BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 28TH DECEMBER, 2019

History Men 
Jadunath Sarkar, G.S. Sardesai, Raghubir Sinh 
and Their Quest for India's Past
by -  T.C.A. Raghavan
ISBN : 9789353573850
Cost Rs. 799.00
About the Book
History Men is the story of the intersecting lives of three deeply committed historians: Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958), who was an expert on the Mughal period; G.S. Sardesai (1865-1959), whose works were on the Marathas; and Raghubir Sinh (1908-1991), who studied the Rajputs. How the three became close friends and joint workers; how they wrote about the great confrontations between the Mughals, Rajputs and Marathas; how their long association exposed continuing conflicts of interpretation and explanation; and how, together, they illuminated a historical moment make for a story worth telling. A narrative built from original research based on the correspondence and the published and unpublished writings of the three scholars, this is also a portrait of rich friendships, of the minutiae of the lives of these historians, and their fierce commitment to historical research as they addressed the significant questions of the age they lived in. Anyone who is interested in the making of historical narratives will find History Men a compelling read.
About the Author
T.C.A. Raghavan has a PhD in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has been High Commissioner of India to Singapore and to Pakistan. He retired from the Indian Foreign Service in 2015. His first book, Attendant Lords: Bairam Khan and Abdur Rahim, Courtiers and Poets in Mughal India, was awarded the Mohammad Habib Memorial Prize for the best book on medieval Indian history by the Indian History Congress in 2017. He is also the author of The People Next Door: The Curious History of India's Relations with Pakistan (2017). He is currently Director-General of the Indian Council of World Affairs in New Delhi.
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 21ST DECEMBER, 2019

The Absent Dialogue 
By -  Anit Mukherjee

About the Book
ISBN : 9780197507193   
Cost Rs. 1100.00

Civilian control over the military is widely hailed as one of the major successes of India's democracy. Because it is so rare, especially among post-colonial states, this control is rightfully celebrated. But has this come at a cost.  in the absent dialogue, an it Mukherjee argues that the pattern of civil-military relations in India has hampered its military effectiveness. Diving deep into understanding the organization and internal processes within the Indian military, he explains how Indian politicians and bureaucrats have long been content with the formal and ritualistic exercise of civilian control, while the military continues to operate in institutional silos. Yet, there has been little substantive engagement between the two. To support this claim, Mukherjee closely examines the variables most closely associated with military effectiveness-weapons procurement, jointness (the ability of separate military services to operate together), Officer education, promotion policies, and defense planning. Further, Mukherjee shows how India's pattern of civil-military relations-best characterized as an absent dialogue-adversely affects each of these processes. While the book focuses on India, It also highlights the importance of civilian expertise and institutional design in enhancing civilian control and military effectiveness in other democracies.  informed by more than a hundred and fifty interviews and recently available archival material, the absent dialogue sheds new light on India's military and will reshape our understanding of both the history and contemporary dynamics of civil-military relations and recurring problems therein.
About the Author
Anit Mukherjee is Assistant Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution India Center. He has a Ph.D. from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University and was formerly an officer in the Indian Army.
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 14TH DECEMBER, 2019

Diamond in my Palm 

By - Sanjay Dharwadker

ISBN :9789382035305 
Price Rs. 795/-
About the book
At a Middle Eastern international airport, a Gandhian scholar from Hyderabad and a mining engineer from Johannesburg meet fortuitously and romance brews. Their love unfolds amongst stories of twelve celebrated diamonds that were once lost from India, changed destinies of emperors and empires since, and are the pride of nations around the world today. Their journey also confronts a wily diamond trader from Lucknow, a vivacious former clerk at Anglo-Dutch and an ambitious business woman of African political pedigree, once a student in Moscow. The Indian dies in a carjacking incident and a South African woman apparently jumps to her death from her sixth-floor hotel room. An eminent Brahmin scholar is crushed under the weight of “five thousand years of learning” when a giant bookcase topples on him. Are these deaths accidents or crimes part of a much larger web of desire, deceit, power & retribution in the five-thousand-year history of the world’s most magnificent precious stones? It is as much a literary novel as a fast-paced crime thriller with animated characters, who inhabit the richly evoked social worlds of global cities, from Johannesburg, Antwerp, New York to Hyderabad, Mumbai & Delhi. Within its fictional setting, for the very first time – the astounding trajectory of the world’s twelve premier diamonds is fully unravelled – that motivates its characters, intensifies its action, and solves the manifold mystery in the climactic finale. Sanjay Dharwadker is an alumnus of BITS Pilani in India. Currently based in Netherlands, he works closely with governments and the United Nations on identity law, policy and practices and continues to write. --- Dharwadker writes a fast-paced narrative with verve and wit. Dilip M. Menon, Mellon Chair in Indian Studies, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 7TH DECEMBER. 2019

