India House

As a $3-trillion economy, India is on her way to becoming an economic superpower. Between 1991 and 2011, the period of our best growth, there was also a substantial decline in the number of people below the poverty line. Since 2011, however, there has been a marked retreat in the high growth performance of the previous two decades. What happened to the promise? Where have we faltered? How do we change course? As professional economists as well as former civil servants, Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah have spent most of their lives thinking about and working on these questions.

From Amartya Sen to Aamir Khan, Raghuram Rajan, Sachin Tendulkar, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Pranab Mukherjee, Arun Jaitley, Nirmala Sitharaman and Sania Mirza among others, in this book eminent journalist Sonia Singh opens a window to the myriad worlds of these stalwarts, who share their idea of India in freewheeling conversations. Chatty, candid, and amazingly gripping, these 15 interviews uncover the pivotal moments in their lives that have become defining moments in the history of the nation.

My India: Ideas for the Future is a collection of excerpts from Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam's speeches in his post presidency years. Drawn from Dr. Kalam's addresses to parliaments, universities, schools, and other institutions in India and abroad, they include his ideas on science, nation-building, poverty, compassion, and self-confidence. Dr. Kalam draws on the lives of stalwarts such as Marie Curie and Dr. Vikram Sarabhai to encourage and inspire his young listeners. Through these speeches, he shares many valuable lessons in humility, resilience, and determination.

A stone-age hand axe, an enchantingly sculpted yakshi, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and even an HMT watch―can these things have anything in common? Yes, they can! Each of these has been conceived by the human mind and shaped by the human hand. Each object has a voice, not just of rulers and conquerors, but also of the common people. Most significant of all, each carries stories of how communities and identities were built on the Indian subcontinent.

Surveying the many images of the country, De points out that for every truism about India, the opposite is also true: India as the land of the meek; India as inheritor of the earth; India gherao-ed by distinctly unfriendly neighbours; Indians fleeing to jobs in the West and then racing right back to a better life; Indians who ape their erstwhile colonizers and yet cling irrationally to tradition.

In 2022, India, second only to the US, produced more unicorns than any other country in the world. Although ours is a vibrant ecosystem that encourages young minds to take the entrepreneurial plunge, the road ahead is full of pitfalls. Unlocking Unicorn Secrets captures the entrepreneurial journeys of some of India's new-age founders and looks at the challenges they faced and how they overcame them.

From the matter of environmental jurisprudence and custodial deaths to the controversial topic of reservations, the author deals extensively with each case in the 10 essays and points out the effects that the Supreme court’s final verdicts produced. The book describes how the Indian judicial system is capable of impacting the lives of the millions that thrive under this democracy and succeeds in restoring the listener’s faith on the legal system of the nation. The internal affairs that go about in each case, which otherwise escape scrutiny, have been shed light on through the book.

This is the story of a tiger. Once a helpless ball of fur, Genghis emerges as a mighty predator, the king of the forest. But the jungle isn’t just his kingdom. Soon, Genghis finds himself fighting for his skin against equally powerful predators of a different kind–humans. The very same ones that Vikram and Aditya get embroiled with when they attempt to lay their hands on a diary that belongs to a ruthless tiger poacher. Worlds collide when one ill-fated encounter plunges the boys and their friend Aarti into a thrilling chase that takes them deep into the magnificent game park of Ranthambore.

Since time immemorial, India has been an ocean bed over which numerous stories have flowed and enriched the world. Storytellers from Tulsidas to Rohinton Mistry have added their magic to this magnificent repository. Inspired in part by Somadeva’s Kathasaritasagara, William Radice collects these timeless tales of India and tells them anew through his unique idiom. Like itinerant storytellers, he fills these tales with emotion and wit, bringing them alive for the contemporary listener.

Early humans leaving messages on cave walls; three men on a raft stumbling upon a language they weren't looking for; a secret language that evolved to hide a people; the world's only undeciphered language that is 4000 years old. The stories in this book take you from the northeastern-most tip of our country to the forests in central India, from indigenous languages that are thousands of years old to those that have developed recently.

