Master administrator. Author of the Arthashastra. But before the legend, there was the boy: Vishnu Gupta. Pataliputra, capital of the great Nanda empire, is teeming with crime and corruption. Granted unlimited authority by the hedonistic emperor Mahapadma Nanda, evil mastermind Maha-amatya Kartikeya has the city in a vice-like grip. But another name bubbles up through the chaos; there is talk of a young genius, Vishnu Gupta. When the Maha-amatya investigates the rumours, he recognises a future rival in the boy. He is determined to destroy this competition from the roots – family and all. Vishnu must gather all his wits and his formidable knowledge to protect everything he holds dear. The holy scriptures, his brilliant interpretations of the Vedas and the power of his unmatched mind: these are the only tools he has against the might of the most powerful man in the empire. Epic storyteller Ashok K. Banker imagines the life and formative years of India’s greatest genius, a man whose influence persists down the ages. In this first instalment of a thrilling trilogy, he recreates Chanakya’s early struggles and triumphs.

    The Magic. Dominarian legends speak of a mighty conflict, obscured by the mists of history. Of a conflict between the brothers Urza and Mishra for supremacy on the continent of Terisiare. Of titantic engines that scarred and twisted the very planet. Of a final battle that sank continents and shook the skies. The saga of the Brothers' War.

    ‘Our purpose is to fulfil our destiny…All life is light and shadow.’ Like any other place on earth, the territory of the Adis in the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh is ‘Pensam’—the ‘in-between’ place. Anything can happen here, and everything can be lived, and ‘the narrow boat that we call life sails along somehow in calm or stormy weather’. A mysterious boy who fell from the sky is accepted as a son of the village and grows up to become a respected elder. A young woman wounded in love is healed by a marriage of which she expected little. A mother battles fate and the law for a son she has not seen since she lost him as an infant. A remote hamlet gets a road, but the new world that comes with it threatens upheaval. And as villages become small towns and towns approximate cities, the brave and patient few guard the old ways, negotiating change with memory and remembrance. An intricate web of stories, images and the history of a tribe, The Legends of Pensam is a lyrical and moving tribute to the human spirit. With a poet’s sense for incident and language, Mamang Dai paints a memorable portrait of a land that is at once particular and universal.

    He was an employee of Hindustan Shipyard limited which is building India’s nuclear submarine fleet. This is the fourth submarine engineer in the last twelve months who perished under mysterious circumstances. Navy leadership gets suspicious about a covert sabotage operation being carried out by an unknown enemy, to slow down India's attempt at acquiring a potent nuclear deterrent platform. After deliberations at different levels, an Intelligence Bureau agent is sent to Vizag to work as an undercover operative. What secrets will she uncover? Will she become the next target of an enemy spy ring? Would the Indian Navy exact revenge from a belligerent enemy?

    The hostage-takers threaten to shoot pilgrims every day, unless the incumbent Government accedes to their demands. With the popular Hindu festival of Diwali just around the corner and elections less than six months away, the Government at the center is under immense pressure to act. What will the Government do? The army? The intelligence agencies? The common man? No terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack. Who are these men? Is there a larger plot? Faced with such unprecedented events, will the country descend into unimaginable anarchy or will it rise above the issues of collective apathy and greed that have plagued it since Independence?

    Lying and killing for the sake of peace and order, Indra felt he was unworthy of being king of heaven. A new king was installed on his throne! Now it was up to Indra’s wife Shachi to ensure that his honour survived. Would the gods ever regain their respect for her beloved?

    It revolves around a limited number of characters, confines itself in time and space, and has a well-plotted narrative that drives its central theme. Within the traditional framework, however, creativity flowers and a fresh and imaginative story emerges. This volume is chock-full with such stories, written by authors well known in their regional languages as well as those who have made a name for themselves in English literary circles. Carefully selected by India's literary giant, the late Khushwant Singh, these pieces represent the best of Indian writing from around the country.

    This is his second time in Mayong, in rural Assam, since 1998, when he had come for a few days to attend his father's best friend's funeral. As the wedding preparations gather pace, Pablo is amused as well as disturbed by squabbling aunts, dying grandmothers, cousins planning to elope for love and hysterical gossips. And on this heady theatre of tradition and modernity hovers the sinister shadow of insurgency and the army's brutal measures to quell militancy. In the days leading up to the wedding, which ends in an unspeakable tragedy, Pablo finds first love, discovers family intrigues and goes through an extraordinary rite of passage. Written with clinical precision, this gripping first novel announces the arrival of one of the most original voices from India's North-East.

    These caustic poems with their black humour, sharp sarcasm, tart repartees, semantic puns and semiotic plays irritate, shock and sting the readers until they are provoked into rethinking the ‘time-honoured’ traditions and entrenched hierarchies at work in contemporary society. The poet stands myths and legends on their head to expose their regressive core. She uses words, images and metaphors as tools of subversion, asserting, in the process, her caste, gender and regional identities while also transcending them through the shared spaces of her socioaesthetic practice. She de-romanticises the world and de-mythifies religious and literary traditions by re-appropriating the hegemonic language in a heretical gesture of Promethean love for the dispossessed. The poet interrogates the tenets of a solipsistic modernism to create a counterpoetic community speech brimming with emancipatory energy.

    The book is about how army rule works, how he try to achieve what he desired to do at raarang dhang. Interaction with various peoples from different location and grade. Whether he succeed in his goal.... Do read...

    When Khela, the oppressive king of the neighbouring Vrishabhavati, begins to overwhelm and invade Ashtagani, Avishi rises to protect her settlement but at a high cost.Separated from her love, her settlement broken, with a brutal injury needing an amputation of her leg, what can Avishi do to save herself?Will her disability let her continue to be the warrior that she was?Can she fight Khela and save everything dear to her?

    The central characters of this play portray the modern, middle-class, Indian family: a daughter who lives inAustralia with her husband and children, a son who is a media professional, a younger daughter who is willing to marry a 'suitable' boy from the US whom she has never met, a doting mother, an ageing father rapidly losing his authority, and a loyal cook. Wedding Album operates at two levels: it explores the traditional Indian wedding in a globalized, technologically-advanced India even as it juxtaposes the very different life experiences and expectations of the family and the loyal cook. By doing this, Karnad reveals how particular notions ofwealth, well-being, sexual propriety, tradition, and modernity form the basis of middle-class society in contemporary India. This play has already been staged at numerous venues and was translated by Karnad himself from Kannada into English. An outstanding addition to OUP's corpus of plays by Girish Karnad, this volume will be of value not only to students and teachers of modern Indian drama, but also to general readers.

    The average life-expectancy of an RAF pilot on the Western Front is three weeks. Inexperienced young men are hurled into vicious dogfights over the trenches, often without adequate training, and are slaughtered by the German aces.Into this hell arrives Ira Penaluna, only nineteen years old and totally in love with aviation. As those who have become his friends die one-by-one, Ira realises that in a world where skill, speed and killer-instinct are all, there is only one way to survive: to think like a hawk.A searing, moving novel of the First World War, full to the brim with detailed historical research, perfect for fans of Thomas Wood and Wilbur Smith.

    Their accounts of the struggles and hardships which they have at times overcome, and at other times been overwhelmed by, are put together in this book.There are stories about people’s generosity—and selfishness—in times of natural disasters like the tsunami; women struggling to speak out in a world that refuses to listen to them; and tales of young professionals trying to find their feet as they climb up the corporate ladder.Told simply and directly from the heart, The Old Man and His God is a collection of snapshots of the varied facets of human nature and a mirror to the souls of the people of India.

    The stories are a strong reflection of the kind of life the author himslf led.