Harper Collins
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English Books, Harper Collins, इतिहास, जीवनी/आत्मकथा/संस्मरण
A Life in the Shadows : A Memoir
No Indian spymaster has, until now, written a memoir. A.S. Dulat is the first to do so, and in A Life in the Shadows he does it with considerable elan.
He is one of India’s most successful spymasters, his name synonymous with the Kashmir issue. His methods of engagement and accommodation with all people and perspectives from India’s most conflicted state are legendary. The author of two bestselling books, Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years (2014) and The Spy Chronicles: R&AW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace (2018), Dulat’s views on India, Pakistan and Kashmir are well-known and sought after.
Yet very little is known about him, primarily because the former spymaster has been notoriously private about his personal life. In this unusual and unique memoir, Dulat breaks that silence for the first time. This is not a traditional, linear narrative as much as a selection of stories from across space and time. Still bound by the rules of secrecy of his trade, he tells a fascinating story of a life richly lived and insightfully observed. From a Partition-bloodied childhood in Lahore and New Delhi to his early years as a young intelligence officer; from meetings with international spymasters to travels around the world; from his observations on Kashmir-political and personal-post the abrogation of Article 370, to his encounters with world leaders, politicians and celebrities; moving from Bhopal to Nepal and from Kashmir to China, Dulat tells the story of his life with remarkable honesty, verve and wit.
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English Books, Harper Collins, इतिहास
Ayodhya : Past and Present
10.30 a.m., 9 November 2019: A five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court of India unanimously ruled that the land where the Babri Masjid once stood in Ayodhya belongs to the lord, Ram Lalla. The decision was expected to end the conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India, who have been asserting their religious rights over the 2.77 acres of disputed land for five centuries. But Ayodhya still remains a divided city.
Journalist Sutapa Mukerjee has frequented the town since 1998. After the apex court decree, she returned to the land now gifted to Lord Ram and reconnected with the locals. Her narrative takes off from the historic 2019 Supreme Court judgment, traces the milestones of the seventy-year-long legal battle for the disputed land and even goes back a few centuries to give cultural and civilizational context to the conflict in Ayodhya, before culminating in a ground-zero account of the Babri Masjid demolition.
Ayodhya: Past and Present gives voice-through innumerable personal interviews-to the people of the pilgrim town, both the movers and shakers of the Mandir-Masjid tussle as well as the commoners caught in the crossfire. A history of Ayodhya, the book brings alive the reality of this once-quaint town that is on its way to becoming a commercialized pilgrimage destination.
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Harper Collins, Hindi Books, इतिहास
Bharat Vikhandan
भारत विखण्डन एक पुस्तक है जो भारत और इसकी विविध संस्कृति के भीतर अव्यक्त क्षमता के पक्ष में बोलती है। यह तर्क देता है कि तीन प्रमुख पश्चिमी संस्कृतियों द्वारा देश की अखंडता को पतला किया जा रहा है और इस प्रक्रिया के परिणाम पर चर्चा करता है। यह पुस्तक प्रसिद्ध द्रविड़ आंदोलन की उत्पत्ति की जांच करती है जिसने हमारे देश की विशाल संस्कृति को आकार दिया, जबकि दलित पहचान और इसकी वर्तमान स्थिति पर भी ध्यान दिया। यह भी कहा गया है कि पुस्तक मुख्य रूप से स्वतंत्र भारत के अधीनता, निगरानी और तोड़फोड़ पर केंद्रित है। भारत विखण्डन आधुनिक भारत में बदलते रुझानों को बारीकी से देख रहा है और इसके विकास और अंततः कमजोर पड़ने के कारणों पर सवाल उठा रहा है। हमारी प्राथमिकताओं और निष्ठाओं पर पुनर्विचार करने के लिए मजबूर करते हुए राष्ट्र के लिए एक वेकअप कॉल है। इसकी ऐतिहासिक और संघर्षपूर्ण सामग्री के लिए प्रशंसा की गई है, जबकि उन कठोर सच्चाइयों से इनकार करने से इनकार किया जाता है, जिन पर चर्चा करने की आवश्यकता है।
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English Books, Harper Collins, इतिहास
Bombay after Ayodhya : A City in Flux
The demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 was followed by riots across India. Mumbai had always been susceptible to communal violence, but the violence in December 1992 and then again in January 1993 was unprecedented. Two months later, in March, serial blasts rocked the city, killing over 250 and injuring 700. Communal strife was followed by gang wars and natural calamities, all of which changed the city forever.
Bombay after Ayodhya chronicles how the past three decades have been a period of unprecedented flux in Mumbai. In the aftermath of the riots, a split in the Mumbai underworld led to new equations in politics, which changed the demography of the city and led to the rise of new townships. After a brief lull, blasts and terrorist attacks rocked it once more in 2002, a cycle of violence that culminated in the horrific 26/11 attacks in 2008.
