Ramesh, Alter books in Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Prize longlist

(New Delhi, Sep 30, 2020) Twelve books on a variety of themes ranging from political biographies to reportage, anthropology to history and environmental histories to regional studies by writers like Jairam Ramesh, Stephen Alter and Vikram Sampath among others have made it to the longlist of the 2020 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Prize.

The longlist was named by a jury headed by Niraja Gopal Jayal and also comprising Ramachandra Guha, Nandan Nilekani, Srinath Raghavan, Nayanjot Lahiri and Manish Sabharwal.

According to the jury, the books cover a wide array of genres: biographies, investigative reportage, regional histories, environmental studies and are written by scholars, journalists and activists.

“It was both exciting and arduous to choose these titles among the over one hundred books submitted for the prize,” it said.

The shortlist will be announced on November 16 and the winner in December.

Named after Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, who had contributed significantly to the freedom struggle, to the women’s movement, to refugee rehabilitation and to the renewal of handicrafts, the prize celebrates non-fiction literature by emerging writers from all nationalities, published in the previous calendar year. Instituted in 2018, the prize carries a cash award of Rs 15 lakh and a citation.

The longlist includes A Chequered Brilliance: The Many Lives of VK Krishna Menon by Ramesh; Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth by Alter; Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883-1924 by Sampath; 2019: How Modi Won India by Rajdeep Sardesai; The Unquiet River: A Biography of the Brahmaputra by Arupjyoti Saikia; and Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements by Amit Ahuja.

Panjab: Journey through Faultlines by Amandeep Sandhu; The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World by Neeladri Bhattacharya; Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma by Katherine Eban; Animal Intimacies: Beastly Love in the Himalayas by Radhika Govindrajan; Kuknalim, Naga Armed Resistance: Testimonies of Leaders, Pastors, Healers and Soldiers by Nandita Haksar and Sebastian Hongray; and Midnight’s Machines: A Political History of Technology in India by Arun Mohan Sukumar complete the list.

Previous winners of the award are Milan Vaishnav (When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, 2018) and Ornit Shani (How India Became Democratic, 2019).

Anuja Chauhan to come out with suspense thriller

(New Delhi, Sep 29, 2020) Writer Anuja Chauhan adds a dollop of spine-chilling suspense to her patented mix of laugh-out-loud humour and toe-tingling romance in her new book, which will be published in the summer of 2021.

HarperCollins India on Tuesday announced the acquisition of Chauhan’s novel Club You to Death.

“The lockdown made me want to murder people. Hopefully, I’ve done it well,” says the author of The Zoya Factor, Battle for Bittora, Those Pricey Thakur Girls, The House that BJ Built and Baaz about her new work.

According to Diya Kar, publisher (commercial division) at HarperCollins India, a “new Anuja Chauhan is a publishing event and this one is absolutely delicious”.

Swati Daftuar, senior commissioning editor at HarperCollins India, describes the book as “clever, funny and absolutely thrilling”.

The book talks about a crime that takes place in Delhi. A personal trainer is found asphyxiated to death under an overloaded barbell at the posh Delhi Turf Club, on the eve of the club elections.

It is first thought to be a grisly freak accident. But when it comes to light that his protein shake had been laced with a lethal dose of popular party drug Pinko Hathni, it can no longer be denied that it is a cold-blooded killer.

As the capital bristles with speculation and conspiracy theories, a Crime Branch veteran is appointed to investigate the case who has two able deputies to help him.

Together, the trio sets out to solve the crime that seems simple enough on the surface, but turns out to have roots as deep and spreading as those of New Delhi’s famous neem trees, the publishers said.

When Gayatri Devi sent Alphonso mangoes for Prince Philip!

(New Delhi, Sep 27, 2020) Former Rajmata of Jaipur, the charismatic Gayatri Devi and her husband were great friends with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip and every year, she would send a box of Alphonso mangoes from India for the Duke of Edinburgh’s birthday, says a new book.

In The House of Jaipur: The Inside Story of India’s Most Glamorous Royal Family, Australian author John Zubrzycki describes the history of the royal house, with stories of glamour, jewels, scandals and opulence.

Gayatri Devi and husband Man Singh II, the last ruling Maharaja of the erstwhile Jaipur State – Ayesha and Jai as they were known to their friends – are central to the story of Jaipur over the past century, he says.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, Jai and Ayesha were India’s golden couple, its answer to John and Jackie Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. They were the only Indians invited to Truman Capote’s Black & White Ball in 1966 at New York’s Plaza Hotel,” he writes in the book, published by Juggernaut.

