Dera Sacha Sauda and Gurmeet Ram Rahim: A Decade-long Investigation
299.00₹ 289.00₹
A journalist’s account of investigating Gurmeet Ram Rahim and his empire of exploitation
How did a nondescript young man from a farming family become the head of a quasi-religious sect with a million followers willing to die and kill for their ‘Pitaji’?
The story of the rise of Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan of the wildly popular Dera Sacha Sauda is anything but ordinary. It allegedly involved sexual exploitation, forced castrations, private militias, illegal trade in arms and opium, and land grab on an untold scale-until the self-styled godman was convicted for one of his many crimes in August 2017.
Here, There and Everywhere: Best-Loved Stories of Sudha Murty
250.00₹ 220.00₹
Wearer of many hats-philanthropist, entrepreneur, computer scientist, engineer, teacher-Sudha Murty has above all always been a storyteller extraordinaire. Winner of the R.K. Narayan Award for Literature, the Padma Shri, the Attimabbe Award from the government of Karnataka for excellence in Kannada literature, and the Raymond Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award, her repertoire includes adult non-fiction, adult fiction, children’s books, travelogues and technical books. Here, There and Everywhere is a celebration of her literary journey and is her 200th title across genres and languages. Bringing together her best-loved stories from various collections alongside some new ones and a thoughtful introduction, here is a book that is, in every sense, as multifaceted as its author.
Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World
1,390.00₹ 820.00₹
In a lyrical memoir and meditation on the nature of time and place, Elizabeth Dodd explores a variety of landscapes, reading the records left by inhabitants and by time itself. In spring in the Yucatán peninsula, she marks the equinox among the ruins of the Maya. In summer in the Orkney Islands, she considers linguistic and historic connections with Icelandic sagas. In tallgrass country in the fall, she observes bison and black-footed ferrets returning to their ancestral landscape. In winter in the canyons of the Ancestral Puebloans, she notes the standstill positions of the sun and the moon.
Ranging across continents and millennia, Dodd examines how people have inscribed the concept of time into their physical environments, through rock art, standing stones, and the alignment of buildings on the landscape. She follows the etymological trail of various languages, blending research with travel narrative and aesthetic meditation. From musings on the origin of the sandhill cranes’ transcontinental journey to reflections on the dimming light of shortening days as the winter solstice approaches, from depictions of exploding stars in ancient petroglyphs to meditations on the Great North Road, whose purpose scientists have yet to discover, Dodd captures the interstices of the natural world.
KANNUR – Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics
499.00₹ 425.00₹
Kannur, a sleepy coastal district in the scenic south Indian state of Kerala, has metamorphosed into a hotbed of political bloodshed in the past few decades. Even as India heaves into the age of technology and economic growth, the town has been making it to the national news for horrific crimes and brutal murders with sickening regularity. Ullekh N.P.’s latest book, Kannur: Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics draws a modern-day graph that charts out the reasons, motivations and the local lore behind the turmoil.
As Sumantra Bose, Professor of international and comparative politics, London School of Economics and Political Science, mentions in his foreword for the book, “Ullekh N.P. is uniquely placed to write this chronicle of Kannur, both as a native of the place and as the son of the late Marxist leader Pattiam Gopalan. Being an ‘insider’— and a politically connected insider…Ullekh tells the story of unending horror with deadpan factuality, tinged with compassion in his latest book, Kannur: Inside India’s Bloodiest Revenge Politics.”
Nadirs
1,190.00₹ 890.00₹
Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, Nadirs is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta Müller’s childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a child’s often nightmarish impressions of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream-like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and, at the same time, capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state.
Oil Notes
1,190.00₹ 890.00₹
Oil Notes is about the excitement of the earth below us, the passing of time, and oil: where it is trapped, how it is discovered, and its gradual disappearance. Writing in the form of a journal, Rick Bass brings a lyric imagination to the oil geologist’s craft, measuring people’s short lives and relationships against the seemingly immutable history of the earth, showing mountains and forests that do not move while we are free to race across them, living our lives in the ultimate freedom of speed. To dig for oil is a way to dig deep into human experience, a kind of subterranean exploration of self. And nothing escapes this writer’s eye or imagination.
In lean, considered prose, Bass’s essays and notes offer fascinating insights into the oil industry while skillfully painting the picture of a young man on the verge of adulthood. Oil Notes successfully conveys the excitement of possibility—a stimulating career, the pursuit of a wonderful woman, the beautiful mystery of the earth—that so addresses and captivates us in our own lives.