Mapping the Great Game
Explorers, Spies & Maps in Nineteenth-century Asia 
By - Riaz Dean 
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ISBN : 9780670092918
Price : Rs 599/-
About the bookThe Great Game raged through the wilds of Central Asia during the nineteenth century, as Imperial Russia and Great Britain jostled for power. Tsarist armies gobbled up large tracts of Turkestan, advancing inexorably towards their ultimate prize, India. These rivals understood well that the first need of an army in a strange land is a reliable map, prompting desperate efforts to explore and chart out uncharted regions. Two distinct groups would rise to this challenge: a band of army officers, who would become the classic Great Game players; and an obscure group of natives employed by the Survey of India, known as the Pundits.
While 'the game' played out, a self-educated cartographer named William Lambton began mapping the Great Arc, attempting to measure the actual shape of the Indian subcontinent. It was completed four decades later by a fellow officer working for the Survey of India, George Everest, who would have a special mountain named in his honour. The Great Arc would then lauded as 'one of the most stupendous works in the whole history of science'. Meanwhile, the Pundits, travelling entirely on foot and with meagre resources, would be among the first to enter Tibet and reveal the mysteries of its forbidden capital, Lhasa.
Featuring forgotten, enthralling episodes of derring-do combined, and of the most sincere efforts to map India's boundaries, Mapping the Great Game is the thrilling story of espionage and cartography which shrouded the Great Game and helped map a large part of Asia as we know it today.
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About the AuthorRiaz Dean has travelled much of the area described in this book, including the two halves of what was once Turkestan, and on the Roof of the World that divides them. He collects old maps and books about the exploration of this region, and has written of the ancient Silk Road and its mapping. Born and raised in the Fiji Islands, he subsequently lived on three continents before settling in New Zealand. Here, after four years of research and writing he completed this, his first book.
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 30 NOVEMBER, 2019

2019: How Modi Won India
By - RAJDEEP SARDESAI
About the book : 
On 23 May 2019, when the results of the general elections were announced, Narendra Modi and the BJP-led NDA coalition were voted back to power with an overwhelming majority. To some, the numbers of Modi's victory came as something of a surprise; for others, the BJP's triumph was a vindication of their belief in the government and its policies. Irrespective of one's political standpoint, one thing was beyond dispute: this was a landmark verdict, one that deserved to be reported and analysed with intelligence - and without bias. Rajdeep Sardesai's new book, 2019: How Modi Won India, does just that. What was it that gave Modi an edge over the opposition for the second time in five years? How was the BJP able to trounce its rivals in states that were once Congress bastions? What was the core issue in the election: a development agenda or national pride? As he relives the excitement of the many twists and turns that took place over the last five years, culminating in the 2019 election results, Rajdeep helps the reader make sense of the contours and characteristics of a rapidly changing India, its politics and its newsmakers. If the 2014 elections changed India, 2019 may well have defined what 'new India' is likely to be all about. 2019: How Modi Won India takes a look at that fascinating story, which is still developing.
About the Author :
Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior journalist, author, columnist and news presenter with more than thirty years' experience in print and television news. Having begun his career with the Times of India in 1988, Rajdeep moved to NDTV in 1994. He was the founder-editor of the IBN18 Network, which started news channels like CNN-IBN. He is currently a consulting editor with the TV Today Network and anchors a flagship prime-time show. Rajdeep has won several awards for journalistic excellence including the Ramnath Goenka award, the International Broadcasters prize, the Asian TV award and the Prem Bhatia Political Journalism award (in 2019, for his general election coverage). He received the Padma Shri in 2008. He is the author of three previous books: 2014: The Election That Changed India; Democracy's XI: The Great Indian Cricket Story; and Newsman: Tracking India in the Modi Era. He lives in New Delhi. Narendra Modi; 2019; Elections; Hindu; BJP; Bharatiya Janata Party; Congress; Rahul Gandhi; Amit Shah; Rajdeep Sardesai
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 23 NOVEMBER, 2019

