The time is early 16th century. The Rajput kingdom of Mewar is at the height of its power. It is locked in war with the Sultanates of Delhi, Gujarat and Malwa. But there is another deadly battle being waged within Mewar itself. who will inherit the throne after the death of the Maharana? The course of history, not just of Mewar but of the whole of India, is about to be changed forever. At the centre of Cuckold is the narrator, heir apparent of Mewar, who questions the codes, conventions and underlying assumptions of the feudal world of which he is a part, a world in which political and personal conduct are dictated by values of courage, valour and courtesy; and death is preferable to dishonour. A quintessentially Indian story, Cuckold has an immediacy and appeal that are truely universal.

<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: &quot;Open Sans&quot;, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">Except for the odd woman captured by pirates and sold into a Mughal harem, the first European women to enter India owed their presence to the Portuguese, in the 16th century, and later to the East India Company — in the expectation that they would marry and provide solace to lonely European traders and merchants. During India’s cold weather season, women would sail out from England to India to plunder its plentiful storehouse of bachelors, regardless of the dangers of the tropical climate and a culture that bore no resemblance to the one they had known at home. Who were these women? Were they gold-diggers, or hopeless romantics hoping to enact their own Cinderella fairy-tale? Did they live happily ever after? Set against the backdrop of India’s independence struggle, Wicked Women of the Raj is an unputdownable factual account with stories of twenty such women who broke society’s rules to marry the ‘heathen’ Indian princes.</span>

In a distinguished career spanning sixty years, veteran journalist, political commentator and author Kudip Nayar has seen and reported it all. From his vantage point - at the forefront of every ground-breaking news event, in close proximity to the people in power - Kuldip Nayar's articles are all the more interesting as they are first-hand accounts of historic political events, informed with personal insights into the motives and machinations that conspired to bring them about. From personal encounters with Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, and interviews with Mountbatten and Radcliffe, to the 1965 Indo-Pak war and its aftermath, the 1969 Congress split and the liberation of Bangladesh - this book is a compendium of the most important news-stories to break over the last sixty years, told by a man with access to the people in power, and who, in his capacity as information officer, also influenced these decisions.

The story of an extraordinary emotional adventure... In 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence, Shashank Mani, an IIT alumnus, organized a train journey across India. The purpose - to get a sense of how the country had changed in the past fifty years of independence, and what needed to be accomplished in the future. On this twenty-two day journey, in a specially chartered train, were 200 Indians from different walks of life - young men and women whose commitment would help shape the country's future. As they travelled, they discussed among themselves the issues that bothered them as citizens, and possible solutions. They came up with ideas on how best to fight corruption and kindle a new spirit of entrepreneurship. There was a reaffirmation of love for the country, tempered by an awareness of just how much more needed to be done, whether it was in population control or in protecting the environment. In a world suffering the first signs of an 'industrial hangover', the developmental models discovered during the journey offered the participants new and pragmatic alternatives. As India enters its sixtieth year of independence - and as the original 1997 team plans one more ambitious journey across India - this story is a fitting reminder of where we once were and where we need to head.

2007 marks 60 years of India's independence from colonial rule. Traditionally, in India, the attainment of 60 years, called shashti-poorti, is an important milestone in the life of an individual. It is a time to reflect on one's past and start planning for the future. This volume brings together a brilliant posse of writers, including academicians, journalists and activists, who took up the challenge of such stocktaking, of assessing the achievements and failures of these six decades across a range of issues and concerns. The result is a lively collection of essays that examine the problems, solutions and debates which move contemporary India. From democracy, elections, agriculture, economy, education, human rights and reservations - areas where no single voice or solution seems to be the answer - to literature, art, cinema and urban life - where the eye cannot keep pace with the flashing images - writers range at will, differing from one another in tone and opinion, but allied in the clarity and sharpness of their perspective. Dipankar Gupta discusses the imperatives of democracy in the context of reservations; Lord Meghnad Desaiwrites on the course that the Indian economy has charted over the past 60 years; Sudhir Kakar summarizes for us the paradoxes of the Indian family; Kanti Bajpai sets out the parameters of changing Indo-US relations; Sir Mark Tully reflects on the transformation of broadcasting technology and content; Dayanita Singh frames space and emotion in a series of speaking images of a society in transition while Pankaj Mishra writes with characteristic ease and insight on the death of the small town. A thoughtful compendium of elegantly presented arguments supported by facts and, more importantly, a real understanding of the way things work in this country of a billion ideas, India 60 is a must-read for all those who seek to know India. For, more than any other book in recent times, it captures for us, truthfully and without artifice, the shifting boundaries of ideology and creativity that continue to shape a nation at once old and young.

