BOOKS OF THE WEEK - SATURDAY, 15TH, JUNE 2019

The Carpet Weaver

By - Nemat Sadat 

ISBN : 9780670092048 

Price : Rs. 599.00

About the Book : 

Afghanistan, 1977. Kanishka Nurzada, the son of a leading carpet seller, falls in love with his friend Maihan, with whom he shares his first kiss at the age of sixteen. Their romance must be kept secret in a nation where the death penalty is meted out to those deemed to be kuni, a derogatory term for gay men. And when war comes to Afghanistan, it brings even greater challenges-and danger-for the two lovers.

From the cultural melting pot of Kabul to the horrors of an internment camp in Pakistan, Kanishka's arduous journey finally takes him to the USA in the desperate search for a place to call home-and the fervent hope of reuniting with his beloved Maihan. But destiny seems to have different plans in store for him.

Intimate and powerful, The Carpet Weaver is a sweeping tale of a young gay man's struggle to come of age and find love in the face of brutal persecution.

About the Author :

Nemat Sadat is a prominent activist and journalist currently based in the USA. He is the first native from Afghanistan to have publicly come out as gay and campaign for LGBTQIA rights in Muslim communities worldwide. While teaching at the American University of Afghanistan, he secretly mobilized a gay movement off campus but was then persecuted by the Afghan authorities and deemed a national security threat for allegedly subverting Islam. Sadat has previously worked at ABC News's Nightline, CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and the UN Chronicle, and has earned six university degrees, including graduate degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and Oxford. The Carpet Weaver is his first novel.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

www.ebdbooks.com

Our mail order service ships books in India and Overseas

Email: sales@ebd.in, Phone: +91 135 2655192

BOOKS OF THE WEEK - 23 JUNE, 2018

By - Jairam Ramesh   

About the Book

This is the first definitive biography of arguably India’s most influential and powerful civil servant: P.N. Haksar, Indira Gandhi’s alter ego during her period of glory.

Educated in the sciences and trained in law, Haksar was a diplomat by profession and a communist-turned-democratic socialist by conviction. He had known Indira Gandhi from their student days in London in the late-1930s, even though family links predated this friendship. They kept in touch, and in May 1967, she plucked him out of his diplomatic career and appointed him secretary in the prime minister’s Secretariat. This is when he emerged as her ideological beacon and moral compass, playing a pivotal role in her much-heralded achievements including the nationalization of banks, abolition of privy purses and princely privileges, the Indo-Soviet Treaty, the creation of Bangladesh, rapprochement with Sheikh Abdullah, the Simla and New Delhi Agreements with Pakistan, the emergence of the country as an agricultural, space and nuclear power and, later, the integration of Sikkim with India.

This power and influence notwithstanding, Haksar chose to walk away from Indira Gandhi in January 1973. She, however, persuaded him to soon return, first as her special envoy and later as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission where he left his distinctive imprint. Exiting government once and for all in May 1977, he then continued to be associated with a number of academic institutions and became the patron for various national causes like protecting India’s secular traditions, propagating of a scientific temper, strengthening the public sector and deepening technological self-reliance. Successive prime ministers sought his counsel and in May 1987, he initiated the reconstruction of India’s relations with China. He remained an unrepentant Marxist and one of India’s most respected elder statesman and leading public figures till his death in November 1998.

Drawing on Haksar’s extensive archives of official papers, memos, notes and letters, Jairam Ramesh presents a compelling chronicle of the life and times of a truly remarkable personality who decisively shaped the nation’s political and economic history in the 1960s and 1970s that continues to have relevance for today’s India as well. Written in Ramesh’s inimitable style, this work of formidable scholarship brings to life a man who is fast becoming a victim of collective amnesia.

About the Author

Jairam Ramesh is a member of Parliament since 2004 and has been a union minister between 2006 and 2014. He is the author of a number of acclaimed works including Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature (2017), Old History, New Geography: Bifurcating Andhra Pradesh (2016), To the Brink and Back: India's 1991 Story (2015), Legislating for Justice: The 2013 Land Acquisition Law (2015), Green Signals: Ecology, Growth and Democracy in India (2015), Making Sense of Chindia: Reflections on China and India (2005) and others. Before becoming a politician, he worked in various capacities in the Government of India including the Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of Finance, Planning Commission and Ministry of Industry.

