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Ignited Minds
Ignited Minds: Unleashing the Power Within India" goes the logical next step and examines why, given all our skills, resources and talents, we, so obviously capable of being the best, settle so often for the worst. What is it that we as a nation are missing? For at the heart of "Ignited Minds" is an irresistible premise: the people of a nation have the power, by dint of hard work, to realize their dream of a truly good life. Kalam offers no formulaic prescription in "Ignited Minds," Instead, he takes up different issues and themes that struck him on his pilgrimage around the country as he met thousands of school children, teachers, scientists and saints and seers in the course of two years: the necessity for a patriotism that transcends religion and politics; for role models who point out the path to take; and for confidence in ourselves and in our strengths. Who was he to write on so large a theme, he wondered as he started writing this book. But at the end, Kalam's humility notwithstanding, this may well prove to be the book that motivates us to get back on the winning track and unleash the energy within a nation that hasn't allowed itself full rein.
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The Heart of India
For more than twenty years Mark Tully was the BBC Chief of Bureau in Delhi and his name and his voice became synonymous with the country he had made his home. For years he sent back dispatches interpreting the subcontinent to the outside world, but the 'truth' of India is remarkably resistant to reportage. Imbued with his love for India and informed by his vast experience, Mark Tully has woven together a series of extraordinary stories. All the stories are set in Uttar Pradesh and tell of very different lives. Of a barren wife who visits a holy man and subsequently conceives-but is it a miracle or something more worldly? Of a son's carefully laid plot to take revenge against his father's murderer, with a surprising twist when his case comes to court. Of a daughter, persuaded by her friends to spurn an arranged marriage, whose romance ends in blackmail. Of a man's inability to overcome the conventions of caste and go into business, which leads to his wife breaking purdah and taking control of the family. In these and in other stories, Mark Tully delicately probes the nuances of life in India.
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Polar Shift
Polar Shift: it is the name for a phenomenon that may have occurred many times in the past. At its weakest, it disorients birds and animals and damages electrical equipment. At its worst, it causes massive eruptions, earthquakes and climatic changes. At its very worst, it would mean the obliteration of all living matter! Sixty years ago, an eccentric Hungarian genius discovered how to artificially trigger such a shift, but then his work disappeared, or so it was thought. Now, the charismatic leader of an anti-globalization group plans to use it to give the world's industrialized nations a small jolt, before reversing the shift back again. The only problem is, it can't be reversed. Once it starts, there is nothing anyone can do. Austin, Zavala and the rest of the NUMA Special Assignments Team have certainly faced dire situations before, but never have they encountered anything like this. This time even they may be too late.
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CountDown
On 11 May 1998 the Indian government tested five nuclear devices some forty kilometres from Pokaran. Seventeen days later Pakistan tested nuclear devices of its own. About three months after the tests, Amitav Ghosh went to the Pokaran area, after which he visited Kashmir as part of the defence minister's entourage. He also went to the Siachen glacier in the Karakoram mountains where Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been exchanging fire since 1983. Ghosh then travelled through Pakistan and Nepal.Countdown is partly a result of these journeys and conversations with many hundreds of people of the subcontinent. In its descriptions the book is haunting and evocative; and its analyses of the compulsions behind South Asia's nuclearization, and the implications of this, are profound, deeply disturbing and, ultimately, chilling.
