Biography India

In this fast-paced epic, best-selling historian and master storyteller Arthur Herman spotlights two giants of the 20th century. Gandhi & Churchill shows how their 40-year rivalry revolutionized India and the British Empire, paving the way for a new era. Gandhi championed India's independence, Churchill the British Empire.

Mohandas Gandhi inspired the spiritual and political souls of millions of people. His concept of nonviolent resistance propelled numerous struggles throughout the world, including the civil rights movement in America. Written after his release from prison, first published in English in 1927, My Experiments with Truth is Gandhi's autobiography, documenting his spiritual journey amidst the political strife of his times.

This volume opens with Mohandas Gandhi's arrival in Bombay in January 1915 and takes us through his epic struggles over the next three decades. In reconstructing Gandhi's life and work, author Ramachandra Guha has drawn on 60 different archival collections. Using this wealth of material, Guha creates a portrait of Gandhi and of those closest to him that illuminates the complexity inside his thinking, his motives, his actions, and their outcomes as he engaged with every important aspect of social and public life in the India of his time.

Thrissur, on the coast of Kerala, is known as India's 'gold town'. It was here that Puthussery Alukka Joseph Varghese moved into jewellery retail from his umbrella business in the late 1950s. One of his ­fifteen children, Joy Alukkas, seemed to have inherited his father's entrepreneurial spirit. In 1986, the quest for his personal El Dorado took Joy to the modern 'city of gold': Dubai.

In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes. Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages. Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years.

It was their shared empathy for homeless dogs that sparked an unlikely friendship. In 2014, Shantanu Naidu, an automobile design engineer in his early 20s, developed an innovation to save the local strays from being run over by speeding cars. Ratan Tata, himself known for his compassion for stray dogs, took note. Impressed, he not only decided to invest in the venture, but over the years became a mentor, boss, and an unexpectedly dear friend to Shantanu.

Srinagar in the winter of 1989 was an eerie ghost town witnessing the beginnings of a war dance. The dam burst the night JKLF boys were freed in exchange for the release of Rubaiya Sayeed, daughter of then Union home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. As Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah had predicted, the government's caving in emboldened many Kashmiris into thinking that azaadi was possible. 'The price we will have to pay' were Farooq's prophetic words.

Kim Barker is not your typical, impassive foreign correspondent—she is candid, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny. At first an awkward newbie in Afghanistan, she grows into a wisecracking, seasoned reporter with grave concerns about our ability to win hearts and minds in the region. In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.

To Love and Be Loved is a firsthand account of Mother Teresa’s last years, and the first book ever to detail her dealings with worldly matters. We see her gracefully navigate the opportunities and challenges of leadership, the perils of celebrity, and the humiliations and triumphs of aging. We also catch her indulging in chocolate ice cream, making jokes about mini-skirts, and telling the president of the United States he’s wrong. Above all, we see her extraordinary devotion to God and to the very poorest of His children.

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.

Madhur (meaning sweet as honey) Jaffrey grew up in a large family compound by the Yamuna River in Delhi where her grandfather often presided over dinners with forty or more members of his extended family savoring together the wonderfully flavorful dishes that were forever imprinted on Madhur's palate.

In 1993 Greg Mortenson was the exhausted survivor of a failed attempt to ascend K2, an American climbing bum wandering emaciated and lost through Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya. After he was taken in and nursed back to health by the people of an impoverished Pakistani village, Mortenson promised to return one day and build them a school. From that rash, earnest promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time: Greg Mortenson's one-man mission to counteract extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.

In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into Indian royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, one of the greatest empires of the Indian subcontinent. Sophia transcended her heritage to devote herself to battling injustice and inequality, a far cry from the life to which she was born. Her causes were the struggle for Indian Independence, the fate of the lascars, the welfare of Indian soldiers in the First World War--and, above all, the fight for female suffrage.

Few possess greater courage, yet remain in oblivion, than the Indian Para Special Forces. To these brave officers worthy owners of the Balidan badge is entrusted the safety of the most perilous heights and the annihilation of the darkest underbellies of terrorism. The legacy of these warriors is shrouded in mystery and legend. So secretive are their missions that little is known about them beyond code names like Dagger, Ghost, Viper or Desert Scorpio. In this remarkable collection of tales of valour beyond measure, Pandey lifts the curtain on some of the greatest Special Forces officers.

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the British Empire withdrew from India, igniting the exhilaration and turmoil of a newly free society. In this vivid, atmospheric popular history, Alex von Tunzelmann chronicles these times through the most prominent figures.

This is the story of the voice of a generation, the legend—Kishore Kumar. Beginning with his time spent in Khandwa, Bhagalpur and Indore and going on to Bombay where Kishore moved to try his luck in cinema, this new biography by Parthiv Dhar and Anirudha Bhattacharjee tells it all. A product of over thirty years of research, it goes beyond Kishore's nearly three thousand songs and his varied contributions to cinema, and reveals unknown facts about his four marriages, his run-ins with the government in the 1970s, and his health issues.

Nariman Karkaria, a young Parsi from Gujarat, had always wanted to see the world. So he left home as a teenager with fifty rupees in his pocket to do just that. After working in Hong Kong and Peking for a few years, in 1914, when war was in the air, he decided to volunteer for the British Army. Passing through China, Manchuria, Siberia, Russia and Scandinavia, he reached London early in 1915 and managed to register as a private with the 24th Middlesex Regiment. He was now a Tommy.

First published in 2010 in Malayalam as Oru Police Surgeonte Ormakkurippukal, this is the best-selling memoir of Kerala's most famous forensic surgeon, Dr. B. Umadathan. Popularly known as the "Sherlock Holmes of Kerala", Dr. Umadathan revisits some of his strangest and most interesting cases, like the Chacko murder masterminded by Sukumara Kurup; the sensational Polakkulam case; and the baffling Panoor Soman case.

Alexander Frater spent the first six years of his life on a South Pacific island, where his father, the only doctor within a thousand square miles, encouraged his fascination with and respect for the volatile play of the elements. Frater brings this heritage to his observations on the monsoon, following it from its burst on the beaches of Trivandrum through Delhi and Calcutta, across Bangladesh, to its finale in the town of Cherrapunji, the "wettest place on Earth".

Few actors in Hindi cinema have had Rishi Kapoor's sort of a career arc: from the gawky adolescent pining for his schoolteacher ( Mera Naam Joker, 1970) to the naughty 90-year-old ( Kapoor & Sons, 2016), Rishi Kapoor has regaled audiences for close to 50 years. He won a National Award for his debut, became an overnight sensation with his first film as a leading man ( Bobby, 1973), and carved a niche for himself with a string of romantic musical blockbusters.