India : A portrait by Patrick French

The Fabric of Cosmos

The Dissapearing Spoon

The Bad Boys Guide To The Good Indian Girl by Annie Zaidi, Smriti Ravindra

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple

The Last Mughal’ by William Dalrymple has to be one of the most engaging and engrossing historical account of the great Indian mutiny of 1857. The book sensitively handles the issue with a balanced approach in terms of the references.

Keeping in mind the local sensibilities Dalrymple relied on an impressive list of sources, including people from Zafar’s court and other royals. So you have manuscript sources in European languages, unpublished manuscripts and dissertations, Persian and Urdu sources, contemporary works and articles in European languages, and secondary works and periodical articles being referred to every now and then by the author.

To make life easy for a history student, throughout the book Dalrymple gives the source name and the page number to authenticate his claim.

There are several things that saddens one after reading the book. The one that glares out from the rest is the way the great Mughal capital was treated. Delhi once a city of art, beauty, culture, and a symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity was robbed of everything it stood for. The Indian rebels were as much to blame for the city’s loss as were the British.

You could share the grief of Bahadur Shah Zafar as the helpless soul who saw his sons and empire going down in front of his eyes. The once peaceful and poetic city was turned into a mass graveyard with bodies rotting in the open, and destruction all around. The last nail in the coffin was the mindless violence that followed in the aftermath. Many great poets of the era lost their lives and rare poetic work was lost. Worse was the treatment of the emperor Zafar. He was exiled to Rangoon, confined to a small house with a handful of loyal followers, his death a hush-hush affair, and his place of burial kept a secret for 129 years till it was accidentally discovered.

And you won’t miss the fact that we lost a great cause and the war due to a complete lack of discipline and unity.

Dalrymple’s work gives you a beautiful glimpse into the life and times of the great Mughal during his last few years. The fight for succession, influence of a eunuch, poet as court members, celebration of Hindu festivals with equal fervour, a royal wedding of monumental scale, old world charm of a flourishing city, Dalrymple has woven it all seamlessly. History has rarely been this fascinating!

Dalrymple introduces the main characters in a separate section before the actual book, and that makes his narrative easy to follow. When it comes to Bahadur Shah Zafar, Dalrymple gives a very poignant account bordering on pity at times. But it is his love for the city of Delhi that you won’t miss throught the novel. Maybe that’s why his family divide their time between Delhi, London, and Scotland.

This one para more or less summarises the whole book-

“He (Zafar) is blamed by some nationalist historians for corresponding with the British during the fighting, and by others for failing to lead the rebels to victory. Yet it is difficult to see what more Zafar could have done, at least at the age of eighty-two. He was physically infirm, partially senile and had no money to pay the troops who flocked to his standard. Octogenerians can hardly lead a cavalry charge. Try as he might, he was powerless even to stop the looting of Delhi by an insurgent army that proved almost as much a threat to Zafar’s subjects as it did to his enemies. Yet the Mutiny Papers bear eloquent witness to the energy he expended trying to protect his people and his city.”

The reality will bite you at times but didn’t they say, “everything is fair in war.” A must read book for all the history lovers.

Arranged Marriage by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Born in India, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni lives near San Francisco with her husband and two children. She teaches creative writing at a local college, and is the coordinator for a helpline for South Asian women. She is the author of several award-winning volumes of poetry, as well as Arranged Marriage, her acclaimed collection of short stories, a bestseller in America and winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize for fiction, an American Book Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for fiction. She is also the author of two novels, The Mistress of Spices and Sister of My Heart.

Can Love Happen Twice - Ravinder Singh

Ravinder Singh is the author of I Too Had a Love Story. After working as a computer engineer for several years at some of India's prominent IT companies, Singh is now pursuing his MBA at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.

His next book Can Love Happen Twice? is all set to hit the bookstores.

On Valentine's Day, a radio station in Chandigarh hosts a special romantic chat show. Ravin and his three best friends are invited as guests to talk about Ravin's love story. But surprisingly everyone apart from Ravin turns up. As the show goes live, there is only one question in every listener's mind: what has happened to Ravin?

