India Memoir

Deeply affected by the death of his entire platoon in the Vietnam War, Lance Corporal Brian Tibbitts embarked upon the pursuit of the real meaning and purpose of life. To his dismay, none of the major spiritual and religious texts he read could fully answer his questions, until he found Bhagavad-gita As It Is and met its author, Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. At the age of twenty-one, Brian Tibbitts became his disciple, and at the age of twenty-nine, became Indradyumna Swami when he entered the renounced order of life.

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.

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.

Munoz provides new insight into Benazir Bhutto’s unprecedented rise and an unflinching, minute-by-minute narrative of the assassination itself. With impeccable research, Munoz also situates Bhutto in the decades-long history of U.S.-Pakistan relations and the emergence of global terrorism, pinpointing her death as the moment when those relations changed forever. The result is a gripping narrative of Pakistan’s turbulent political realities and the death of its leading politician.

In 2018, India Sturgis – successful journalist, mother and wife – was admitted into the Priory hospital with anxiety so crippling she was deemed a risk to herself. On her slow journey back to herself, it became clear to her that anxiety doesn’t discriminate, anyone can suffer from it regardless of external circumstances – but anyone can learn to cope with it too.

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.

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.

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.

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was an established Urdu short story writer and a rising screenwriter in Bombay at the time of India's partition in 1947, and he is perhaps best known for the short stories he wrote following his migration to Lahore in newly formed Pakistan. Ayesha Jalal draws on Manto's stories, sketches, and essays, as well as a trove of his private letters, to present an intimate history of partition and its devastating toll.

When Bhagat Singh was executed by the British after a sham trial for his involvement in the Lahore Conspiracy Case at the age of 23, he was glorified by the Indians as a martyr for his youth, his defiance and his reckless bravery. It was only many years later, after Independence in 1947, that his writings came to light. Today, it is these that set Bhagat Singh apart and reveal him as not just a hot-headed revolutionary who believed in the cult of the bomb but a widely-read intellectual inspired by the writings of Marx and Lenin.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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?

A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments - his success in seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor.

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.

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.

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.

An army medic who went beyond the call of duty amid a frenzy of treacherous bloodletting in Ladakh’s Galwan while his fellow soldiers fought the Chinese to death; the crew of an Indian Navy destroyer that put everything on the line to rescue hundreds from Cyclone Tauktae in the Arabian Sea; an Indian Air Force pilot who ejected from his doomed fighter less than two seconds before it hit the ground, only to find he was missing a leg.