Book Excerpt

Editor's Note: Rajneeti: A Biography of Rajnath Singh written by Gautam Chintamani chronicles Singh's fifty-year-long political journey during which he rose from a Swayamsevak in the RSS to become the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and later the home and defence minister of India. The book delves into Singh's various achievements as a cabinet minister in Vajpayee’s government, and as president of the BJP. Chintamani divulges how Singh, a two-term party chief, played a pivotal role in 2014 elections which brought…

Editor’s note: New Delhi MP Meenakshi Lekhi makes her debut as a fiction writer with her latest book, The New Delhi Conspiracy. Co-authored by Lekhi and Krishna Kumar, the book, a political thriller, was launched on Friday by BJP MP JP Nadda at NCUI Auditorium & Convention Centre, New Delhi. The book is a work of fiction and claims to be adventurous and intriguing and begins with the death of a scientist, who warns a woman politician in New Delhi about the impending danger to the life of Raghav Mohan, the…

Editor's Note: The following excerpt has been taken from Parashar Kulkarni's Cow And Company. It's a hilarious work of fiction, set in colonial India, and tells the story of a British Chewing Gum Company that opens shop in Bombay with the objective of enticing Indian paan addicts to switch to chewing gums. To prove their point that chewing gum is a superior substitute of paan, they use a cow as their mascot. The cow's photo goes up on all the posters, and of course, there are consequences. Religious sentiments are…

Editor's Note: The excerpt below has been taken from 'The Yogini', by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay. The book chronicles the journey of a modern woman, Homi, who is one day approached by a yogi who is visible to only her. In a manner that can be described as surrealistic, the book depicts the story of a woman desperate to prove that her life is ruled by her own free will. Here is an excerpt from the book: Several days had passed, and the brief discussion about fate had slipped from Homi’s mind, which was entirely…

As the first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru had a slew of difficult decisions to make. Only a few months in, India had already witnessed several incidents of communal violence, incited by the colonial rulers, including the bloody Partition riots. Therefore, despite being a secularist in the Western mode, Nehru knew that the ideals of Western secularism wouldn't work for India. As debates over secularism in India are once again raging in Parliament, the streets and social media, an essay titled…

The former deputy chairman of Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia launched his book, Backstage The Story Behind India's High Growth Rate Years, on Wednesday, during an event attended by many dignitaries in Delhi. Also present during the occasion was former prime minister, Manmohan Singh. Although not a memoir, this book weaves events from Ahluwalia's personal life with India's journey through economic reforms in the last 30 years during which Ahluwalia had not only had a front-row seat to witness the economic…

In a new book titled Rebels With A Cause, Famous Dissenters and Why They Are Not Being Heard, the author, Professor T.T Ram Mohan traces the trajectory of famous dissenters like Arundhati Roy, Oliver Stone, Kancha Ilaiah, David Irving, Yanis Varoufakis, U.G. Krishnamurti and John Pilger to depict how, in practice, dissent tends to be severely circumscribed and it is only the celebrity status of these dissenters in some cases that have kept them from being actively harmed. For instance, Mohan propounds that Arundhati Roy…