To answer this question the three friends begin reading from a handwritten copy of Ravin's incomplete second book.

Lucknow Boy : A Memoir - Vinod Mehta

And by any reckoning, it is an extraordinary story. Mehta grew up as an insouciant army brat from a Punjabi refugee family, in the syncretic culture of Lucknow of the 1950s—an experience that turned him into an unflagging ‘pseudo secularist’. Leaving home with a BA third class degree, he experimented with a string of jobs, including that of a factory hand in suburban Britain, before accepting an offer to edit Debonair, a journal best known for featuring naked women. With the eclecticism and flair that were to become his hallmark, he turned it into an intelligent, lively magazine, while managing to keep fans of its centrespreads happy. The next three decades saw Vinod Mehta becoming one of India’s most widely-read and influential editors, as he launched a number of successful new publications, from the now legendary Sunday Observer to the weekly newsmagazine, Outlook.



This remarkably candid memoir, with its ringside view of many of the major events of our times, brims over with wit, wisdom, scandal and gossip. Mehta recounts with zest how he was wooed and then summarily sacked by sundry media proprietors when their much-vaunted respect for editorial freedom broke down in the face of political pressures. There are riveting accounts of his encounters with personalities from the worlds of politics, business, films and the media. There are masterly pen portraits of personalities ranging from Shobhaa De to V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Sonia Gandhi. ( And of course, Mehta’s dog Editor who now, like his master, gets quantities of fan and hate mail.) There are the stories behind the scoops Mehta has brought before a fascinated public, from the alleged mole in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet, to the cricket match-fixing scandal, to the Radia Tapes.



Embedded within these racy tales are thoughtful insights on Indian politics and society. There are valuable lessons, too, in Mehta’s inside stories of his successful media launches, in his tips for aspiring journalists, and in his struggles for editorial independence through his nearly four-decade-long tryst with Indian journalism.

Celebrating Delhi By Mala Dayal

Delhi, located at the crossroads of history, has been occupied, abandoned and rebuilt over the centuries. It has been the capital of the Pandavas, the Rajputs, Central Asian dynasties, the Mughals and the British, and is best described as a melting pot of these vastly varying traditions and customs.



A galaxy of experts come together to offer fresh perspectives on the capital city. Originally part of the Sir Sobha Singh Memorial Lecture series organized by The Attic in collaboration with the India International Centre and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, this updated selection explores Delhi’s living syncretic heritage.

The essays illuminate unknown and fascinating aspects of the city’s history. We learn, for instance, how Sir Sobha Singh transplanted Delhi’s two foundation stones by bullock-cart in the stealth of the night from Kingsway Camp to Raisina Hill. In a different departure, archival records point to the fundamental ecological miscalculation of the British choice of trees to line the avenues of Imperial New Delhi. Place names, part of the cultural fabric of a city, unearth a vanishing history of Delhi, while the contrasting history of Sufi shrines draws attention to the spiritual masters, the pirs, and their search for truth.



This open-mindedness is reflected in the letters and public proclamations issued from the Mughal court in the Delhi uprising of 1857. These were emphatically religious, yet inclusive of both Hindus and Muslims. In our time a different take on the reality of refugee and resettlement colonies shows the blindness of the city’s civic planners, and reveals who was making and who was breaking the city in the twentieth century.



As the centre of political power for centuries, many great artists, poets and musicians found patronage at the royal courts of Delhi. The city has been home to a rich tradition of classical music—both the Sufi traditions of Central Asia and the darbari (courtly) style explore the development of the rich Delhi gharana tradition; as well as the birth, growth, banishment and reinvention of the language of Delhi over centuries. The many peoples who made Delhi their home through the centuries have all contributed to the creation and development of a sumptuous cuisine noted for its rich variety.



Celebrating Delhi takes you on a journey, both varied and unexpected.

The Inheritance Of Loss By Kiran Desai

In the north-eastern Himalayas, at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga, in an isolated and crumbling house, there lives an embittered old judge, who wants nothing more than to retire in peace. But with the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and the son of his chatty cook trying to stay a step ahead of US immigration services, this is far from easy.

