India Social

In this inspiring work, Dominique Lapierre tells stories of extraordinary love and heroism - performed by ordinary people. Deep within one of the poorest sections of Calcutta, Lapierre found that this city, which produced Mother Teresa, had many other selfless inhabitants.

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.

Sita, the beloved princess of Mithila, is one of the most revered women in Indian history; so well known, yet probably the least understood. At every crossroad of her life, she chose acceptance and grace over self-pity. Her life was filled with sacrifice yet wherever she was, there was abundance. It was as if she was carved out of an intense longing for Rama, yet she had infinite patience.

For Amartya Sen, “home” has been many places, including Dhaka, in modern Bangladesh, where he grew up; Calcutta, where he studied economics; and Cambridge, where he engaged with the greatest minds of the 20th century. In Home in the World, these “homes” collectively form an unparalleled and truthful vision of 20th- and 21st-century life.

India has taken so sharp a turn in recent years that the very centet has shifted considerably. What led to this swing? Is it possible to trace the path to this point? This country has long been an outlier in its South Asian neighborhood, with its inclusive Constitution and functioning democracy. The growth of Hindutva, in some sense, brings India in line with the other polities here. In Our Hindu Rashtra, writer and activist Aakar Patel peels back layer after layer of cause and effect through independent India’s history to understand how Hindutva came to gain such a hold on the country.

Spirit of India, by A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, is a book focused towards the connection of youth and nation. This book revolves around the aspirations, issues and dreams of the Indian youth in the contemporary India. As the time has changed over 60 decades of independence, the population of the youth has grown to require more and more education, growth in career, and overall development. In this time of personal ambitions, the spirit of one, India looks endangered to the author, as has been addressed in this book.

In 1943 Winston Churchill and the British Empire needed millions of Indian troops, all of India's industrial output, and tons of Indian grain to support the Allied war effort. Such massive contributions were certain to trigger famine in India. Because Churchill believed that the fate of the British Empire hung in the balance, he proceeded, sacrificing millions of Indian lives in order to preserve what he held most dear. The result: the Bengal Famine of 1943-44, in which millions of villagers starved to death.

Through a lyrical narrative of her journey to Tibet in 2007, activist Canyon Sam contemplates modern history from the perspective of Tibetan women. Traveling on China's new "Sky Train", she celebrates Tibetan New Year with the Lhasa family whom she'd befriended decades earlier and concludes an oral-history project with women elders.

There are many intellectual biographies of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, but until now none has sought to reveal the personality of the man. They will tell you what he thought or what he wrote, but remain silent about who he actually was, his inner struggles, how he felt. They give information about Ambedkar, but do not talk about his interior life, his personal growth or how he came to be the man who left such an indelible mark on modern India's constitutional, political, social and religious landscapes. The first of an ambitious two-volume biography, Becoming Babasaheb traces Ambedkar's life journey.

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.

"I thought the nation was coming to an end", wrote Khushwant Singh, looking back on the violence of Partition that he was witness to over half a century ago. He believed then that he had seen the worst that India could do to herself. But after the violence in Gujarat in 2002, he felt that the worst, perhaps, is still to come. Analysing the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the burning of Graham Staines and his children, the targeted killings by terrorists in Punjab and Kashmir, Singh confronts the absolute corruption of religion that has made us among the most brutal people on earth.

Revolutionary, philosopher, litterateur, and seer, Sri Aurobindo remains one of the brightest minds India has ever had. This book captures the evolution of his thought through excerpts from his political articles and speeches, essays, talks with and letters to disciples and public messages - presented chronologically. It includes his views on Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose; his doubts about Gandhi’s method to attain freedom and insistence on Ahimsa; and his very distinctive contribution to the nascent Nationalist Movement.

For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country's former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi--Bhutto's birthplace and Pakistan's other great metropolis--Rafia Zakaria's family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death.

Indian mythology stretches beyond the tales of creation. This audiobook will acquaint you with the gods and goddesses who shaped the world, as well as epic tales of hardship, struggle, and strife. Mythology attempts to explain the origins of the universe and delves deep into understanding the creation of time, matter, and life itself. Were humans born out of the light that spilled from Lord Brahma? Was the universe created out of a golden egg? Can all of the human race trace its lineage back to one man?

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.

Traveling across India, interviewing Hindu zealots, armed insurgents, jailed dissidents, and politicians and thinkers from across the political spectrum, Siddhartha Deb reveals a country in which forces old and new have aligned to endanger democracy. The result is an absorbing—and disturbing—portrait. India has become a religious fundamentalist dystopia, one depicted here with a novelist's precise language and eye for detail.

Kwasi Kwarteng is the child of parents whose lives were shaped as subjects of the British Empire, first in their native Ghana, then as British immigrants. He brings a unique perspective and impeccable academic credentials to a narrative history of the British Empire, one that avoids sweeping judgmental condemnation and instead sees the Empire for what it was: a series of local fiefdoms administered in varying degrees of competence or brutality by a cast of characters as outsized and eccentric as anything conjured by Gilbert and Sullivan.

We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, one of the greatest men to walk this earth, begins the story of his life with descriptions of his childhood in Porbandar and Rajkot in Gujarat, his schooldays, his early marriage, the lessons he learnt when he tried stealing, told lies and smoked cigarettes, and his unshakable devotion to his parents. He then tells us of his journeys abroad, first to England and then to south Africa, and narrates in simple, lucid language his transformation from a shy, diffident young man with a chronic fear of public speaking to a fearless lawyer and leader.

This is the story of three terrible famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846. The second is the deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943. The third is the Ethiopian famine, which first sprung up in lethal form in the 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and then reappeared under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s.