Bass provides a new introduction for this edition reflecting how much—and how little—has changed since his youth in the oil industry.
Only a game
1,190.00₹ 990.00₹
It’s only a game, Bill Littlefield’s National Public Radio program tells us, trying to keep sports in perspective. And for all the deadly serious perspectives of sports commentators and fans, Littlefield’s is perhaps the most realistic. It is certainly the most entertaining. Sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, Littlefield’s take on the games people play is as refreshing as it is enlightening. From baseball Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett’s untimely death, to pickup soccer games among misfit high-schoolers, to the most obscure nicknames and unusual mascots in college sports, the book collects memorable commentaries from Littlefield’s popular NPR sports show as well as never-before-published essays. No matter the topic, Littlefield illuminates the dark corners and unlikely angles of sports with wry good humor and a lightly worn expertise that lets nothing pass.
Sandhill and Whooping Cranes: Ancient Voices over America’s Wetlands
910.00₹ 800.00₹
Driving west from Lincoln to Grand Island, Nebraska, Paul A. Johnsgard remarks, is like driving backward in time. “I suspect,” he says, “that the migrating cranes of a pre–ice age period some ten million years ago would fully understand every nuance of the crane conversation going on today along the Platte.”
Johnsgard has spent nearly a half century observing cranes, from a yearly foray to Nebraska’s Platte River valley to see the spring migration, to pilgrimages to the birds’ wintering grounds in Arizona and nesting territory in Alaska. In this book he draws from his own extensive experience as well as the latest science to offer a richly detailed and deeply felt account of the ecology of sandhill and whooping cranes and the wetlands in which they live.
Incorporating current information on changing migration patterns, population trends, and breeding ranges, Johnsgard explains the life cycle of the crane, as well as the significance of these species to our natural world. He also writes frankly of the uncertain future of these majestic birds, as cranes and their habitats face the effects of climate change and increasing human population pressures. Illustrated with the author’s own ink drawings and containing a detailed guide to crane-viewing sites in the United States and Canada, this book is at once an invaluable reference and an eloquent testimony to how much these birds truly mean.
The Round and Other Cold Hard Facts
1,290.00₹ 995.00₹
Set largely in locations near the French Riviera, these eleven short stories depict the harsh realities of life for the less-privileged inhabitants of this very privileged region. Distinguished French writer J. M. G. Le Clézio lends his voice to the dispossessed and explores his familiar themes of alienation, immigration, poverty, violence, indifference, the loss of beauty, and the betrayal of innocence.
In one story an adolescent girl encounters the violence of a gang of masked bikers in a hostile and desolate housing project. In others a man stands by helplessly as a place of great beauty and deep childhood memory is slowly consumed and destroyed by a quickly developing city, an illegal immigrant desperate for work finds himself the prisoner of a ring trafficking in human beings, and two girls risk everything by running away from home and their dead-end factory jobs in search of a more meaningful life. At once tragic and evocative, these engrossing and beautifully crafted stories touch upon the loss of human values in a rapidly changing world.
THE THIRD PILLAR
799.00₹ 699.00₹
HOW MARKETS AND THE STATE LEAVE THE COMMUNITY BEHIND
Windshield Wilderness
1,690.00₹ 1,295.00₹
In his engaging book Windshield Wilderness, David Louter explores the relationship between automobiles and national parks, and how together they have shaped our ideas of wilderness. National parks, he argues, did not develop as places set aside from the modern world, but rather came to be known and appreciated through technological progress in the form of cars and roads, leaving an enduring legacy of knowing nature through machines.
With a lively style and striking illustrations, Louter traces the history of Washington State’s national parks – Mount Rainier, Olympic, and North Cascades – to illustrate shifting ideas of wilderness as scenic, as roadless, and as ecological reserve. He reminds us that we cannot understand national parks without recognizing that cars have been central to how people experience and interpret their meaning, and especially how they perceive them as wild places.
Windshield Wilderness explores what few histories of national parks address: what it means to view parks from the road and through a windshield. Building upon recent interpretations of wilderness as a cultural construct rather than as a pure state of nature, the story of autos in parks presents the preservation of wilderness as a dynamic and nuanced process.Windshield Wilderness illuminates the difficulty of separating human-modified landscapes from natural ones, encouraging us to recognize our connections with nature in national parks.
