Its pages are ripe with shame, honor, and survival-based decisions, such as a father killing his own daughter to preserve the family's reputation, a grandfather thieving a goat to feed his family and burying its bones in the night, and women employing natural poisons to kill their female infants in order to avoid the devastating costs of dowry.Perhaps it is also a story of how to survive as a "Most Backward" boy in a society that values light skin more than education, designated by British colonizers as "habitually criminal," where ancient caste rivalries persist even into an era of rapidly unfolding modernity. Is it possible, one wonders, for a boy to leave his caste identity behind and adopt new ways of seeing himself, shattering hundreds of years of prejudice?"Growing Up in India's 'Most Backward' Caste" illustrates the potential for faith, effort, and vision to overcome even the cruelest of abuses and biases. Its author, Dr. Hill Krishnan, later took on multiple identities disallowed by his roots: engineer, movie actor and performer, political scientist, professor, candidate for public office in the United States, motivational speaker, and now, as an author telling his story. In "Growing Up in India's 'Most Backward' Caste," one observes the earliest, most pivotal moments in which he first defies oppression."Growing Up in India's 'Most Backward' Caste" is truly eye-opening—a brave, intimate portrayal of life as a "Most Backward" child resisting all categorization, inspiring the rest of us to challenge our own perceived limitations.

    The book describes their often comic attempts to teach English to a group of lively youngsters in a wooden hut, using blackboard and chalk, and without the benefit of electricity, water or toilet.They came to love the village people and the children, who did everything they could to make their stay in Nepal a happy one.Whether or not you've ever dreamed of trekking through the magnificent isolation of the Himalayas, or of spending time living in a small village there, you'll find this book compulsive reading.'A Beard In Nepal II' (Return to the Village) is now published and is available on Amazon."....incredibly well written....""....a joy to read....""....an adventure tale filled with colorful characters....""....laugh out loud humor....""....I would highly recommend this....""....A fascinating insight into the rewards and pitfalls of doing something really significant, worthwhile and life changing....""....beautifully written, both humorous and poignant....""....would highly recommend to armchair travellers....""....a heady mixture of travel narrative, humanity and comic escapades....""....cannot be recommended highly enough....""....Reading Fiona Roberts' book is a humbling as well as a joyful experience....""....I selfishly felt I wanted Fiona and Tod to return to Salle, just so that hopefully she will write another entertaining and gripping account for me to read...."'A BEARD IN NEPAL 2. RETURN TO THE VILLAGE' is now available.See also:'GHOST OF A SMILE' and  'VOICES'  by Fiona Roberts

    (And SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED….in spirit form. Cybernagger! Astralnagger! ) There are two routes to Ladakh - the Srinagar-Leh road and the Manali-Leh road. Which one should we do? Ah...Let’s do both! What other places should we go to? Ah...Let’s go everywhere! The most epic ride of India deserves a most epic travel story! Read the madcap adventures of the Amigos. Adi - Mr Perpetual Motion, the sunglass executioner. Delzad - the Ghost rider, the tandoori fanatic. Ketan - the cool rider. the husband of SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED! The most hilarious ride story ever written. Check out the sample right now! EXPLORE INDIA WITH THE AMIGOS Ketan, Adi and Delzad ride all over India on their Royal Enfield motorcycles and have the most amazing and hilarious adventures. Join the Amigos as they ride and get insights on Indian history, culture, customs and a bellyaching amount of laughs. Three Men on Motorcycles - The Amigos Ride to Ladakh Three Men Ride Again- The Amigos Ride to Spiti Three Men Ride South The Amigos Ride to Coorg Three Men Ride the Cliffhanger The Amigos Ride the Most Dangerous Roads in the World Check out photos and videos of the rides on www.ketanjoshi.net

    Traversing the country, he encounters a pompous Western businessman swindling his way to millions, a local vendor with a flair for painting nudes, and long ago legends of a western circus. Sensitively written and expertly researched, Greetings from Myanmar: Exploring the Price of Progress in One of the Last Countries on Earth to Open for Business is the story of a flourishing nation still very much in limbo and an answer to the hard questions that arise when tourism not only charts, but shapes a place as well.

    A few years later, he returns to Banaras to write that book.Plunging into its timeless aura, he roams its ghats and galis, sails through the cool breeze of the Ganga, walks through the heat of funeral pyres. One moment he is observing a sadhu show off his penile strength, in the next he is on a boat with a young woman who has been prophesied to marry seven times; one moment he is in conversation with the celebrated writer Kashinath Singh, who is an atheist, and in the next he is having tea with a globe- trotting priest and a god-fearing doctor ... Ghosh finds a story in every bend as he engages with quintessential Banarasis—their paan-stuffed mouths spouting expletives and wisdom with equal flair—and discovers why they are among the happiest people on earth. Then one evening at Manikarnika, as he emerges from a temple, wearing ash from the cremation ground on his forehead, he finds a bit of Banaras in himself. Aimless in Banaras is not only a sensuous portrait of India’s holiest city but also a meditation on life—and death.