Talking to Strangers 
What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know
By - Malcolm Gladwell
ISBN : 9780241351574
Price : Rs 799/-
About the book : 
The highly anticipated new book from Malcolm Gladwell, No.1 international bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath.
In July 2015, a young black woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation in rural Texas. Minutes later she was arrested and jailed. Three days later, she committed suicide in her cell. What went wrong? Talking to Strangers is all about what happens when we encounter people we don't know, why it often goes awry, and what it says about us.
How do we make sense of the unfamiliar? Why are we so bad at judging someone, reading a face, or detecting a lie? Why do we so often fail to 'get' other people?
Through a series of puzzles, encounters and misunderstandings, from little-known stories to infamous legal cases, Gladwell takes us on a journey through the unexpected. You will read about the spy who spent years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the man who saw through the fraudster Bernie Madoff, the suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath and the false conviction of Amanda Knox. You will discover that strangers are never simple.
No one shows us who we are like Malcolm Gladwell. Here he sets out to understand why we act the way we do, and how we all might know a little more about those we don't.
The No.1 international bestselling author back with a powerful and provocative exploration of what our interactions with strangers tell us about who we are.
'The best kind of writer - the kind who makes you feel like you're a genius, rather than he's a genius' The Times
Gladwell comes exuberantly close to what goes on inside other people's heads' Daily Telegraph
About the Author :
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five international bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is the host of the podcast Revisionist History and is a staff writer atThe New Yorker. He was named one of the 100 most influential people byTime magazine and one of the Foreign Policy's Top Global Thinkers. Previously, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business and science, and then served as the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He lives in New York.
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 16TH, NOV. 2019

Resurgent India: 
Politics, Economics and Governance
By -  Bimal Jalan 

ISBN :   978-9353570217 
Price  :   Rs 699.00
About the book : 
Resurgent India, a sequel to Dr Bimal Jalan's book Emerging India (2012) looks ahead and analyses what needs to be done in light of the significant advances made in politics and governance in one of the fastest-growing developing countries in the global economy. Since 2014, the political profile of the government has changed dramatically. The new government elected in 2019 - either with a full majority or a coalition of parties - will hopefully be in a position to launch significant political reforms. Resurgent India identifies the key priorities that can - and should - be implemented by the new government in national interest, irrespective of the political agenda of the party (or parties) that come to power.
About the Author :
Dr Bimal Jalan is former Governor, Reserve Bank of India. He has held several positions in the government, including those of finance secretary and chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. He has represented India on the boards of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 2ND NOVEMBER, 2019

The Anarchy
The East India Company, Corporate Violence,
and the Pillage of an Empire 
By -    William Dalrymple

ISBN : 9781526618504
Price : Rs 699/-
About the book : 
In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army - what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation.
The East India Company's founding charter authorised it to 'wage war' and it had always used violence to gain its ends. But the creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than four decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men - twice the size of the British army - and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. The Company's reach stretched until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London.
The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
About the Author :
William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton and Brown. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. William lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 27TH, OCTOBER, 2019

Good Economics for Hard Times : 
Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
By -    Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo 

ISBN :  9789353450700
Price : Rs 699/-
About the book : 
Do immigrants from poorer countries take away jobs from low-income native workers? Why is inequality exploding everywhere? Does redistribution actually undermine incentives? Should we worry about the rise of artificial intelligence or celebrate it? How do we manage the trade-off between growth and climate change? Is economic growth over in the West? Should we care?
Figuring out how to deal with today’s critical economic problems is the great challenge of our time. Much greater than space travel, perhaps even than curing cancer – what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life and, perhaps, of liberal democracy itself. We have the resources to solve these problems; what we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us. Only if we can engage seriously in this quest, and if the best minds in the world work with governments and civil society to redesign our social programs for effectiveness and political viability, will history remember our era with gratitude.
In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics, explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent,G ood Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for intelligent interventions toward a society built on compassion and respect. It is an extraordinary book, one that will help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.
About the Author :
Abhijit V. Banerjee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics 2019, is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Esther Duflo, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics 2019, is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - 05TH, OCTOBER, 2019