Jitendra Dixit grew up in Mumbai and has reported from the city for much of the three decades he writes about in this book. This is a deeply felt biography of a city, which has transformed from a city of mills to one of malls, where the number of skyscrapers has multiplied along with their height, where local trains have become longer and yet remained overcrowded. It is the city of Bollywood, yet constraints of producing films in the city have led filmmakers to move out. Its iconic festivals, such as Ganesh Utsav and Govinda, once primarily celebrated by the poor and the middle class, have become commercialized.
Along with key events and people that have shaped the evolution of present-day Mumbai, Bombay after Ayodhya also documents the change in the city’s character, from its physical appearance and civic issues, to real estate and politics.
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English Books, Harper Collins, इतिहास, सही आख्यान (True narrative)
Indra’s Net: Defending Hinduism’s Philosophical Unity
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English Books, Harper Collins, इतिहास, सही आख्यान (True narrative)Indra’s Net: Defending Hinduism’s Philosophical Unity
Introductionbook is about the ongoing battle over Hinduism’s positioning on par with the world’s major religions. It rebuts an increasingly powerful school of thought amongst the academia, which posits that Hinduism, as such, has never existed. What is popularly considered to be Hinduism today is dismissed as a potent myth concocted by Swami Vivekananda, who supposedly appropriated and repackaged Western concepts and practices as part of a nationalist project. Moreover, it is alleged that this project has produced many of the social ills found in India today.
This battle is not merely a philosophical debate. The ramifications of a discourse that pits contemporary Hinduism against its hoary past are profound and terrifying. The claim made by my opponents that there is no such thing as Hinduism-regardless of the name we might choose to assign it-simply denies the existence of an integrated unified spiritual substratum in ancient India. This battle, therefore, is also an intellectual one, with implications for the very survival of Hinduism as a tradition with a rich past, to be understood on its own terms.
The school of thought I debunk here represents an insidious, subtle. but nevertheless powerful, form of colonialism and conversion. Indeed, no explicit act of ‘conversion’ is even necessary, one is systemically re- programmed to believe that one was never a Hindu in the first place, and that the things one cherished about Hinduism all along were simply a repackaged collection of Christian and Westem secular beliefs and values. Thus, one is made to feel that one loses nothing by abandoning Hinduism other than the term itself.
This pernicious ploy is used to create fissures in Hindu society by pitting the spiritual giants of Hinduism against one other, and to distort their subtle and deeply intricate viewpoints. The book not only disproves this dangerous line of thought, it offers a new framework in which to understand and interpret Hindu identity that is broad and yet well-defined, authentic and yet accessible, embracing both the traditional and the contemporary.
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English Books, Harper Collins, Suggested Books, इतिहास, सही आख्यान (True narrative)
Ninety Days (PB)
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English Books, Harper Collins, Suggested Books, इतिहास, सही आख्यान (True narrative)Ninety Days (PB)
About the Book: Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhis Assassins At 10.20 p.m. on 21 May 1991, a young woman bowed before Rajiv Gandhi at an election rally in Sriperumbudur, 42 km north of Chennai. And then there was an explosion. This book is the definitive account of one of the most controversial crimes in contemporary India. It unravels the complex plot hatched by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) to ensure that Rajiv Gandhi did not return to power in the 1991 general elections. Ninety Days provides a blow-by-blow account of how the Special Investigation Team of the CBI
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English Books, Harper Collins, Suggested Books, इतिहास, सही आख्यान (True narrative)
The Ultimate Goal (HB)
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English Books, Harper Collins, Suggested Books, इतिहास, सही आख्यान (True narrative)The Ultimate Goal (HB)
The Ultimate Goal
In The Ultimate Goal, Vikram Sood, former chief of Indias external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RandAW), explains the narrative and how a countrys ability to construct, sustain and control narratives, at home and abroad, enhances its strength and position. Intelligence agencies invariably play a critical role in this, an often-indispensable tool of statecraft. A narrative may not necessarily be based on truth, but it does need to be plausible, have a meaning and create a desired perception. During most of the twentieth century, intelligence agencies helped shape narratives favourable to their countries agendas through literature, history, drama, art, music and cinema. Today, social media has become crucial to manipulating, countering or disrupting narratives, with its ability to spread fake news disinformation, and provoke reactions.
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Harper Collins, Hindi Books, इतिहास
Vibhinnata
About the Book: Vibhinnata: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism India is more than a nation state. It is also a unique civilization with philosophies and cosmologies that are markedly distinct from the dominant culture of our times-that of the West. In this book, thinker and philosopher Rajiv Malhotra addresses the challenge of a direct and honest engagement with differences, by reversing the gaze and looking at the West from the dharmic point of view. In doing so, he challenges many hitherto unexamined beliefs that both sides hold about themselves and each other, pointing out the integral unity that underpins dharmas metaphysics and contrasts this with Western
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