India Memoir

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

In this concluding volume of the Savarkar series, exploring a vast range of original archival documents from across India and outside it, in English and several Indian languages, historian Vikram Sampath brings to light the life and works of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the most contentious political thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century.

Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence from British colonial rule.

Jawaharlal Nehru remains a towering figure in Indian politics, a man who left an indelible stamp on the history of South Asia. As a leading light of the nationalist struggle and as India's first and longest-serving prime minister, his ideas shaped the political contours of the country and left an imprint so deep that his legacy continues to be debated furiously today. This book illuminates four encounters that Nehru had with contemporaries from across the political spectrum that are critical to understanding his ideas and his long afterlife.

A chronicle of life on the resplendent island. Adele Barker and her son, Noah, settled into the central highlands of Sri Lanka for an 18-month sojourn, immersing themselves in the customs, cultures, and landscapes of the island: its elephants, birds, and monkeys; its hot curries and sweet mangoes; the cacophony of its markets; the resonant evening chants from its temples. When, having returned home to Tucson, Barker awakes on December 26, 2004, to see televised images of the island's southern shore disappearing into the ocean, she decides she must go back.

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.

If you think of homeopathy in India, one name springs to mind-Dr Batra's(R). From humble beginnings with a clinic in Chowpatty, Bombay in 1982, Dr Mukesh Batra put homeopathy on the world map by starting over 200 clinics in seven countries and in 150 cities of India in the next four decades.

Rahul Pandita was fourteen years old when he was forced to leave his home in Srinagar along with his family. They were Kashmiri Pandits—the Hindu minority within a Muslim-majority Kashmir that was by 1990 becoming increasingly agitated with the cries of 'Azaadi' from India. Our Moon Has Blood Clots is the story of Kashmir, in which hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits were tortured, killed and forced to leave their homes by Islamist militants and to spend the rest of their lives in exile in their own country.

Decades after his death, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar continues to uniquely influence India's political scenario. An optimistic advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity in his treatise on the 1857 War of Independence, what was it that transformed him into a proponent of "Hindutva"? A former president of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar was a severe critic of the Congress's appeasement politics.

The Army major who led the legendary September 2016 surgical strikes on terror launch pads across the LoC; a soldier who killed 11 terrorists in 10 days; a Navy officer who sailed into a treacherous port to rescue hundreds from an exploding war; a bleeding Air Force pilot who found himself flying a jet that had become a screaming fireball...their own accounts or of those who were with them in their final moments.

When Amy B. Scher was struck with undiagnosed late-stage, chronic Lyme disease, the best physicians in America labeled her condition incurable and potentially terminal. Deteriorating rapidly, she went on a search to save her own life - from the top experts in Los Angeles and the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis to a state-of-the-art hospital in Chicago. After exhausting all of her options in the US, she discovered a possible cure - but it was highly experimental, available only in India, and had as much of a probability of killing her as it did of curing her.

The “compelling [and] vivid” (The New York Times Book Review) true story of a man who claimed to be a survivor of a 1919 British massacre in India, his elaborate 20-year plan for revenge, and the mix of truth and legend that made him a hero to hundreds of millions.

From heading an ashram at Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, USA, in the 1980s to allegedly spearheading what is known as the largest bioterror attack in American history and spending 39 months in prison, Ma Anand Sheela's life is one that fascinates and intrigues. But who is the woman beyond the persona of the commune leader? What is Sheela like behind the sensational "tough titties" avatar?

The Elements of Cricket is a cricket book unlike any other published before, an extraordinary, eccentric guide and charming visual representation of the game, from the weather and wood that make it possible to the achievements of its greatest and most famous players. The book is divided into the three parts that make up the fundamental elements of cricket: bat, ball and field. Their harmony produces cricket’s unique environment; their centuries’ long conflict provides its innovation, adaptability and vast psychological hinterland.

Dr Kalam, who was India's 11th president and has been a scientist and a teacher, has written more than 20 books. Ranging from inspirational and spiritual thoughts, to autobiographical reflections, to his vision statements for a developed India, these works bear the imprint of a mind that is deeply reflective. For the first time, some of the most thoughtful, inspiring and educative of these writings have been compiled in one place in The Righteous Life.

In May 1999, the Kargil insurgency was still being viewed as a routine affair. No one quite understood the magnitude of the situation. However, it soon emerged that infiltrators had captured high-altitude posts vacated by Indian soldiers during the winter months and thus had a tactical upper hand, while the Indian Army struggled with intelligence.