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Prostitution And Beyond An Analysis Of Sex Workers
What is the diversity of perspectives on sex work in India today? This edited volume addresses this question through its sections on feminist discourse, ethnographic studies, socio-economic-legal-health frameworks and cultural reflections. The first section explores the space for women in prostitution within mainstream feminist discourse in India, and the way it has evolved over time. The second section emphasizes on the heterogeneity of sex work practices with their historical vestiges, contemporary manifestations and urban-rural contrasts. The third section examines the interface of society and prostitution, tracing economic and social undercurrents, health concerns and legal regulations. The final section focuses on the bearings of prostitution on the cultural spheres of literature, language, cinema, theatre and media. In addition to rigorous academic research, this volume also pools in case studies, live discussions and interviews, drawing the experience of a wide spectrum of professionals and organizations working with sex workers. This book is a must-read for professionals and academicians in the fields of Gender Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Public Health and Social Work.
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A Brutal Hand Theres No Escape
When a wealthy business owner is found dead in a Mumbai parking lot, the police are flummoxed. Alok Dalal was a family man, with a wife and a teenage daughter. There are no apparent enemies his family or associates know of. Who could want him dead? And the only clue is a note with the word ‘Sorry’ on it—what could it mean? As Inspector Abhay Rastogi investigates the baffling crime, the police find another body with a similar note. Is this a copycat crime, or are the two murders related? Will there be more bodies? Inspector Rastogi must race against time to catch an alarmingly elusive killer. Packed with twists and turns, and non-stop action, A Brutal Hand will keep readers guessing until the very end.
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Legend Of Suheldev The King Who Saved India
A Forgotten Hero. An Unforgettable Battle.India, 1025 AD. Repeated attacks by Mahmud of Ghazni and his barbaric Turkic hordes have weakened India’s northern regions. The invaders lay waste to vast swathes of the subcontinent—plundering, killing, raping, pillaging. Many of the old Indian kingdoms, tired and divided, fall to them. Those who do fight, battle with old codes of chivalry, and are unable to stop the savage Turkic army which repeatedly breaks all rules to win. Then the Turks raid and destroy one of the holiest temples in the land: the magnificent Lord Shiva temple at Somnath. At this most desperate of times, a warrior rises to defend the nation. King Suheldev. The ruler of a small kingdom, he sees what must be done for his motherland, and is willing to sacrifice his all for it. A fierce rebel. A charismatic leader. An inclusive patriot. Read this blockbuster epic adventure of courage and heroism, a fictional tale based on true events, that recounts the story of that lionhearted warrior and the magnificent Battle of Bahraich.
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Insomnia Keep Your Eyes Open
‘Please help me … my wife is trying to kill me. ’When police officers Meera Dixit and Aditya Sachdev investigate a panicked midnight phone call, they are drawn into the unhappy story of a couple—a woman slowly losing her grip on sanity and her husband living in constant fear of death. As they delve deeper, the officers realise that this case is more knotted than anything they’ve dealt with before. Is Tanvi Acharya really sick? What caused Rohit’s insomnia? Do deeper secrets lie below the surface? As they try to make sense of the sinister goings-on in the house, Dixit and Sachdev hurtle towards a shocking revelation that they are not prepared for.
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A Second Chance
Relationships require openness, and that brings vulnerability. If you open up, you risk getting hurt; if you don’t, you may never know the relationship you deserve. Disha has always been shy and wary, and finds it difficult to make friends. Having grown up with parents who bicker all the time, she craves warmth and harmony. And ever since she first experienced the emotion of love, she has longed to be the centre of a special someone’s world. But with every fibre of her being, Disha believes she is unlucky in love. The hardest part for anyone is finding the ‘right’ person—but in her search for that man, broken hearts and broken promises is all she’s had. With no luck and no one on the horizon, Disha gives up and agrees to an arranged marriage. Is true love not written in her stars? Will she be able to reverse her fortunes, or is she destined to never find her soulmate? A Second Chance is the heart-wrenching story of a multifaceted girl and her search to find the love she deserves.