Liberty Or Death : India's Journey To Independence And Division

India???s Journey to Independence and Division???A remarkable achievement??? Philip Ziegler, Daily Telegraph ???Brilliant???There can be no doubt that Patrick French is the most impressive Western historian of modern India currently at work??? Frank McLynn, Glasgow Herald

At midnight on 14 August 1947, Britain???s 350-year-old Indian Empire cracked into three pieces. The greatest mass migration in history began, as Muslims fled north and Hindus fled south, over a million being massacred on the way. Britain???s role as world power came to an end, and the course of Asia???s future was irrevocably set. Using a compelling mixture of scholarship, travel and personal narrative, Patrick French offers a radical reinterpretation of the events surrounding India???s independence and partition, including the disastrous mistakes made by politicians, and the bizarre reasoning behind many of their decisions. Exploring the interplay between characters such as Churchill, Mountbatten and Gandhi, it reveals a fascinating tale of idealism and manipulation, hope and tragedy. With sources ranging from newly declassified secret documents to the memories of refugees, Patrick French gives a riveting account of an epic debacle, the impact of which reverberates across Asia to this day....

India Unbound - Gurcharan Das

India Unbound is the riveting story of a nation’s rise from poverty to prosperity and the clash of ideas that occurred along the way. Today’s India is a vibrant free-market democracy, and it has begun to flex its muscles in the global information economy. The old centralized, bureaucratic state, which stifled industrial growth, is on the decline; the lower castes have risen confidently through the ballot box; and the middle class has tripled in the last two decades. This economic and social transformation is one of the major themes of this book.

Gurcharan Das recounts the hope and despair of the last fifty years. The Licence Raj created a work environment in which a cousin of the author, on his first day at work in the railways, could precipiate a strike just because he was honest. And on one occasion, the author, even though a seasoned executive, was driven to sit by the polluted Yamuna and weep after a fruitless meeting with a bureaucrat. The transformation began in the golden summer of 1991, when a reticent reformer, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, finally changed the nation’s course through sweeping economic reforms. A restrictive regime, in which the state dictated everything, from a woman’s choice of lipstick to the programmes on television, gave way to the optimism of a rising middle class eager to compete with the rest of the world. It was a quiet revolution, one that has not been chronicled before.

Gurcharan Das examines the highs and lows of independent India through the prism of history and his own experiences and those of numerous others he has met following the reforms, from young people in sleepy UP villages to the chiefs of software companies in Bangalore. Defining and exploring the new mindset of the nation, India Unbound is the perfect introduction to contemporary India.

The powerful story of a nation's transition from poverty to prosperity. Examining the highs and lows of independent India through the prism of history and his own experiences, Gurcharan Das defines the new mindset of the nation in riveting prose.

Words Of Freedom: Ideas Of A Nation by Vallabhbhai Patel

To celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Indian Republic, the Words of Freedom series showcases the landmark speeches and writings of fourteen visionary leaders whose thought animated the Indian struggle for Independence and whose revolutionary ideas and actions forged the Republic of India as we know it today.

Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty And The Ways To End It

Imagine you have a few million dollars. You want to spend it on the poor. How do you go about it? Billions of government dollars, and thousands of charitable organizations and NGOs, are dedicated to helping the world’s poor. But much of their work is based on assumptions about the poor and the world that are untested generalizations at best, harmful misperceptions at worst. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics through their award-winning Poverty Action Lab. They argue that by using randomized control trials, and more generally, by paying careful attention to the evidence, it is possible to make accurate—and often startling assessments—on what really impacts the poor and what doesn’t. Why would a man in Morocco who doesn’t have enough to eat buy a television? Why is it so hard for children in poor areas to learn even when they attend school? Why do the poorest people in Maharashtra spend 5 percent of their total budget on sugar? Does having lots of children actually make you poorer? Drawing on their research at the Poverty Action Lab and their fifteen years of fieldwork in India and across the world, the two economists ask many such questions and show why the poor, despite having the same desires and abilities as anyone else, end up with entirely different lives. Revelatory and impassioned, Poor Economics is a pathbreaking book that will help you to understand the real causes of poverty and how to end it.