<p><span style="font-family: Roboto, sans-serif;">On the morning of 15 August 1947, when Jawaharlal Nehru, heir to Mahatma Gandhi, the Buddha and the European Enlightenment, raised the Indian Tricolour on the ramparts of the Red Fort, the seventeenth-century palace of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, India was free to make experiments with freedom. In the seven decades since Independence, the country gradually changed from Nehru’s democratic socialism to Narendra Modi’s democratic entrepreneurial digital India, dealing with its internal contradictions by playing the game of democracy and in the process becoming the sixth-largest global economy. And with Chandrayaan exploring the Moon, a space nation was born. India overlooks the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean, abridging Southeast Asia with the Middle East. With its immense brainpower and young demographics, India is geopolitically an indispensable nation. Indians play the game of democracy any which way they can: through massive elections; parliamentary debates and no-confidence motions; coalition forming and horse-trading; hartals, bandhs, dharnas, fast-unto-death; and finally, when nothing works, they knock at the doors of the Supreme Court. India in a New Key attempts to offer an insight into questions like: -How has India been experimenting with freedom to solve its socio-economic problems? -Can Modi—like Nehru—create a unified Indian consciousness? AUTHOR OF THE BOOK Narain D. Batra is professor of communications at Norwich University—a 200-year institution nestled in the Green Mountains of Vermont. His field of academic and professional expertise includes literature, history, journalism, geopolitics, diplomacy, social media, ethics, and most of all, the First Amendment. He is the author of several books including The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation: The Constitutional Foundations of the Aspirational Society; Digital Freedom: How Much Can You Handle?; A Self-Renewing Society; and, The Hour of Television. For more than a decade, he wrote a weekly column for The Statesman about American politics, culture and technology. He has also written for The Times of India, Business Standard, Mint, The Diplomatist and LA Reveu De L’Inde. He was the editor and publisher of a monthly magazine, People’s Times (Ahmedabad, India). Yoga, meditation and golf keep him going, and going.</span><br></p>

<span style="color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 14.6667px; text-align: justify;">The official narrative of India's freedom struggle has almost entirely been about the non-violent political movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. However, it is Sanjeev Sanyal's contention that there was a continuous parallel armed struggle against British colonial rulers that can be traced to the very beginning of colonial occupation. It abated for a while after the First War of Indian Independence in 1857, but re-emerged from the beginning of the twentieth century. It is not that people are unaware of Rashbehari Bose, Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sachindra Nath Sanyal and Subhas Chandra Bose, but the impression one gets from reading historical accounts is that theirs were individual acts of courage that did not have an impact on the larger Independence movement.</span>

<p>At the start of the nineteenth century, there was a Mughal emperor on the throne in Delhi, but the Mughal empire, in decline for almost a century, was practically gone. A new power had emerged—the British East India Company, which captured the Mughal capital in September 1803, becoming its de facto ruler. Swapna Liddle’s book is an unprecedented study of the ‘hybrid halfcentury’ that followed—when the two regimes overlapped and Delhi was at the cusp of modernity, changing in profound ways. With a ground-level view of the workings of early British rule in India, The Broken Script describes in rich detail the complex tussle between the last two Mughal emperors and the East India Company, one wielding considerable symbolic authority, and the other a fast-growing military and political power.It is, above all, the story of the people of Delhi in this period, some already well known, such as the poet Ghalib, and others, like the mathematician Ram Chander, who are largely forgotten: the cultural and intellectual elite, business magnates, the old landed nobility and the exotic new ruling class—the British. Through them, it looks at the economic, social and cultural climate that evolved over six decades. It examines the great flowering of poetry in Urdu, even as attempts to use the language for scientific education faltered;the fascinating history of the Delhi College, and how it represented a radically new model for higher education in India; the rise of modern journalism in Urdu, and various printing presses and publications, exemplified by papers.</p><div><br></div>

On 20 October 1962, high in the Himalayas on the banks of the fast-flowing Nam Ka Chu, over 400 Indian soldiers were massacred and the valley was overrun by soldiers of China’s People’s Liberation Army. Over the course of the next month, nearly 4,000 soldiers were killed on both sides and the Indian Army experienced its worst defeat ever. The conflict (war was never formally declared) ended because China announced a unilateral ceasefire on 21 November and halted its hitherto unhindered advance across NEFA and Ladakh. To add to India’s lasting shame, neither Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru nor the Indian Army was even aware that the ‘war’ had ended until they heard the announcement on the radio—despite the Indian embassy having been given the information two days earlier. This conflict continues to be one of our least understood episodes. Many books have been written on the events of the time, usually by those who were involved in some way, anxious to provide justification for their actions. These accounts have only succeeded in muddying the picture further. What is clear is that 1962 was an unmitigated disaster. The terrain on which most of the battles were fought (or not fought) was remote and inaccessible; the troops were sorely underequipped, lacking even warm clothing; and the men and officers who tried to make a stand were repeatedly let down by their political and military superiors. Time and again, in Nam Ka Chu, Bum-la, Tawang, Se-la, Thembang, Bomdila—all in the Kameng Frontier Division of NEFA in the Eastern Sector—and in Ladakh and Chusul in the Western Sector, our forces were mismanaged, misdirected or left to fend for themselves. If the Chinese Army hadn’t decided to stop its victorious campaign, the damage would have been far worse.In this definitive account of the conflict, based on dozens of interviews with soldiers and numerous others who had a first-hand view of what actually happened in 1962, Shiv Kunal Verma takes us on an uncomfortable journey through one of the most disastrous episodes of independent India’s history.

In 1965, while India was still licking its wounds from the disastrous war against the Chinese in 1962, the belligerent Pakistanis decided to wrest Kashmir from India. To test the waters, they launched their first military probes into the Rann of Kutch between February and May; India responded. By the end of July, India gave in to the dictates of the UN and stood down the troops it had mobilized in the Punjab and Kargil sectors in response to the Rann of Kutch skirmishes.