Bøker utgitt av Aleph Book Company

One Who Serves Becomes the Master'' collects together timeless lessons from Hazrat Nizamuddin on living a life dedicated to love and service to humanity. - This book will appeal to anyone who wants easy to understand spiritual lessons that will enrich their lives. - This is the next book in Aleph Book Company''s ''Life Lessons'' series which features words of wisdom from India''s greatest spiritual leaders.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi has been an administrator, diplomat, author, and public intellectual of distinction for over four decades. His writings have spanned diverse genres, showcasing both his deep scholarship as well as a profound engagement with issues of politics, history, literature, and culture. He is respected not only for his statesmanship, but also admired as an exemplar of a fading ideal of our republic, one that placed ethics and the pursuit of the common good at the core of our public life. The Fourth Lion, a festschrift in honour of Gopalkrishna Gandhi, consists of twenty-six essays contributed by individuals drawn from various walks of life and from across the globe. Organized into thematic sections-Literature and Culture, History, Environment, Politics and Public Affairs, and Memoirs-the essays speak to concerns, interests and sensibilities that animate our lives.The Fourth Lion is a festschrift for Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a respected diplomat, author and an exemplary public intellectual.Features twenty-six essays on diverse themes like culture, history, environment, and politics that are pertinent to contemporary times.The title draws on the expertise of contributors from different walks of life from across the globe.

Over the centuries, Indo-Islamic and European ideas merged with Hindu traditions to make Lucknow a powerhouse of creativity and the centre of what was known as Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, the evocative Awadhi phrase for Hindu-Muslim syncretism. A city known for its art and artisans, the courts of the nineteenth-century rulers of Lucknow swarmed with people from all over the subcontinent as well as European painters and photographers. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, poets from Delhi''s Mughal court migrated to Lucknow in the hope of better emoluments. Lucknow''s legendary status as a city of culture waxed with every new influx of creative geniuses.A Shadow of the Past celebrates the people responsible for the city''s fame-its nawabs, painters, writers, revolutionaries, and freedom fighters. At a time when Uttar Pradesh has been reduced to one of the most backward states of the country, Mehru Jaffer shows us how Lucknow''s glorious cultural heritage ensures that it remains a city of substance.A Shadow of the Past showcases the glorious cultural heritage of the city of Lucknow.It celebrates the nawabs, the painters, the writers, the revolutionaries, and the freedom fighters that made Lucknow the centre of arts and culture.Mehru Jaffer traces the evolution of Lucknow across centuries, highlighting the diverse historical influences that form the cultural fabric of the city even today.The next book in Aleph''s city series, which includes the bestselling A Matter of Rats: A Short Biography of Patna and City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay.

In a grey and frightened world driven to despair by the pandemic, Ruskin Bond''s luminous new book, It''s a Wonderful Life, cuts through the gloom like a blade of bright steel. His unerring eye seeks out the joys and positive truths to be found in the smallest of incidents that occur in our lives, the good news and sources of happiness that we often miss out on as a result of the anxiety and bad news that has pervaded our daily existence over the past year.Perceptive, uplifting, and deeply moving, It''s a Wonderful Life is another triumph from one of our most beloved writers.This title is particularly relevant in the current pandemic when daily anxieties can far outweigh the joys of life.The positive and uplifting tone of this work casts light on the little bundles of happiness that go unnoticed in our busy lives.Ruskin Bond is a bestselling author whose writing appeals to readers of all ages.