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We Are Like That Only
The Indian market is about a lot of people consuming a little bit each that adds up to a lot . . . the Indian DNA is about continuity with change; it is about
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The World Is Flat
Truly amazing ... an essential read for anyone interested to know where the next lightning-fast passage of travel over the surface of our ever-more
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Maximum City
Suketu Mehta left Bombay at the age of 14. Twenty-one years later he returned to rediscover the city. The result is this stunning, brilliantly illuminating portrait of the megalopolis and its people
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist
At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an American stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting . . . Among the brightest and best of his graduating class at Princeton, Changez is snapped up by Underwood and Samson, an elite firm that specializes in ‘valuation’ of companies ripe for acquisition. He thrives on New York and the intensity of his work, and his infatuation with the beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, he finds his position in the city he loves suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and perhaps even love. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a riveting and devastating exploration of our divided and yet ultimately indivisible world, with echoes of Fitzgerald and Camus. Praise for The Reluctant Fundamentalist ‘A brilliant book. With spooky restraint and masterful control, Hamid unpicks the underpinnings of the most recent episode of distrust between East and West. But this book does not merely excel in capturing a developing bitterness. The narrative is balanced by a love as powerful as the sinister forces gathering, even when it recedes into a phantom of hope. It is this balance, and the constant negotiation of the political with the personal, that creates a nuanced and complex portrait of a reluctant fundamentalist’ —Kiran Desai ‘Builds with masterfully controlled irony and suspense . . . A superb cautionary tale, and a grim reminder of the continuing cost of ethnic profiling, miscommunication and confrontation’ —Kirkus Reviews Praise for Moth Smoke ‘Not often does one find a first novel that has the power of imagination and skill to orchestrate personal and public themes of these consequences and achieve a chord that reverberates in one’s mind. Moth Smoke is one of the two or three best novels I have read this year’—Nadine Gordimer [A] brisk, absorbing novel . . . Hamid steers us from start to finish with assurance and care’—Jhumpa Lahiri, The New York Times Book Review The most impressive of his gifts is the clearsightedness of his look at the power structure of a society that has shifted from the old feudalism, based on birth, to the new Pakistani feudalism based on wealth’—Anita Desai, The New York Review of Books Stunning . . . [Hamid] has created a hip page-turner’—The Los Angeles Times A first novel of remarkable wit, poise, profundity, and strangeness . . . Hamid is a writer of gorgeous, lush prose and superb dialogue . . . Moth Smoke is a treat’—Esquire Moth Smoke is a book that the Indian reader relates to at once’—Business Standard Mohsin Hamid draws and etches his characters with enviable skill’—The Hindu This deeply disturbing book should be read by all’—Ira Pande, India Today
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Jesus Lived In India
Why has Christianity chosen to ignore its connections with the religions of the East, and to dismiss repeatedly the numerous claims that Jesus spent a large part of his life in India? This compelling book presents irrefutable evidence that Jesus did indeed live in India, dying there in old age. The result of many years of investigative research, Jesus Lived in India takes the reader to all the historical sites connected with Jesus in Israel, the Middle East, Afghanistan and India. As well as revealing age-old links between the Israelites and the East, the evidence found by theologian Holger Kersten points to the following startling conclusions: In his youth Jesus followed the ancient Silk Road to India. While there he studied Buddhism, adopting its tenets and becoming a spiritual master. Jesus survived the crucifixion. After the
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India Unbound
In India Unbound , acclaimed writer Gurcharan Das offers a ringside view of economic and social transformation of a nation. It is the riveting story of a nation s rise from poverty to prosperity and the clash of ideas that occurred along the way. Das shows how India s policies after 1947 condemned the nation to a hobbled economy until 1991, when the government instituted sweeping reforms that paved the way for extraordinary growth. Das traces these developments, deftly interweaving memoir with contemporary history. In doing so he has written a book that is impassioned and erudite. India Unbound is recommended reading for anyone interested in understanding modern India.
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What is the What
This is the story of a man who, as a boy, was spearated from his family in Sudan's brutal civil war; who trekked across Africa's punishing wilderness with thousands of other children; who survived aerial bombardment and attacks by militias and wild animals; who ate whatever he could find or nothing at all; who, as a boy, considered ending his life to end the suffering; and who eventually made it to America, where a new and equally challenging journey began. His name is Valentino Achak Deng, and in this novel Dave Eggers tells the extraordinary true story of his incredible journey.
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An Autobiography
Through all its details there runs a deep current of humanity which overpasses the tangles of facts and leads us to the person who is greater than his deeds and truer than his surroundings.' Rabindranath Tagore Jawaharlal Nehru's life was closely intertwined with the history and destiny of modern India. His Autobiography, written between 1934 and 1935 when he was in prison, is more than the personal story of an individualit is also an account of the political awakening of a nation, its struggle for freedom from British rule, and its search to reshape itself as a modern society, rid of the cultural and economic shackles of the past. Through this narrative, written with extraordinary eloquence and honesty, and illuminated with vibrant descriptions of Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders of the national movement, emerges the portrait of the author himselfa complex and introspective personality with a brilliant and questing mind, a deep love of nature, an engaging zest for life and, above all, a passionate commitment to democracy and secularism.