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One Arranged Murder
Keshav has set up an investigation agency with his best friend, Saurabh. Can the two amateur detectives successfully solve another murder case that affects them personally? And where will it leave their friendship? ‘Ever since you found Prerna, I lost my best friend’ is what I told Saurabh. Hi, this is Keshav, and Saurabh, my best friend, flatmate, colleague and business partner, won’t talk to me. Because I made fun of him and his fiancée. Saurabh and Prerna will be getting married soon. It is an arranged marriage. However, there is more cheesy romance between them than any love-marriage couple. On Karva Chauth, she fasted for him. She didn’t eat all day. In the evening, she called him and waited on the terrace for the moon and for Saurabh to break her fast. Excited, Saurabh ran up the steps of her three-storey house. But when he reached … Welcome to One Arranged Murder, an unputdownable thriller from India’s highest-selling author. A story about love, friendship, family and crime, it will keep you entertained and hooked right till the end.
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A Shout In The Ruins.
Following his hugely celebrated debut novel, The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers returns to the battlefield and its aftermath, this time in his native Virginia, just before and during the Civil War and ninety years later. The novel pinpoints with unerring emotional depth the nature of random violence, the necessity of love and compassion, and the fragility and preciousness of life. It will endure as a stunning novel about what we leave behind, what a life is worth, what is said and unsaid, and the fact that ultimately what will survive of us is love.
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Own It Leadership Lessons From Women Who Do
Most women today are opting for careers over jobs, even if it requires them to play multiple roles with superhuman abilities. Meanwhile, men, at home and at work, struggle to come to terms with their changing priorities. And therein lies the chasm between male expectations and female ambition. As Dame Julia Walsh says in the television miniseries The Honourable Woman, 'In a room full of pussies, I'm the only one with a vagina.' Own It tells women's stories: the ugly, the happy, the rarely discussed, the unacknowledged, the whispered, the denied. Close to two hundred Indian women leaders across industries discuss the challenges they face in the Indian workplace and at home. Heads of companies, human resource directors and senior managers talk about issues like pay parity, harassment, promotion and maternity policies. Why is the workplace agenda skewed against women and what are their own demons that keep them from breaking the glass ceiling? Thought-provoking and controversial, Own It takes the challenges that confront women in the workplace head-on - without discounting the complexities of being a woman in an Indian home.
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Milk Teeth
Childhood allies Ira Kamat and Kartik Kini meet on the terrace of their building in Matunga, Mumbai. A meeting is in progress to decide the fate of the establishment and its residents. And the zeitgeist of the 1990s appears to have touched everyone and everything around them. Ira is now a journalist on the civic beat, unearthing stories of corruption and indolence, and trying to push back memories of a lost love. Kartik works a corporate job with an MNC, and leads a secret, agonising, exhilarating second life. Between and around them throbs the living, beating heart of Mumbai, city of heaving inequities and limitless dreams. Milk Teeth is subtle, incisive, unputdownable.
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The Far Field
Winner of the JCB Prize for Literature 2019. Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019. Shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award (Fiction) 2019. In the wake of her mother's death, Shalini, a privileged, naive and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote village in Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to track him down. But as soon as Shalini arrives, she is confronted with the region's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. As life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could have dangerous repercussions for the people she has come to love. With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay gives a potent critique of Indian politics and class prejudice through the lens of a guileless outsider, while also offering up a profound meditation on grief, guilt and the limits of compassion.
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Roots Of Terrorism
The events of 11 September in New York and 13 December in New Delhi marked the high points of terrorism. But India's experience with it goes back two decades. In this essay, Bajpai examines the volatile situation in the borderlands of Kashmir, Punjab and the Northeast, while drawing comparisons with leftist insurgency, communal riots, and caste wars elsewhere. How should we think about terrorist violence? Why has India been the object of terrorism from separatist groups in Kashmir, Punjab, and the Northeast? Have external influences played a role in supporting this? How has the Indian government responded to secessionist violence? These are some of the concerns the author explores here, as he seeks an identifiable set of factors that account for terrorism. Dwelling on how this violence can be combated, Bajpai discusses in detail the case of Kashmir. He argues convincingly about the impracticality of the military option, including war, and the futility of using limited force, as in policing, without commitment to a credible political process, namely free and fair elections. In this forceful and timely essay he not only calls for measured governmental action, but also places responsibility on citizens for restoring long-term peace by finding ways of de-legitimizing violence in Indian society.