NA

In incandescent prose, award-winning novelist Jeet Thayil tells the story of Newton Francis Xavier, blocked poet, serial seducer of young women, reformed alcoholic (but only just), philosopher, recluse, all-round wild man and India's greatest living painter. At the age of sixty-six, Xavier, who has been living in New York, is getting ready to return to the land of his birth to stage one final show of his work (accompanied by a mad bacchanal). As we accompany Xavier and his partner and muse 'Goody' on their unsteady and frequently sidetracked journey from New York to New Delhi, the venue of the final show, we meet a host of memorable characters-the Bombay poets of the seventies and eighties, 'poets who sprouted from the soil like weeds or mushrooms or carnivorous new flowers, who arrived like meteors, burned bright for a season or two and vanished without a trace', journalists, conmen, murderers, alcoholics, addicts, artists, whores, society ladies, thugs-and are also given unforgettable (and sometimes unbearable) insights into love, madness, poetry, sex, painting, saints, death, God and the savagery that fuels all great art.Narrated in a huge variety of voices and styles, all of which blend seamlessly into a novel of remarkable accomplishment, The Book of Chocolate Saints is the sort of literary masterpiece that only comes along once in a very long time.

The Lovers is about a man in search of a love story. This man, our narrator, is Kailash-a new immigrant, eager to shine. His friends teasingly call him Kalashnikov and sometimes AK-47, even AK. In his account of his years at a university in New York, AK takes us through the bittersweet arc of youth and love. There is discovery and disappointment. There are the brilliant women, Jennifer and Nina and Cai Yan. There is the political texture of campus life and the charismatic professor overseeing these young men and women, Ehsaan Ali (modelled on the real-life Eqbal Ahmad). Manifest in AK's first years and first loves is the wild enthusiasm of youth, its idealism, chaotic desires and confusions.A decidedly modern novel that melds story and reportage, anecdote and annotation, picture and text, fragment and essay, The Lovers reminds us of the works of John Berger and Teju Cole. Funny, meditative and shot through with waves of longing, the book explores feelings of discomfort about cultural misunderstandings and the lack of clarity between men and women. At heart though, it is an investigation of love-'love despite, or in spite of; love beyond and across dividing lines'.

We lose it. We gain it. We hate it. We hide it. We shame it. We suck it in and we even suck it out. Fat is an international obsession, a dirty word and our least understood body part. A ground-breaking combination of historical, cultural and cutting-edge scientific research, The Secret Life of Fat reveals everything we need to understand fat, how it influences our appetite and willpower, how it defends itself when attacked and why it grows back so quickly. Find out how our genetics and hormones determine how much fat we have and where exactly it will show. Fascinating and surprising in equal measure, this book will give you a powerful new understanding of fat.

Swimmer Among the Stars announces the arrival of a writer who is gifted not just with extraordinary talent but also with a subtle, original and probing mind.' - Amitav Ghosh. The fiction debut of the year.An interview with the last speaker of a language. A chronicle of the final seven days of a town that is about to be razed to the ground by an invading army. The lonely voyage of an elephant from Kerala to a princess's palace in Morocco. A fabled cook who flavours his food with precious stones. A coterie of international diplomats trapped in near-earth orbit. These, and the other stories in this collection, reveal an extraordinary storyteller, whose tales emerge from a tradition that includes the creators of the Arabian Nights and the Kathasaritsagara, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter and other ancient and modern masters of fabulist, surrealist and magical short stories. Furiously inventive, beautifully crafted and remarkably assured, Swimmer Among the Stars announces the arrival of a blazing new talent.

Indian food is one of the world's most popular cuisines. Even as it has transformed the contemporary urban foodscape in this age of globalization, social scientists have paid scant attention to the phenomenon. The essays in this book explore the relationship between globalization and South Asia through food. Udipi restaurants, Indian food in colonial times, dum pukht cuisine, staples of the prepared food industry like Bangalore's MTR Foods, Britain's curry culture, Indian fast food in California-these and other distinctive aspects of South Asia's food and culture are examined to gain new insights into subcontinental food and the ways in which it has influenced the world around us