    A hijacking, several nuclear explosions and a religious experience ... just some of the ingredients in the latest tour de force from the bestselling author of the Carpet Wars. In the searing summer of 2004, Christopher Kremmer returns to India, a country in the grip of enormous and sometimes violent change. As a young reporter in the 1990s, he first encountered this ancient and complex civilisation. Now, embarking on a yatra, or pilgrimage, he travels the dangerous frontier where religion and politics face off. tracking down the players in a decisive decade, he takes us inside the enigmatic Gandhi dynasty, and introduces an operatic cast of political Brahmins, 'cyber coolies', low-caste messiahs and wrestling priests. A sprawling portrait of India at the crossroads, Inhaling the Mahatma is also an intensely personal story about coming to terms with a dazzlingly different culture, as the author's fate is entwined with a cosmopolitan Hindu family of Old Delhi, and a guru who might just change his life.

    Exhaustively researched and gracefully written, The King in Exile tells a story of compelling human interest, filled with drama, pathos and tragedy... [It] heralds the arrival of a writer of non-fiction who is both uncommonly talented and exceptionally diligent... One of the great merits of [the book] is that it is completely free of jargon and theorizing. It is in essence a family story, centred on five women whose lives were waylaid by history' Amitav Ghosh in his blog 'The captivity of Burma's last king and the fall of the Konbaung dynasty: a compelling new account'. In 1879, as the king of Burma lay dying, one of his queens schemed for his forty-first son, Thibaw, to supersede his half brothers to the throne. For seven years, King Thibaw and Queen Supayalat ruled from the resplendent, intrigue-infused Golden Palace in Mandalay, where they were treated as demi-gods. After a war against Britain in 1885, their kingdom was lost, and the family exiled to the secluded town of Ratnagiri in British-occupied India. Here they lived, closely guarded, for over thirty-one years. The king's four daughters received almost no education, and their social interaction was restricted mainly to their staff. As the princesses grew, so did their hopes and frustrations. Two of them fell in love with 'highly inappropriate' men. In 1916, the heartbroken king died. Queen Supayalat and her daughters were permitted to return to Rangoon in 1919. In Burma, the old queen regained some of her feisty spirit as visitors came by daily to pay their respects. All the princesses, however, had to make numerous adjustments in a world they had no knowledge of. The impact of the deposition and exile echoed forever in each of their lives, as it did in the lives of their children. Written after years of meticulous research, and richly supplemented with photographs and illustrations, The King in Exile is an engrossing human-interest story of this forgotten but fascinating family.

    When she befriends some Tibetan nomads, her trek quickly evolves from a daredevil adventure to a journey of self-discovery and personal revelation.

    In recent decades, the world has seen an unprecedented shift of people from the countryside into cities. As Steve Inskeep so aptly puts it, we are now living in the age of the "instant city," when new megacities can emerge practically overnight, creating a host of unique pressures surrounding land use, energy, housing, and the environment. In his first book, the co-host of Morning Edition explores how this epic migration has transformed one of the world's most intriguing instant cities: Karachi, Pakistan.Karachi has exploded from a colonial port town of 350,000 in 1941 to a sprawling metropolis of at least 13 million today. As the booming commercial center of Pakistan, Karachi is perhaps the largest city whose stability is a vital security concern of the United States, and yet it is a place that Americans have frequently misunderstood.As Inskeep underscores, one of the great ironies of Karachi's history is that the decision to divide Pakistan and India along religious lines in 1947 only unleashed deeper divisions within the city-over religious sect, ethnic group, and political party. In Instant City, Inskeep investigates the 2009 bombing of a Shia religious procession that killed dozens of people and led to further acts of terrorism, including widespread arson at a popular market. As he discovers, the bombing is in many ways a microcosm of the numerous conflicts that divide Karachi, because people wondered if the perpetrators were motivated by religious fervor, political revenge, or simply a desire to make way for new real estate in the heart of the city. Despite the violence that frequently consumes Karachi, Inskeep finds remarkable signs of the city's tolerance, vitality, and thriving civil society-from a world-renowned ambulance service to a socially innovative project that helps residents of the vast squatter neighborhoods find their own solutions to sanitation, health care, and education.Drawing on interviews with a broad cross section of Karachi residents, from ER doctors to architects to shopkeepers, Inskeep has created a vibrant and nuanced portrait of the forces competing to shape the future of one of the world's fastest growing cities.