About The Author
Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow. He has also received the inaugural Infosys Prize (2009) in Social Sciences and Economics.

Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. Duflo has received numerous academic honours and prizes including most recently the John Bates Clark Medal (2010) and a MacArthur Fellowship (2009). She has also been featured in Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers and Fortune’s 40 under 40.

Albert Einstein (Jaico Great Lives Series) - Alice Calaprice & Trevor Lipscombe

Albert Einstein remains one of most famous scientists in world history. His image is instantly recognizable by even the most scientifically uninformed person—for many people, Einstein personifies genius. But who was Einstein really? What was he like as a person? What did his science actually mean? This fresh biography of Albert Einstein provides students and general readers a concise, accessible introduction to the life and science of this revolutionary man. Underneath his genius, Einstein was an ordinary person, with human frailties and weaknesses, but also with charm, modesty, a wry sense of humor, and idiosyncrasies. Readers will understand why he was named the “Person of the Century.”

In this collection of stories, Rakhshanda Jalil draws attention to the lives of the Indian Muslim, not the marginalized or ghettoized Muslims of popular stereotype but ordinary, mainstream ones. The minutiae of everyday life are captured as layers of identities are peeled back to reveal people who are strangely recognizable in their ordinariness. Perfectly engraved cameos of grief and separation, frailty and strength, resilience and defeat, revenge and jealousy glow in the tautly strung warp and weft of her stories.

While the title story is an exquisite invocation of a vanished world, the others deal with contemporary, commonplace issues. The illusion of domestic harmony, the discord that breeds within a marriage, the definitions of success or failure; the inexplicability of what attracts one person to another – the author explores all this and more as she lays bare a world at once familiar and little known.

Modern Physics And Vedanta - Swami Jitatmananda

Discoveries in Modern Physics,especially the discoveries from the beginning of 20th Century,are making it more and more evident that many conclusions of Modern Physics are exactly the conclusions of Vedanta philosophy enshrined in the Upanishads and countless other Vedantic texts. This small book is a very humble attempt to project how some of the conclusions of modern physics converge with the very words and ideas of the ancient Vedanta,and it's modern interpretations given by Swami vivekananda.

The World's Greatest Long And Short Stories - A Compilation

Henry O, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy & Others

The Complete Works Of Khalil Gibran - A Compilation

A unique publication, containing 12 books in one volume. Includes The Prophet, The Wanderer, Sand and Foam, The Madman, The Forerunner, The Earth Gods, Nymphs of the Valley, Tears and Laughter, Between Night and Morn, Secrets of the Heart, Spirits Rebellious and Broken Wings.

Table of Contents
Book I : The Prophet
Book II : The Wanderer
Book III : Sand and Foam
Book IV : The Madman
Book V : The Forerunner
Book VI : The Earth Gods
Book VII : Nymphs of the Valley
Book VIII : Tears and Laughter
Book IX : Between Night & Morn
Book X : Secrets of the Heart
Book XI : Spirits Rebellious
Book XII : The Broken Wings

The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo

Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. This is such a book a magical fable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life's path and, above all, follow your dreams.

This is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who dreams of travelling the world in search of a worldly treasure as fabulous as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers, and from there into the Egyptian desert, where a fateful encounter with the alchemist awaits him

With Paulo Coelho's visionary blend of spirituality, magical realism and folklore, The Alchemist is a story with the power to inspire nations and change people's lives.

iWoz by Steve Wozniak

iWoz offers readers a unique glimpse into the offbeat and brilliant but ethical mind that conceived the Macintosh. After 25 years avoiding the public eye, Steve Wozniak reveals the full story of the Apple computer, from its conception to his views on the iconic cult status it has achieved today. In June 1975 Steve's curiosity and determination inspired him to build a computer, the first Apple. Six months later, he sold the machine, and for the self-professed 'engineer's engineer', success was imminent. But this story is full of life lessons, critical decisions, huge triumphs and big mistakes. Steve speaks also of his childhood, phone hacking pranks, working at Hewlett-Packard, the life-changing plane crash and teaching.

