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The Legend of Kuldhara: A Historical Novel Set in
Kuldhara, a village in the Rajasthan desert, perched at the edge of time. Abandoned, cursed, nearly two hundred years ago, to remain a heap of rubble and stone. It lies dreaming of its vibrant past when the streets echoed with laughter and the fields swayed green and gold. What happened one night that drove its inhabitants from their homes, never to return? Did they flee to preserve their honour, when the covetous gaze of a local lord fell on Pari, the headman’s daughter? Where did they go? How did they survive?
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Rajasthani Stories Retold
Rajasthan continues to fascinate the world for many reasons. Some of the more obvious ones include its colours, music and dance, venerable history, forts, fortifications, palaces, step-wells and old towns and rich textile tradition. Rajasthan also brings to mind the vast tracts of golden desert to its north-west and west, juxtaposed by the scattered green and dust-mantle clad valleys, plains and hills of its south-east and east, with their rivers and rivulets and lakes.Rajasthan is also famed for its rich oral and written traditions, drawn from mythology and religious tales as much as from the history of the area. The oral and written traditions are sometimes coloured by the blood of battles, sometimes romantic with the folk-remembered tales of Moomal, Dhola and Maru, Nihal-de and often based on real-life tales of sacrifice and duty of valourous men and women like Maharana Pratap, Prithviraj Chauhan, Jaimal, Patta, Gora, Badal, Panna-dhai, Achaldas Khinchi, Durgadas Rathore and countless ordinary citizens.Dipping into this rich heritage, this book brings to its readers a collection of short stories from Rajasthan. These are based on real people and events, but are somewhat fictionalised in the narration. The nine Rajasthani tales in this book are but a fraction of the amazing legacy of Rajasthan.
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Blossoms in the Graveyard
Blossoms in the Graveyard is the story of Mehr, a young girl from a village in what is at that time, East Pakistan. It is the story of her journey from dependence to self-reliance, both emotionally and physically. Parallel to her story, is the narrative of a land that is struggling to assert its identity and moving towards a hard-won Independence in a crucible of blood and tears. Mehr is the symbol of the land. Her suffering, her distress, her tortured anguish, is an emblem of its agony, in particular of the women of the country, as it is being birthed. Set at a crucial time in the history of the struggle, when the land is on the cusp of becoming Bangladesh, the novel is in the voice of Robin Babu. As an Assamese, he, like so many others living in this part of India that lay adjacent to the theatre of war, is deeply affected by horrors taking place at his very doorstep. Jnanpith Awardee Birendra Kumar Bhattacharyya has told the story with a fine understanding of all the issues involved, in a non-partisan way. Though fiction, it deals with events and issues of recent history. Each of the characters is delineated with empathy and a thorough understanding of what he or she stands for, without them being typecast in any way. The author’s unswerving humanism imbues the whole work with a luminous compassion that is often very moving. The echoes from that time reverberate across the entire subcontinent even today, making this a work of contemporary significance.
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Mohammed Rafi Gods Own Voice
Before Mohammed Rafi there can only be a Zero and after him there can be only Two. That should succinctly describe the legendary singer of four decades whose rise to stardom was phenomenal. Indeed, Rafi was bigger than many of the stars who lip-synched to his golden voice. For a man who came from a very humble and conservative background, it was his hard work, naturally blessed talent and godly nature that made him stride like Colossus in an industry known for its crassly commercial values. Before the writers embarked upon this historic sojourn of encapsulating this simple man’s life history and career—stuff folklores are made of—they were well aware of the magnitude of the task. Thirty-five years after his death, Rafi’s popularity keeps multiplying and each day one gets to hear and rediscover some new anecdote about his prowess as a singer and nobility as a human being. Years of painstaking research and experience went into the compilation of this book apart from the 7000 plus songs he sang and hundreds of shows he performed at home and abroad. The authors have tried to put most of them together and piece together a spell-binding account of a professional pilgrimage that cannot be said to be complete by any stretch of imagination given the events—and the new ones that keep unfolding—that go into the making of this extraordinary folk-story like narrative. The biographers feel humbled and rewarding to chronicle a personality rightly acknowledged as among the “Best 50 Indians” ever born. More so, this being the first attempt that delves into the stupendous life and times of a titan in such comprehensive depth.
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Tiger in you
This is the story of self-realisation of five musician friends - Rahul, Imran, Jessy, Keya, British-born Hazel and the swashbuckling Bhombol - all fresh graduates from college, deep in the mudflats of the Sunderbans. Here amidst the serpentine rivers, islands and its mangroves, the friends are left enchanted with its tapestry of beauty and silence. They are equally moved by the locals and their hapless living condition - their abject poverty, their inhuman hardships, and their undying human spirit to survive and improve their lot. A journey that begins as a joyride, replete with music and thrill, however, turns out to be much more for the friends. The book weaves picturesque vignettes of their escapades, which present wonderful intriguing opportunities for transformation for each one of them� - they discover love amidst poverty, valour despite grief, and the eternal triumph of the human spirit. This book is about that awakening within them, reminiscent of the majestic power and roar of a Royal Bengal tiger.