NA

Asia Reborn unveils the story of Asia's resurgence over the past century. In the first single chronicle of the modern economic and political history of the whole continent, Prasenjit K. Basu weaves together a compelling account of how Asia's nations overcame European domination in the twentieth century-and its legacies of war and famine-to begin the long climb to economic dynamism.Asia Reborn shows British, Dutch and French colonies to have had scant infrastructure or modern industry and to have consequently been far behind Taiwan, Manchuria and Korea in social indicators such as literacy and life expectancy by mid-century. In West Asia and Burma, the brief European imprint created the ethnic conflicts that still plague these regions. The British Indian Army held the edifice of empire together. Ultimately, it was the undermining of its legitimacy by the armies of Subhas Bose, Sukarno, Ho Chi Minh and Aung San that helped end the ravaging of Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. By the end of the century, the eastern part of the liberated continent, had emulated Japan and Singapore in transforming itself into an industrious, dynamic and increasingly creative force finally capable of taking its people to new heights in an Asian twenty-first century.

In this book, read three stories from Shiva's adventure-filled life. Find out the tale behind the origin of the river Ganga and what role Shiva had to play in it; how the Shiva lingam avatar of Shiva came about and how Shiva destroyed three demons with one arrow. Beautifully retold by Subhadra Sen Gupta and accompanied by Tapas Guha's magnificent illustrations, this book will be loved by every child.

NA

The Small Wild Goose Pagoda is a natural and social history of 433 square yards of India. On this piece of land in the foothills of the Himalaya, the Sealy family have a small brick house with one-and-a-half bedrooms, two-and-a-half gardens, front, back and side, an old Fiat, an internet link with the world, and a terrace roof for walking on under the sky. Here-surrounded by trees: litchi, rosewood, magnolia, silk cotton, jacaranda, a reluctant pear, a profusely flowering peach-Allan Sealy looks back on his life as he turns sixty and goes from Householder to Forest Dweller (the two middle stages in the life of a man - as set out in Indian philosophical tradition).Lending depth and texture to a narrative written in the form of an almanack is his experience of building, after a visit to China, a pagoda on his roof. As the pagoda takes shape we are introduced to a host of extraordinary characters who drift in and out of the 433 square yards: Dhani, family retainer and mali, bent in half by age; Habilis, master brick-layer and contractor with a roving eye; Beauty, part of Habilis's crew, who may or may not be his lover; Victor, stoic assistant to Habilis....In this remarkable book, his first in a decade, award-winning novelist and travel writer, Irwin Allan Sealy, gives us an evocative account of the drama of small town life; at the same time it is an extraordinary meditation on work, family history, nature, Indian society, and the passage of time.

Rich in detail, this eye-opening book explores the activities and political strategies of women political workers and leaders of Shiv Sena. Based on more than ten years of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with dozens of women Sena workers in urban Maharashtra, the work shows how they conjure political authority through the inventive, dangerous, and transgressive political personas known as dashing ladies. Through the narratives of these women, Tarini Bedi develops a feminist theory of brokerage politics, and what can be termed 'political matronage'.

NA

A brave new voice on India's literary scene.' - Indian ExpressA teacher lies dead in a small village near Calcutta. Since the Chinese took over, things in the Bengal Protectorate have been sliding from bad to worse. It looks like the work of the New Thug Society, whose members are determined to free Bengal from Chinese oppression.Under Governor Wen, who is confused and slightly weepy, the law and order situation continues to deteriorate. Resurrected members of the Bengal politburo stalk the land, demoralizing all those who thought they were dead. The Maoists are still in the jungle, and remain strangely reluctant to re-integrate with the Motherland. Meanwhile, Didu has escaped, the price of fish is rising, and the Competent Authority, undisputed ruler of India, is trying to start a war with China Unimpressed by the rising threat of war, which is none of his business, Inspector Li of Lal Bazaar doggedly pursues his prey. Why is Propagandist Wang so keen that he investigate something else? What are mining magnate Sanjeev Verma and his partner Agarwal up to, and how is Governor Wen involved? Will Inspector Li be able to interview his suspects before General Zhou shoots them all? And why does his ex-wife keep calling, even though her new boyfriend is rich enough to have a duplicate Eiffel Tower in his garden?Outrageously funny and wickedly imaginative, Murder with Bengali Characteristics marks the return of one of our finest comic writers.