A Genealogy of Devotion

By -   Patton E. Burchett
ISBN :  9780231196659
Price : Rs 799/-
 About the book
Patton e. Burchett offers a path-breaking Genealogical study of devotional (bhakti) Hinduism that traces its understudied historical relationships with Tantra, yoga, and Sufism. He focuses his analysis on the early modern period, when the rise of bhakti communities in North India transformed the religious landscape. In this book, Patton e. Burchett offers a path-breaking Genealogical study of devotional (bhakti) Hinduism that traces its understudied historical relationships with Tantra, yoga, and Sufism. Beginning in India’s early medieval “tantric age” and reaching to the present day, burchett focuses his analysis on the crucial shifts of the early modern period, when the rise of bhakti communities in North India transformed the religious landscape in ways that would profoundly affect the shape of modern-day Hinduism. A genealogy of devotion illuminates the complex historical factors at play in the growth of bhakti in Sultanate and Mughal India through its pivotal interactions with Indic and Persianate traditions of asceticism, monasticism, politics, and literature. Shedding new light on the importance of Persian culture and popular Sufism in the history of devotional Hinduism, burchett’s work explores the cultural encounters that reshaped early modern North Indian communities. Focusing on the ramanandi bhakti community and the tantric Nath yogis, burchett describes the emergence of a new and sufi-inflected devotional sensibility—an ethical, emotional, and aesthetic disposition—that was often critical of tantric and yogic religiosity. Early modern North Indian devotional critiques of tantric religiosity, he shows, prefigured colonial-era Orientalist depictions of bhakti as “religion” and Tantra as “magic.” providing a broad historical view of bhakti, Tantra, and yoga while simultaneously challenging dominant scholarly conceptions of them, a genealogy of devotion offers a bold new narrative of the history of religion in India.

About the Author
Patton E. Burchett is assistant professor of religious studies at the College of William and Mary.
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 28TH SEPT. 2019

The Institute
By - Stephen King
ISBN :  9781529355390
Price : Rs 799/-
About the book
'It does everything you'd expect of a masterpiece - and it is one' Sunday Express
'Hums and crackles with delicious unease' Independent 'A captivating, hybrid novel that shape-shifts through several genres' The Sunday Times
Deep in the woods of Maine, there is a dark state facility where kids, abducted from across the United States, are incarcerated. In the Institute they are subjected to a series of tests and procedures meant to combine their exceptional gifts - telepathy, telekinesis - for concentrated effect.
Luke Ellis is the latest recruit. He's just a regular 12-year-old, except he's not just smart, he's super-smart. And he has another gift which the Institute wants to use...
Far away in a small town in South Carolina, former cop Tim Jamieson has taken a job working for the local sheriff. He's basically just walking the beat. But he's about to take on the biggest case of his career.
Back in the Institute's downtrodden playground and corridors where posters advertise 'just another day in paradise', Luke, his friend Kalisha and the other kids are in no doubt that they are prisoners, not guests. And there is no hope of escape.
But great events can turn on small hinges and Luke is about to team up with a new, even younger recruit, Avery Dixon, whose ability to read minds is off the scale. While the Institute may want to harness their powers for covert ends, the combined intelligence of Luke and Avery is beyond anything that even those who run the experiments - even the infamous Mrs Sigsby - suspect.
Thrilling, suspenseful, heartbreaking, The Institute is a stunning novel of childhood betrayed and hope regained.
About the Author
King is described by the Guardian as 'one of the greatest storytellers of our time', by the Mirror as a 'genius' and by The Sunday Times as 'one of the most fertile storytellers of the modern novel'. He is the author of more than sixty books including the No. 1 bestselling novel THE OUTSIDER, voted winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for best Mystery and Thriller 2018 and the classic IT, 'a book which speaks to everybody' - Guardian. Many of his titles have been turned into films, TV series and streamed events including MISERY, PET SEMATARY, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and MR MERCEDES.
King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 14TH SEPT 2019

The Anarchy 
The East India Company, Corporate Violence, 
and the Pillage of an Empire
By - William Dalrymple

ISBN :  978-1526618504
Price : Rs 699/-
About the book
In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army - what we would now call an act of involuntary privatisation.
The East India Company's founding charter authorised it to 'wage war' and it had always used violence to gain its ends. But the creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than four decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men - twice the size of the British army - and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. The Company's reach stretched until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London.
The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
About the Author
William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton and Brown. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. William lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK SATURDAY, -07 SEPTEMBER, 2019

The Epic of the Buddha: 
His Life and Teachings

By - Chittadhar Hrdaya 

About the Book
This award-winning book contains the English translation of Sugata Saurabha (“The Sweet Fragrance of the Buddha”), an epic poem on the life and teachings of the Buddha. Chittadhar Hṛdaya, a master poet from Nepal, wrote this tour de force while imprisoned for subversion in the 1940s and smuggled it out over time on scraps of paper. His consummate skill and poetic artistry are evident throughout as he tells the Buddha’s story in dramatic terms, drawing on images from the natural world to heighten the description of emotionally charged events. It is peopled with very human characters who experience a wide range of emotions, from erotic love to anger, jealousy, heroism, compassion, and goodwill. By showing how the central events of the Buddha’s life are experienced by Siddhartha, as well as by his family members and various disciples, the poem communicates a fuller sense of the humanity of everyone involved and the depth and power of the Buddha’s loving-kindness.            
For this new edition of the English translation, the translators improved the beauty and flow of most every line. The translation is also supplemented with a series of short essays by Todd Lewis, one of the translators, that articulates how Hṛdaya incorporated his own Newar cultural traditions in order to connect his readership with the immediacy and relevancy of the Buddha’s life and at the same time express his views on political issues, ethical principles, literary life, gender discrimination, economic policy, and social reform.

