‘Only one of Pakistan’s finest young writers could carry weighty themes like honour, fame, and violence with such deliberation and poise.’—Fatima Bhutto. ‘Qandeel was a marvelous blaze. She set our dark world on fire and made enough light to expose the hypocrisies of Pakistan’s pious patriarchy. In Sanam Maher’s terrific and necessary book, those flames burn brighter than ever.’ —Bilal Tanweer. ‘A powerful and deeply moving account from an important new voice in non-fiction.’ —Sonia Faleiro. Bold’, ‘Shameless’, ‘Siren’ were just some of the (kinder) words used to describe Qandeel Baloch. She embraced these labels and played the coquette, yet dished out biting critiques of some of Pakistan’s most holy cows. Pakistanis snickered at her fake American accent, but marvelled at her gumption. She was the stuff of a hundred memes and Pakistan’s first celebrity-by-social media. Qandeel first captured the nation’s attention on Pakistan Idol with a failed audition and tearful outburst. But it was in February 2016, when she uploaded a Facebook video mocking a presidential ‘warning’ not to celebrate Valentine’s Day, that she went ‘viral’. In the video, which racked up nearly a million views, she lies in bed, in a low-cut red dress, and says in broken English, ‘They can stop to people go out…but they can’t stop to people love.’ The video shows us everything that Pakistanis loved—and loved to hate—about Qandeel, ‘Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian’. Five months later, she would be dead. In July 2016, Qandeel’s brother would strangle her in their family home, in what was described as an ‘honour killing’—a punishment for the ‘shame’ her online behaviour had brought to the family. Scores of young women and men are killed in the name of honour every year in Pakistan. Many cases are never reported, and of the ones that are, murderers are often ‘forgiven’ by the surviving family members and do not face charges. However, just six days after Qandeel’s death, the Anti-Honour Killings Laws Bill was fast-tracked in parliament, and in October 2016, the loophole allowing families to pardon perpetrators of ‘honour killings’ was closed. What spurred the change? Was it the murder of Qandeel Baloch? And how did she come to represent the clash between rigid conservatism and a secular, liberal vision for Pakistan? Through dozens of interviews—with aspiring models, managers, university students, activists, lawyers, police officers and journalists, among them—Sanam Maher gives us a portrait of a woman and a nation.

From the rape of Mathura, a young tribal girl, by two policemen in Desaiganj, Maharashtra, in 1972, to the brutal sexual assault and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, Kashmir, in 2018, the narrative around violence against women in India has barely changed. While laws have been reformed, societal structures that perpetuate and even justify this violence have remained the same over the decades. Kalpana Sharma, who has written on gender issues for over thirty years, goes deep into the subject in The Silence and the Storm. She argues that violence against women is not restricted to sexual assault, rape, domestic violence and child sexual abuse. What of the violence that developmental policy and environmental destruction wreaks on women—on their health, on their workload, on their mobility? Poor women lose their lands, their livelihoods and access to common resources like forests and rivers. Their daily lives, already burdened, become close to unbearable. There is also the violence in which women are often collateral damage. In conflict zones, men take up arms on behalf of the state or an ideology but the cost is not just loss of life on both sides, but also the trauma inflicted on women caught in the middle. Sexual violence against women in India is also inevitably linked with the kind of politics that dominates today—sectarian politics that feeds on, breeds, encourages, and inflames societal divisions. And, as always, in the battle between warring groups, women pay the price. In her book, Sharma provides the necessary perspective to understand violence against women in India in the larger context of the politics and economics of the country. Her passionate, empathetic and cogently argued account deepens our understanding of the violence that Indian women have had to endure for decades.