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The Book Of Ram
He is Eka-vachani, a king who always keeps his word; Eka-bani, an archer who strikes his target with the first arrow; and Eka-patni, a husband who is eternally and absolutely devoted to a single wife. He is maryada purushottam Ram, the supreme upholder of social values, the scion of the Raghu clan, jewel of the solar dynasty, the seventh avatar of Vishnu, God who establishes order in worldly life. Hindus believe that in stressful and tumultuous times chanting Ram’s name and hearing his tale, the Ramayan, brings stability, hope, peace and prosperity. Reviled by feminists, appropriated by politicians, Ram remains serene in his majesty, the only Hindu deity to be worshipped as a king.
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Hindu Mythology
This is an authoritative and exhaustive account of the Hindu gods and goddesses commonly worshipped in India and their origin and the myths and legends that grew around them. Vedic deities, puranic deities, sacred birds, animals, demons and even lesser gods identified and presented in this one handy volume.
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The Burden Of Democracy
The Burden of Democracy is primarily an informative and intellectual book, which in turn is an elongated essay explaining the probable chaos of Indian democracy. In the book, the author discusses about the plight of Indian democracy even after sixty years of its birth. This book raises some very valid questions, which are often also raised and discussed by common people.In The Burden of Democracy, the author discusses crucial underlined factors of the demolishing Indian democracy and also puts on the podium some very interesting and reasonable suggestions, which if implemented, can bring forth the democracy of this country on the world map. The issues of social inequality, sphere of Indian politics, self-respect of the Indian democracy, public participation in the democracy and the crises of answerability and accountability, are very interestingly discussed in the book.The Burden of Democracy finally urges for a collective action of the Indians in order to help recover the ailing democracy of India. This collective action, the author explains in the essay, will include moral responsibility and social well being.
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Songs Of The Soul
The deep yearnings for divine love and joy that are within each of us found many-faceted expression in the life of Paramahansa Yogananda. Songs of the Soul is an outpouring of his direct perception of GOd - God in nature, in man, in everyday experiences, and in the spiritually awakened state of samadhi meditation. Most of these poems were written during Paramahansaji’s early years in the United States. His writings are not the considered renderings of a poet’s fancies, but a revelation of the interior experiences of a soul ever awake in Spirit, responding to the wonders of nature; to the memories of his beloved motherland; to the deep impressions made by new friends and acquaintances; above all to the divine realizations born of that soul’s intimate communion with God.
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Bazaars Conversations & Freedom For A Market Cultu
Long before the financial meltdown and the red alert on climate change, some far-sighted innovators diagnosed the fatal flaws in an economic system driven by greed and fear. Across the global North and South, diverse people-financial wizards, economists, business persons and social activists-have been challenging the 'free market' orthodoxy. They seek to recover the virtues of bazaars from the tyranny of a market model that emerged about two centuries ago. This book is a chronicle of their adventures. From Wall Street icon George Soros and VISA card designer Dee Hock we get an insider critique of the malaise. Creators of community currencies and others, like the father of microfinance, Bangladesh's Muhammad Yunus, explore how money can work differently. The doctrine of self-interest is re-examined by looking more closely at Adam Smith through the eyes of Amartya Sen. Mahatma Gandhi's concept of 'Trusteeship' gathers strength as the socially responsible investing phenomenon challenges the power of capital. Pioneers of the open source and free software movement thrive on cooperation to drive innovation. The Dalai Lama and Ela Bhatt demonstrate that it is possible to compete compassionately and to nurture a more mindful market culture. This sweeping narrative takes you from the ancient Greek Agora, Indian choupal, and Native American gift culture, onto present day Wall Street to illuminate ideas, subversive and prudent, about how the market can serve society rather than being its master. In a world exhausted by dogma Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom is an open quest for possible futures.
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Babulog Vignettes Of Indian Bureaucrats
Delightful stories and accounts on the Indian bureaucracy
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Delhi A Novel
I return to Delhi as I return to my mistress Bhagmati when I have had my fill of whoring in foreign lands…’ Thus begins Khushwant Singh’s vast, erotic, irrelevant magnum opus on the city of Delhi. The principal narrator of the saga, which extends over six hundred years, is a bawdy, ageing reprobate who loves Delhi as much as he does the hijda whore Bhagmati—half man, half woman with sexual inventiveness and energy of both the sexes. Travelling through time, space and history to ‘discover’ his beloved city, the narrator meets a myriad of people—poets and princes, saints and sultans, temptresses and traitors, emperors and eunuchs—who have shaped and endowed Delhi with its very special mystique. And as we accompany the narrator on his epic journey we find the city of emperors transformed and immortalized in our minds forever.