ISBN : 9789386797261   Price : Rs. 799.00

www.ebdbooks.com

Our mail order service ships books in India and Overseas

Email: sales@ebd.in, Phone: +91 135 2655192

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

American Veda

By : Philip Goldberg

About the book :

In February 1968 the Beatles went to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days in the wilderness. 

With these words, Philip Goldberg begins his monumental work, American Veda, a fascinating look at Indias remarkable impact on Western culture. This eye-opening popular history shows how the ancient philosophy of Vedanta and the mind-body methods of Yoga have profoundly affected the worldview of millions of Americans and radically altered the religious landscape. 

What exploded in the 1960s actually began more than two hundred years earlier, when the United States started importing knowledge as well as tangy spices and colorful fabrics from Asia. The first translations of Hindu texts found their way into the libraries of John Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. From there the ideas spread to Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and succeeding generations of receptive Americans, who absorbed Indias science of consciousness and wove it into the fabric of their lives. Charismatic teachers like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda came west in waves, prompting leading intellectuals, artists, and scientists such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, John Coltrane, Dean Ornish, and Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, to adapt and disseminate what they learned from them. The impact has been enormous, enlarging our current understanding of the mind and body and dramatically changing how we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos. 

Goldberg paints a compelling picture of this remarkable East-to-West transmission, showing how it accelerated through the decades and eventually moved from the counterculture into our laboratories, libraries, and living rooms. Now physicians and therapists routinely recommend meditation, words like karma and mantra are part of our everyday vocabulary, and Yoga studios are as ubiquitous as Starbuckses. The insights of Indias sages permeate so much of what we think, believe, and do that they have redefined the meaning of life for millions of Americansand continue to do so every day. 

Rich in detail and expansive in scope, American Veda shows how we have come to accept and live by the central teaching of Vedic wisdom: Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.

About the Author :

Philip Goldberg is the author or coauthor of nineteen books, including Roadsigns: On the Spiritual Path and The Intuitive Edge. Based in Los Angeles, he is an ordained interfaith minister, a public speaker and seminar leader, and the founder of Spiritual Wellness and Healing Associates. He is director of outreach for SpiritualCitizens.net and blogs regularly on religion for the Huffington Post.

 ISBN : 9780804139434                                                                                Price : Rs. 599.00 

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The Elephant Catchers

 By - Subroto Bagchi

About the Book :
'Unlike an operation to catch rabbits, trapping an elephant calls for expertise over enthusiasm. Those who hunt rabbits are rarely able to rope in elephants.' Many organizations, even those that may have a brilliant start, falter in their attempts to achieve transformational growth in their later phases. In The Elephant Catchers, Subroto Bagchi distils his years of on-the-ground learning to explore why this happens, and what such organizations and their people must do to climb to the next level and beyond. Through a combination of engaging anecdotes from his experiences as co-founder, and subsequently Chairman, of Mindtree Ltd, and insightful stories from our everyday world, Bagchi demonstrates a crucial point: Organizations with real ambition to get to the top need to embrace the idea of scale and then ensure that it systematically pervades every aspect of its functioning. In doing this, he leads you to evaluate:

• Is your organization's infrastructure designed to evolve and ultimately mimic the simultaneity of a living organism?
• Are you constantly nurturing and renewing your brand identity or letting it stagnate and decay?
• Does your sales force have as many hunters as it has farmers? Or is it dominated by a grizzly who just waits for the salmon to land in its mouth?
• In a fiercely competitive environment, are you really stepping 'out of the box' and learning from unusual sources?
• Are leaders in your organization truly building capacity or merely solving problems?

Practical advice on real issues, from how to deal with consultants to the question of succession, words of caution on strategy traps and M&As, and invaluable insights into a whole range of growth-related issues -The Elephant Catchers has it all. Engaging, wise and thoroughly accessible, this book is a must-read for everyone in every organization seeking breakout success.

About the author :

Subroto Bagchi is Chairman, Mindtree Ltd, which he co-founded in 1999. Author of the bestsellers The High-Performance Entrepreneur, Go Kiss the World, The Professional, MBA at 16 and The Professional Companion, Bagchi was acclaimed as India's No.1 bestselling business books author. His works have been translated into several languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Korean and Chinese. He is married to writer Susmita Bagchi, and they have two daughters, Neha and Niti.

 ISBN : 9789350095836                                                                  PRICE : Rs. 499.00 

BOOKS OF THE MONTH