The tiger has captured the imagination of human beings from the beginning of recorded history. It has been feared, worshipped, admired, hunted, studied, photographed, written about, immortalized in art and poetry, and has enthralled king and commoner alike. Tiger Fire celebrates this magnificent predator by bringing together the very best non-fiction writing, photography and art on the Indian tiger from the first written description of a real-life encounter with the animal by the Mughal Emperor Babur in the sixteenth century to photographs and studies of the last of the species surviving in the wild today. Conceived and edited by the world’s foremost authority on the Indian tiger, Valmik Thapar (who has also contributed many pieces and photographs to this volume), the book’s contributors are drawn from an array of renowned naturalists, writers, photographers, and tiger enthusiasts down the centuries including Babur, Akbar, François Bernier, Thomas Roe, R.G. Burton, Walter Campbell, Thomas Williamson, F.W. Champion, Kesri Singh, Jim Corbett, Hugh Allen, Richard Perry, Arjan Singh, George Schaller, Kenneth Anderson, M. Krishnan, Peter Jackson, Fateh Singh Rathore, Kim Sullivan, Tejbir Singh, Jaisal and Anjali Singh, Aditya ‘Dicky’ Singh, K. Ullas Karanth, Dharmendra Khandal, and Dhritiman Mukherjee. Culled from over a million words (both published and unpublished) on the animal, and several thousand photographs, the accounts and pictures assembled in this book show us the tiger in extraordinary and compelling detail. The book contains stories and reports of tiger hunts, attacks on humans by tigers, fights between the tiger and other animals such as the leopard, the bison, the wild dog, the boar, and the elephant, narratives about tigers rearing their young, finding mates, and wild tigers forging bonds with humans. Using his unequalled knowledge of wild tigers, derived from almost forty years of observing them in their natural habitat, Valmik Thapar has put together the most ambitious book ever published on the tiger in India. A lasting testimonial to an animal that has dazzled the human race, Tiger Fire will be treasured by everyone who possesses it.

Recent political developments across large parts of the globe have made it clear that liberalism is in crisis. Several political regimes and political leaders have little time and respect for liberal values but it is important to understand that in many cases they have been empowered by popular social attitudes that have turned against liberalism. In order to understand this phenomenon, Rudrangshu Mukherjee goes back to the origins of liberalism to understand its substantive ideas and lineage. He shows how liberalism, a Western doctrine, flourished when Western empires dominated much of the world. Ironically, while values like freedom, democracy and citizenship were nurtured in the West, they were denied to the people of the countries that had been colonized by Western nations. Liberalism in the West thrived by being illiberal elsewhere. The contradictions within made liberalism vulnerable to attack. Totalitarian regimes swept it aside, and other doctrines replaced it with increasing frequency. In the twenty-first century, in both the East as well as the West, liberalism appears to be fast disappearing. This important book tells us why.

Jagadish Chandra Bose, also called the ‘father of radio science’, was one of the most prominent figures of India’s scientific community. Between 1895 and 1900, Bose made remarkable contributions to certain fundamental aspects of modern physics. Then, his interest shifted to plant physiology and here, too, he was responsible for major discoveries and insights. However, within a few decades of his death in 1937, the scientific community in particular and the world at large seemed to have forgotten about him. Starting from the time of his birth in 1858 in a Brahmo family in Bengal Presidency, and ending with his death a week before his seventy-ninth birthday, this exhaustive biography takes a close look at Bose’s early career as a physicist and his later work as a plant physiologist, and explains the magic behind some of his pioneering findings. It describes how he dealt with racial discrimination and academic plagiarism during his life, and how he found strength, inspiration, and support in the unlikeliest of places. It also makes a case for why Bose, and not Guglielmo Marconi, should have won the 1919 Nobel Prize for Physics for his research into radio waves. The first in-depth biography of the scientist written in the twenty-first century, Unsung Genius: A Life of Jagadish Chandra Bose paints a striking portrait of Bose—the man, the nationalist, the scientist, and inventor par excellence whom the world has almost forgotten.