Revolution 2020 by Chetan Bhagat - How is it ?

Once upon a time, in small-town India, there lived two intelligent boys. One wanted to use his intelligence to make money. One wanted to use his intelligence to create a revolution. The problem was, they both loved the same girl. Welcome to Revolution 2020. A story about childhood friends Gopal, Raghav and Aarti who struggle to find success and love in Varanasi. However, it isn't easy to achieve this in an unfair society that rewards the corrupt. As Gopal gives in to the system, and Raghav fights it, who will win? From the bestselling author of Five Point Someone, one night @ the call center, The Three Mistakes of My Life and 2 States, comes another gripping tale from the heartland of India. Are you ready for the revolution?

Six Not So Easy Pieces by Richard P Feynman

Taken from his celebrated Caltech lectures, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces is more challenging in its content than the previous volume Six Easy Pieces (Penguin 1998), providing an exhilarating analysis of one of the most important general areas of modern theoretical physics: Relativity.

The lectures, delivered in Feynman's inimitable style, begin by dealing with issues of symmetry before moving on to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and how the principle of relativity affects our ideas of physics and other branches of human thought. Other lectures explore relativistic energy, four-dimensional space-time and curved space.

Six Easy Pieces by Richard P. Feynman

Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces is the perfect layman's introduction to the mindboggling universe of physics. In Feynman's safe hands, the reader is introduced to the very basics of atoms, energy, force, gravity and quantum behaviour. If the greatest physicist since the Second World War can't explain it to you, no one can.

Chanakya's Chant by Ashwin Sanghi

The year is 340 BC. A hunted, haunted Brahmin youth vows revenge for the gruesome murder of his beloved father. Cold, calculating, cruel and armed with a complete absence of accepted morals, he becomes the most powerful political strategist in Bharat and succeeds in uniting a ragged country against the invasion of the army of that demigod, Alexander the Great. Pitting the weak edges of both forces against each other, he pulls off a wicked and astonishing victory and succeeds in installing Chandragupta on the throne of the mighty Mauryan empire.

History knows him as the brilliant strategist Chanakya. Satisfied—and a little bored—by his success as a kingmaker, through the simple summoning of his gifted mind, he recedes into the shadows to write his Arthashastra, the ‘science of wealth’. But history, which exults in repeating itself, revives Chanakya two and a half millennia later, in the avatar of Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin teacher in smalltown India who becomes puppeteer to a host of ambitious individuals—including a certain slumchild who grows up into a beautiful and powerful woman.

Modern India happens to be just as riven as ancient Bharat by class hatred, corruption and divisive politics and this landscape is Gangasagar’s feasting ground. Can this wily pandit—who preys on greed, venality and sexual deviance—bring about another miracle of a united India? Will Chanakya’s chant work again? Ashwin Sanghi, the bestselling author of The Rozabal Line, brings you yet another historical spinechiller.

Shrilal Shukla's Must Read Books

Shrilal Shukla(31 December, 1925 - 28 October, 2011) was a Hindi writer, notable for his satire. He worked as a Provincial Civil Services (PCS) officer for the state government of Uttar Pradesh, later inducted into the IAS. He has written over 25 books,including Makaan, Sooni Ghaati Ka Sooraj, Pehla Padaav and Bisrampur Ka Sant.

Shukla has highlighted the falling moral values in the Indian society in the post independence era through his novels. His writings expose the negative aspects of life in rural and urban India in a satirical manner. His best known work Raag Darbari has been translated into English and 15 Indian languages. A television serial based on this continued for several months on the national network in the 1980s. It is a little known fact that he also wrote a detective novel entitled Aadmi Ka Zahar which was serialised in the weekly magazine 'Hindustan'.

His highly acclaimed work, Rag Darbari won him several laurels.











Collection of the works of Shrilal Shukla