About the Author
Chittadhar Hṛdaya (1906–1982) was one of twentieth-century Nepal’s most eminent poets. Born into a Newar family in Kathmandu, he devoted his life to writing in his native language of Nepāl Bhāṣā (also called “Newari”). He composed this epic poem about the life of the Buddha while imprisoned for five years for publishing a poem in Newari that was regarded as subversive by the Nepalese government, smuggling it out on scraps of paper hidden in a tin box. 
Todd T. Lewis isa Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross.
Subarna Man Tuladhar taught at and served as the chief administrator of the Administrative Staff College in Kathmandu. For over four decades, he has also been a private scholar who published articles and short stories in Nepāl Bhāṣā (“Newari”), Nepali, and English. Since 1979, he has also taught several dozen foreign scholars doing research in the Kathmandu Valley. The growth in Newar studies in western academia in fields such as linguistics, anthropology, and religion is due, in considerable measure, to the exceptional work of Subarna Man Tuladhar as an instructor who pioneered the modern teaching of spoken Nepāl Bhāṣā.
ISBN No.  9781611806199   Price Rs. 599.00 
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BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 31ST, AUGUST, 2019

The Hindu Way
An Introduction to Hinduism
By -   Shashi Tharoor 

ISBN : 9789388292856   
Price : Rs. 799.00
About the Book : 
The Hindu Way: An Introduction to Hinduism, the new book by bestselling author Shashi Tharoor, whose last three books have sold over a quarter of a million copies in hardback, is the perfect introduction to one of the world’s oldest, largest and most complex religions. Although there are hundreds of books on Hinduism, there are only a few which provide a lucid, accessible, yet deeply layered account of the religion’s numerous belief systems, schools of thought, sects, tenets, scriptures, deities, rituals, customs, festivals and philosophies. This book is one of them. In the tradition of classics of the genre like K. M. Sen’s Hinduism and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s The Hindu View of Life, this book captures the essence of Hinduism with brevity, insight and an enviable grasp of the myriad layers and intricacies of one of the world’s greatest religions.
It is a book that is especially timely given the rather controversial role that religion has played in countries around the world. The author tells us why Hinduism is a religion that is well-suited to the needs of the world today: ‘In the twenty-first century, Hinduism has many of the attributes of a universal religion—a religion that is personal and individualistic, privileges the individual and does not subordinate one to a collectivity; a religion that grants and respects complete freedom to the believer to find his or her own answers to the true meaning of life; a religion that offers a wide range of choice in religious practice, even in regard to the nature and form of the formless God; a religion that places great emphasis on one’s mind, and values one’s capacity for reflection, intellectual enquiry, and self-study; a religion that distances itself from dogma and holy writ, that is minimally prescriptive and yet offers an abundance of options, spiritual and philosophical texts and social and cultural practices to choose from. In a world where resistance to authority is growing, Hinduism imposes no authorities; in a world of networked individuals, Hinduism proposes no institutional hierarchies; in a world of open-source information-sharing, Hinduism accepts all paths as equally valid; in a world of rapid transformations and accelerating change, Hinduism is adaptable and flexible, which is why it has survived for nearly 4,000 years.’

The text of The Hindu Way is embellished with over a hundred photographs and illustrations, many of them in colour, on various aspects of the religion. Based on Dr Tharoor’s extensive writing on the subject, including the bestselling Why I Am a Hindu, this book gives the reader an unrivalled understanding of Hinduism.
About the Author :
SHASHI THAROOR is the bestselling author of eighteen books, both fiction and non-fiction, besides being a noted critic and columnist. His books include the pathbreaking satire The Great Indian Novel (1989), the classic India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), the bestselling An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, for which he won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, 2016, for Books (Non-Fiction), and most recently, The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His India. He was a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and a former Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State for External Affairs in the Government of India. He is a three-time member of the Lok Sabha from Thiruvananthapuram and chairs Parliament’s External Affairs committee. He has won numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was honoured as New Age Politician of the Year (2010) by NDTV. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India’s highest honour for overseas Indians. He was given the Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
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