Close to 150 years after he was born, how relevant is Mahatma Gandhi? In our country, he is revered as the Father of the Nation; his face still adorns currency notes, postage stamps and government offices; streets and welfare schemes continue to be named after him but has he been reduced to a mere symbol? Do his values, message and sacrifice have any meaning for us in the twenty-first century? In Why Gandhi Still Matters, the Mahatma’s grandson and award-winning writer and scholar Rajmohan Gandhi, appraises Gandhi and his legacy by examining some of his most famous (and often most controversial) ideas, beliefs, actions, successes and failures. He analyses Gandhi’s commitment to democracy, secularism, pluralism, equality and non-violence, his gift to the world of satyagraha, the key strategies in his fight for India’s freedom, his opposition to caste discrimination, and his equations with Churchill, Jinnah and Ambedkar, as also his failings as a human being and family man. Taken together, the author’s insights present an unsentimental view of aspects of Gandhi’s legacy that have endured and those that have been cast aside by power-hungry politicians, hate groups, casteist organizations, venal industrialists, terrorists, and other enemies of India’s promise.

India has more than 1,200 species of birds. The richness and diversity of the country’s birdlife has been celebrated by thousands of ornithologists, birders and amateur naturalists for hundreds of years. Winged Fire brings together the best accounts, pictures and art on our birds. Contributors include luminaries like Babur, Abu’l-Fazl, Jahangir, François Pyrard, Edward Hamilton Aitken, Douglas Dewar, Jim Corbett, Colonel Kesri Singh, F. W. Champion, Salim Ali, E. P. Gee, A. Mervyn Smith, Hugh Allen, Kenneth Anderson, M. Krishnan, Khushwant Singh, R. S. Dharmakumarsinhji, E. R. C. Davidar, Zafar Futehally, Ruskin Bond, A. J. T. Singh, Peter Smetacek, Irwin Allan Sealy, Rishad Naoroji, and Bulbul Sharma. An essay by Ramki Sreenivasan provides a detailed account of the major species and their distribution, behaviour and habitats. Winged Fire is the last book in the trilogy—that also includes Wild Fire and Tiger Fire—put together by Valmik Thapar; taken together, these books give the reader an extraordinary view of India’s wildlife.

‘[Thich Nhat Hanh] shows us the connection between personal, inner peace and peace on earth.’—His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In this extraordinary book, one of the world’s best known Zen Buddhist teachers uses Buddhist precepts to teach us how to find meaning in our jobs and deal with challenges in the workplace. The book’s emphasis is on how to use applied Buddhism in daily life. It shows us how to eliminate stress, adopt new models of leadership, doing business and mindful consumption, and tells us how we can move in the direction of achieving sanity and fulfilment in our daily routines. Practical, insightful and easy to follow, Work offers us new ways in which to live and earn our livelihood.

<p>"Ruskin Bond is eighty-nine years old: long past sixty, the age at which one becomes a senior citizen; also the age around which it is said one should think of retiring from active life. As the years go by, his contentment with living the life he has chosen–keeping to himself, with his family and his books, in Landour–has only grown stronger. He takes great joy in the world outside his window: the changing shades of nature, interesting people, good food, nice walks. Inside his room there are thoughts and memories, and the journal and letters he writes every day.</p><p>All of it makes for a wonderful life–and that is what this book is about. In his trademark warm, witty, whimsical style and his marvellously simple prose, Ruskin tells us how to enjoy the advancing years some of us are blessed with, and how to make the most of the amazing gift called life."</p><div><br></div>

<p>Globally, every industry and every enterprise is being buffeted by strong waves of change, to navigate which, companies must be able to see beyond the visible. The Next New identifies and profiles the deep shifts likely to fundamentally change the business landscape in every industry. Understanding these trends would prove particularly useful for mid-sized companies. Not only are they vulnerable to change but also most of them are unable to see beyond a few quarters of growth and sales. Drawing on numerous interviews of business leaders and cutting edge research findings from MarketsandMarkets, the book provides a practical roadmap to prepare businesses for the new ecosystem being created, in turn helping to articulate the fifth industrial revolution. This is a valuable resource for not only organizations but also young professionals, students, academics, policymakers and entrepreneurs.</p><div><br></div>