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My Illegitimate Son
Relationships are achingly complex, even more so when it’s a father and his accidental love child. Two strangers meet serendipitously. One is an irrepressible, mischievous brat and the other a brooding platitudinous bore. Their contrasting individual paths that portend a star-crossed disaster suddenly find a shared future. Fate brings them under the same roof, and soon, the insolent child’s wild, roller-coaster, mind-numbing life takes centre stage in a moody family’s wacky, dysfunctional abode. What follows is a fantastical journey, and that is putting it mildly. Enter an unexpected visitor, and soon their lives are completely disarranged. The vicissitudes of life are on full display as the father-son duo confront a new reality. The family struggles to grapple with the new power dynamic as circumstances start spiralling beyond everyone’s control, with grievous consequences. In this exceptional slice-of-life book, Sanjay Jha tells us a heart-rending account of love and loss, happiness and grief, regret and redemption. ‘Grief, once it checks in, is a permanent guest’, says the tiny protagonist. Is atonement and forgiveness at all possible, or is it just a desperate human urge for finding inner peace? Is time, eventually, the only true healer? Can we really move on? In My Illegitimate Son, Sanjay Jha narrates a stirringly poignant story, which has both riotous laughter and abundant sorrow, that might just find an echo with your own.
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The Great Unravelling India After 2014
For the first time, I was not so sure that the survival of an idea could be taken for granted. But I was sure of one thing: the battle to salvage it, whether in whole or in part, had to be fought.’ Since May 2014, under a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party, it appears that the Nehruvian—read liberal, secular, scientific—Idea of India has come utterly undone. Institutions of governance that had weathered great turbulence in the past seem to be disintegrating. The economy, once the celebrated ‘India story’, is in a shambles due to self-inflicted blows. Large sections of the media genuflect in cringe-worthy surrender to the ruling dispensation. Two hundred million Indians are being repeatedly reminded about their irrelevance in the new political narrative. Meanwhile, the grand old party of India flounders on unfamiliar territory—trapped in its past and unsure about its future. Sanjay Jha, long-time Congress spokesperson, now suspended from the party for his outspokenness against it, takes a long, hard look at what all of this means for the future of India. What are the reasons for the Congress’s acute lack of oppositional ability? Is a resurrection of this seemingly somnolent giant even possible? What would it entail? Can the party look beyond the easy fallback of the Gandhi-family charisma and embrace transformational change? Can it sell its vision—of inclusive growth and social justice—to a nation that seems mesmerised by hate? Even as he asks tough questions of the government and his party, Jha has not lost faith in Mahatma Gandhi’s India. He writes of renewal, of hope. And the Congress, he firmly believes, is central to that revival of India.
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Eleven:Triumphs, Trials & Turbulence 1st Edition
A billion heart-beat… It best defines cricket in India. Butter Chicken is not so great Indian equalizer, a cover drive hit with kingly disdain from the magnificent willow of Sachin Tendulkar is. Our secular credentials may come frequently under microscopic scrutiny, but the ability of cricket to bring all Indians together remains unparalleled. From the taxi-driver in Mumbai men in Kumarakom’s backwaters to the CEO of a multinational software in Bengaluru, cricket binds them in an inextricable grip of togetherness. This book traces the fast-paced epochal events in Indian cricket since 2003 ranging from the contentious years of Ganguly's captaincy to the extraordinary rise of an instinctive genius called Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Amazing wins, heart-breaking losses, new heroes, endless controversies, big-ticket cash, dark politics, a T20 World Cup with IPL. Like India, cricket itself is work-in-progress.