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Riot
Who killed twenty-four-year-old Priscilla Hart? And why would anyone want to murder this highly motivated, idealistic American student who had come to India to volunteer in women’s health programs? Had her work make a killer out of an enraged husband? Or was her death the result of a xenophobic attack? Was she involved in an indiscriminate love affair that had spun out of control? Had a disgruntled, deeply jealous colleague been pushed to the edge? Or was she simply the innocent victim of a riot that had exploded in that fateful year of 1989 between Hindus and Muslims? In his long-awaited new novel, Shashi Tharoor, the acclaimed author of The Great Indian Noveland Show Business,whom the Independent(London) called "one of the finest novelists writing in English today," once again triumphs. Experimenting masterfully with narrative form, he chronicles the mystery of Priscilla Hart’s death through the often contradictory accounts of a dozen or more characters, all of whom relate their own versions of the events surrounding her killing. Like his two previous novels, Riotprobes and reveals the richness of India, and is at once about love, hate, cultural collision, the ownership of history, religious fanaticism, and the impossibility of knowing the truth.
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The Memory Keeper's Daughter
This stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognises that his daughter has Down's syndrome. For motives he tells himself are good, he makes a split second decision that will haunt all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child as her own. Compulsively readable and deeply moving, The Memory Keeper's Daughter is a brilliantly crafted story of parallel lives, familial secrets, and the redemptive power of love.
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A Girl Like Me
Recently transplanted from the quiet, green suburbs of Minnesota to the bustling concrete jungle that is Gurgaon, sixteen-year-old Anisha Rai is determined not to take to the new place she must call home. While her irrepressible mom, Isha, thrives on the crazy juggling between a hotshot job and their new home, Annie
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Beyond The Last Blue Mountain
Written with J.R.D. Tata's co-operation, this superb biography tells the J.R.D.story, from his birth to 1993, the year in which he died in Switzerland. The bok is divided into four parts: Part I deals with the early years, from J.R.D.'s birth in France in 1904 to his accession to the Chairmanship of Tatas, India's largest industrial conglomerate, at the age of thirty-four; Part II looks at his forty-six years in Indian aviation (the lasting pssion of J.R.D.'s life) which led to the initiation of the Indian eviation industry and its development into one of India's success stories; Part III illuminates his half-century-long stint as the outstanding personality of Indian industry; and Part IV unearths hitherto unknown details about the private man and the public figure, including glimpses of his long friendships with people such as Written with J.R.D. Tata's co-operation, this superb biography tells the J.R.D.story, from his birth to 1993, the year in which he died in Switzerland. The bok is divided into four parts: Part I deals with the early years, from J.R.D.'s birth in France in 1904 to his accession to the Chairmanship of Tatas, India's largest industrial conglomerate, at the age of thirty-four; Part II looks at his forty-six years in Indian aviation (the lasting pssion of J.R.D.'s life) which led to the initiation of the Indian eviation industry and its development into one of India's success stories; Part III illuminates his half-century-long stint as the outstanding personality of Indian industry; and Part IV unearths hitherto unknown details about the private man and the public figure, including glimpses of his long friendships with people such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and his association with celebrities in India and abroad.
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Black Friday
On the afternoon of 12 March 1993, a series of explosions cut a swathe through Bombay, spreading terror and destruction over a period of two hours. Starting from the landmark Bombay Stock Exchange in the south of the city during the crowded lunch hour, the blasts extended all the way across to Centaur Hotel, Juhu, in the north. The toll: 257 killed or missing, 713 injured, and a city in shambles. In Black Friday, S. Hussain Zaidi takes us into the heart of the conspiracy and the massive investigation that ensued. The product of four years of meticulous research, the book gives chilling insights into the criminal mind as revealed in Zaidi