Nearly everyone has played chess at some point in their lives. Its rules and pieces have served as a metaphor for society including military strategy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, literature, and the arts. It has been condemned as the devil’s game by popes, rabbis, and imams, and lauded as a guide to proper living by different popes, rabbis, and imams. In his wide-ranging and ever fascinating examination of chess, David Shenk gleefully unearths the hidden history of a game that seems so simple yet contains infinity.

When Meena finds snakebites on her chest, her worst fears are realized: someone is after her and she must flee India. As she plots her exit, she learns of the Trail, an energy-harvesting bridge spanning the Arabian Sea that has become a refuge for itinerant vagabonds and loners on the run. This is her salvation. Slipping out in the cover of night, with a knapsack full of supplies including a pozit GPS, a scroll reader, and a sealable waterproof pod, she sets off for Ethiopia, the place of her birth.

Dysfunctional families, sexual abuse, sheer greed, and sometimes just a skewed moral compass. These are some of the triggers that drove the women captured here to become lawbreakers. Queens of Crime demonstrates a haunting criminal power with which most people do not associate women. The acts of depravity described in this audiobook will jolt you to the core, ensuring you have sleepless nights for months. Based on painstaking research, these are raw, violent, and seemingly unbelievable but true rendition of India's women criminals.

Originariamente publicadas como folletín, en 1870, en el diario La Tribuna, las cartas que componen este libro son el particular relato de la expedición de Lucio V. Mansilla Tierra Adentro y de su encuentro con los indios ranqueles. Con una minuciosidad por momentos cercana a la obsesión, en ellas el autor toma nota de los detalles de la geografía pampeana y describe lúcidamente los hábitos, costumbres y comportamientos del mundo indígena, ese gran Otro de la literatura argentina.

So who really spearheaded India's Freedom Struggle? Millions of ordinary people—farmers, labourers, homemakers, forest produce gatherers, artisans and others—stood up to the British. People who never went on to be ministers, governors, presidents, or hold other high public office. They had this in common: their opposition to Empire was uncompromising. In The Last Heroes, these footsoldiers of Indian freedom tell us their stories.

A schoolteacher who killed multiple paramours with cyanide; a mother who trained her daughters to kill children; a thug from the 1800s who slaughtered more than 900 people, a manservant who killed girls and devoured their body parts. If you thought serial killers was a Western phenomenon, think again! These bone-chilling stories in The Deadly Dozen will take you into the hearts and heads of India's most devious murderers and schemers, exploring what made them kill and why.

On 26 January 1950, the Constitution of India was adopted formally and came into effect. Its preamble set out in brief the enlightened values it enshrined and hoped to engender. In a radical shift from mainstream constitutional history, this book establishes Dr B.R. Ambedkar's irrefutable authorship of the preamble by uncovering the intellectual origins of its six most central concepts—justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, dignity, and nation.

The Path of Light is a collection of short stories nothing if not a mirror to the phenomenal range of human behavior. Taken from the Upanishads to the Jatakas to South Asian folklore, these simple but contemplative tales reveal how people are capable of both extreme cruelty and inordinate kindness.

The Maria girls from Bastar practice sex as an institution before marriage, but with rules—one may not sleep with a partner more than three times; the Hallaki women from the Konkan coast sing throughout the day; the Kanjars have plundered, looted and killed generation after generation, and will show you how to roast a lizard when hungry. The original inhabitants of India, these Adivasis still live in forests and hills, with religious beliefs, traditions and rituals so far removed from the rest of the country that they represent an anthropological wealth of our heritage.

While the Puranas mention that Lord Brahma becomes an avatar whenever Lord Vishnu comes to Earth to establish dharma, it is in the Dasam Granth (one of the holy books of the Sikhs) that the avatars are actually listed. The common point in Hinduism and Sikhism regarding the avatars of Brahma is that they are seen as great thinkers and teachers. In this book, the authors, who run the popular website, Scientific Monk, delve into the lives of each avatar, their works and the philosophies presented by them.