreated the turbulent and colourful India of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the soldiers of fortune strutting across the subcontinent. The saga of their lives and loves in Delhi, Jaipur, Aligarh, Sardhana, and Lucknow reads stranger than fiction.