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Orientalism
Now reissued with a substantial new afterword, this highly acclaimed overview of Western attitudes towards the East has become one of the canonical texts of cultural studies. Very excitinghis case is not merely persuasive, but conclusive. John Leonard in The New York Times His most important book, Orientalism established a new benchmark for discussion of the Wests skewed view of the Arab and Islamic world. Simon Louvish in the New Statesman & Society Edward Said speaks for interdisciplinarity as well as for monumental eruditionThe breadth of reading [is] astonishing. Fred Inglis in The Times Higher Education Supplement A stimulating, elegant yet pugnacious essay. Observer Excitingfor anyone interested in the history and power of ideas. J.H. Plumb in The New York Times Book Review Beautifully patterned and passionately argued. Nicholas Richardson in the New Statesman & Society
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Ants Ghosts And Whispering Trees
An anthology of some of the best Oriya short stories written over the last hundred years. Some of the stories are formal experiments in storytelling while others are rooted in real life situations and events, and still others portray the lives of ordinary people caught up in the intricacies of living. Village life dominates the stories, not in a reduced and simplified form, but rather in all its complexity, and even cruelty at times, with its relationships traversed by hierarchy, caste, religion and economic and social differences. The transition that Orissa was going through at that time is also reflected in these stories. A collection which, when read as a whole, bears witness to the transformation and continuity of life, values and the specificity of culture of this eastern coastal state.
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One Mans Bible
The new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of international bestseller ‘Soul Mountain’. ‘Unforgettable. “One Man’s Bible” burns with a powerfully individualistic fire of intelligence and depth of feeling.’ New York Times Moving between the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution and the tentative, limited liberties of the China of the 1990s, ‘One Man’s Bible’ weaves memories of a Beijing boyhood and amorous encounters in Hong Kong with a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the communist regime – where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. A fluid, elegant exploration of memory, This novel is a profound meditation on the essence of writing and exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit – and on how that spirit can triumph.
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Care Of The Soul Guide For Cultivating Depth And S
In this special twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Thomas Moore’s bestselling Care of the Soul, which includes a new introduction by the author, readers are presented with a revolutionary approach to thinking about daily life—everyday activities, events, problems, and creative opportunities—and a therapeutic lifestyle is proposed that focuses on looking more deeply into emotional problems and learning how to sense sacredness in ordinary things. Basing his writing on the ancient model of “care of the soul”—which provided a religious context for viewing the everyday events of life—Moore brings “care of the soul” into the twenty-first century. Promising to deepen and broaden the readers’ perspectives on their life experiences, Moore draws on his own life as a therapist practicing “care of the soul,” as well as his studies of the world’s religions and his work in music and art, to create this inspirational guide that examines the connections between spirituality and the problems of individuals and society. “Thoughtful, eloquent, inspiring.” —San Francisco Chronicle “I soulfully recommend it without reservation.” —John Bradshaw, author of Homecoming
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The Essence Of The Gnostics An Illuminating Insigh
Long before there was a system of belief called Gnosticism there were those who reached for a special intimate knowledge of God and His mysterious ways. The possession of such knowledge, they believed, would bring salvation from suffering. All religious traditions acknowledge that the world is imperfect. Where they differ is in their explanations they offer for the imperfection - and what they suggest might be done about it. While many religions hold that Gnostics believed that the world is flawed because it was created in a flawed manner, thereby implicating the creator. Such a perspective was regarded as blasphemous by fellow-Christians at the dawn of the new religion, and led to the sect's persecution. Equally concerning were the Gnostics' liberal views regarding sex, the role of women, and toleration of other faiths. In The Essence of The Gnostics Bernard Simon offers a fascinating insight into this ancient and yet in many ways surprisingly contemporary faith, and explores the reason for its current renaissance.
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Napoleon Profiles In Power
An important reappraisal of Napoleon's life and career which throws new light on his personality and policies and the nature and aims of Napoleonic imperialism. By exploring the different ways they have been interpreted and used by historians this study also illuminates the very process of history making itself.This is a balanced portrait of a man who so completely dominated his age.