    Over the next 3 centuries, it would grow to become one of the mightiest empires in the world, the Vijayanagara Empire. An empire dazzling in it's achievements, in it's riches, in it's arts. From it's founding, to it's fall after the Battle of Tallikota to the heights it achieved under Sri Krishna Deva Raya, City of Victory aims to recreate the splendor and glory of one of the most magnificent empires ev

    Welcomed into a family of nomadic water buffalo herders, he joins them on their annual spring migration into the Himalayas. More than a glimpse into an endangered culture, this superb adventure explores the relationship between humankind and wild lands, and the dubious effect of environmental conservation on peoples whose lives are inseparably intertwined with the natural world.The migration Benanav embarked upon was plagued with problems, as government officials threatened to ban this nomadic family—and others in the Van Gujjar tribe—from the high alpine meadows where they had summered for centuries. Faced with the possibility that their beloved buffaloes would starve to death, and that their age-old way of life was doomed, the family charted a risky new course, which would culminating in an astonishing mountain rescue. And Benanav was arrested for documenting the story of their plight.Intimate and enthralling, Himalaya Bound paints a sublime picture of a rarely-seen world, revealing the hopes and fears, hardships and joys, of a people who wonder if there is still a place for them on this planet.Laced with stories of tribal cultures from India to Yellowstone, from Jordan to Kenya, Benanav deftly wends through the controversial terrain where Western ways of protecting the environment clash with indigenous understandings of nature. Himalaya Bound celebrates and mourns an ancient way of life, while revealing an unlikely battleground in the fight to save the earth.

    An Alaskan alone—and lonely—in Japan, she begins to pay attention.My Year of Dirt and Water is a record of that journey. Allowed only occasional and formal visits to see her cloistered husband, Tracy teaches English, studies Japanese, and devotes herself to making pottery. Her teacher instructs her to turn cup after cup—creating one failure after another. Past and present, East and West intertwine as Tracy is twice compelled to return home to Alaska to confront her mother’s newly diagnosed cancer and the ghosts of a devastating childhood. Revolving through the days, My Year of Dirt and Water circles hard questions: What is love? What is art? What is practice? What do we do with the burden of suffering? The answers are formed and then unformed—a ceramic bowl born on the wheel and then returned again and again to dirt and water.

    Detective Arthur Chupplejeep and Police Officer Pankaj are called to investigate. From their experience this should be a straightforward case, but in a small village like Utol, everybody has something to hide. Suspects soon start coming out of the woodwork. Bala, the pau wallah, has a history with the deceased that he has taken great care to conceal. Then there is Sandeep Shah’s lover and her jealous partner. Even the victim’s family seem to have a good enough motive to kill. To top it all, the telephone number of local moneylender, Sanjog Viraj, is found tucked under the victim’s bed. He looks like a key suspect, but everybody knows Sanjog is more like a Pomfret than a shark. Detective Chupplejeep and Pankaj have their work cut out, sifting through village life, rumour and gossip to get to the truth. But along with solving the case, Detective Chupplejeep has his own problems. His girlfriend, Christabel, is growing impatient with his failure to put a ring on her finger and with his fortieth birthday fast approaching and a recent black mark against his name from the Inspector General of Police, Chupplejeep is having doubts about his professional competence. His dream of being Goa’s answer to Poirot is far from becoming a reality. As the mystery of the body deepens, and the pressures at home begin to weigh on the Detective’s mind, will Chupplejeep be able to solve the case and return peace to the sleepy village of Utol once again?

    He investigates how stories influence perception and construct truths, the cultural roots of the notion of evil and reveals the need for mythology through a telling of various Indian and Western myths. In doing so, he shows how myths reflect the culture they emerge from while simultaneously reinforcing the source.Culture is a groundbreaking work that contextualizes mythology and proposes that myths are alive, dynamic, shaped by perception and the times one lives in.

    Despite themselves they managed to get from Miami to Grenada, eventually dropping the anchor of their cruising catamaran at the island of their dreams. Determined to save future sailors from themselves, "A Sail of Two Idiots" includes lessons Renee and Michael learned and shares them with you as examples of what and what not to do. This a how-to guide wrapped in a funny story--kind of like getting your serving of vegetables from a slice of pizza. Read this and make your dream of sailing away a reality. Includes: "What Broke?" sections explores the ongoing maintenance and upkeep of a cruising multihull "Island" section provide assessments of the islands of the Caribbean