“Ayesha was the only woman who was allowed to break the dress code, arriving in a gold sari and a necklace of emeralds. Frank Sinatra, Rose Kennedy and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were there too. All were friends of the Jaipurs,” he says about that masquerade ball.

Like the historical series Downton Abbey and The Crown, this book shows what life is really like inside the royal palace. It also reveals the poignant drama of how India’s princely families came to terms with democracy and change.

In the book, Zubrzycki mentions about Ayub Khan, a close confidant of Gayatri Devi.

“Khan used to earn a few rupees a day as Gayatri Devi’s ballboy on Lily Pool’s now abandoned tennis courts. After he completed his college degree, she offered him a job as a typist and bought him a trusty Godrej manual typewriter,” he writes.

For three decades, Khan typed all her correspondence – responses to constituents seeking help for their daughters’ dowries, invitations to heads of state to visit her in the Indian winter and complaints to politicians who were neglecting Jaipur’s heritage.

“‘Every year she would send Prince Philip a box of Alphonso mangoes for his birthday,” Zubrzycki quotes Khan as telling him.

Khan regularly met the British royal at polo matches in England.

Zubrzycki describes Jai as the quintessential modern-day maharaja, with a portfolio of gleaming palaces bursting with taxidermied tigers and sporting trophies, garages full of collectible cars and stables full of polo ponies and caparisoned elephants.

Ayesha was unique among Indian maharanis, breaking the stereotype of Indian princesses demurely hidden behind their veils, he says.

“Born into a small eastern princedom, she grew to be a woman who was an international social celebrity, in a class apart from the maharanis of bigger, 21-gun-salute princely states such as Gwalior or Kashmir. She combined the exotic allure of the East with the sophistication of Western aristocracy,” Zubrzycki writes.

Jai predeceased Gayatri Devi in 1970.

According to Zubrzycki, if signatures could speak, Jai and Ayesha’s guestbooks would tell a thousand stories.

“The first signatures, dated 22 January 1961 when the Jaipurs lived at Rajmahal Palace, are those of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. A little over a year later, Jackie Kennedy and her sister Lee Radziwill memorialised their visit, as did Jackie’s children, John and Caroline, in 1982,” he writes.

“Mexico’s Octavio Paz was followed by the Italian photographer Pietro Francesco Mele, best remembered for his work in Afghanistan and Tibet. ‘Reggie’, ‘Baby’, ‘Boopy’ and ‘Bunny’ had a ‘wonderful stay’ in 1964,” he adds.

Zubrzycki says it’s a little over a decade since Gayatri Devi died, but such was her stature it could have been a few weeks ago.

“Her memory is revered, her portrait found in many Jaipur homes – though strangely enough not in the City Palace Museum. She was the woman who took on Indira Gandhi, winning three straight elections despite neither speaking nor understanding the language of her constituents, then paid for her success with a lengthy incarceration in Delhi’s notorious Tihar Jail,” he writes.

Anand Neelakantan pens debut kids’ book

(New Delhi, Sep 26, 2020) Baahubali series author Anand Neelakantan has written his debut book in the children’s space which tells some of the most hilarious stories about child asuras and their antics.

Puffin has published The Very, Extremely, Most Naughty Asura Tales for Kids, which has full-colour illustrations accompanying the narrative.

Among the stories are those of asura twins Kundakka and Mandakka, who hate going to school; clumsy Bhasma and pet pig Nakura, who create trouble in the village; brothers Atapi and Vatapi, who like to eat 96 cartfuls of fruits as dessert; and the great Bana who claps with his thousand hands.

The stories are interspersed with funny songs and poems making the book a read-aloud as well as a bedtime companion, the publishers said.

Neelakantan says he found that most children are addicted to their electronic devices and if at all they read, they are fond of books coming from the west.

“Some of them are great stories and beautifully written, but they alienate kids from our stories and culture. We have one of the oldest storytelling traditions in the world, and it is unfortunate that our kids grow up without getting familiar with them,” he says.

When he asked some children why they don’t find Indian stories cool, they told him that these were “boring with a heavy dose of morality”. So, he decided to bring back the fun and entertainment in storytelling.

“Traditional Indian folk arts are meant for entertainment. It is never preachy or judgmental. Making asuras dark and evil is a recent phenomenon. There is a fascinating world out there that has so many wonderful fantasy elements in our stories,” Neelakantan says.

“This book is a small window to that world. This is an introduction to the marvellous world of Indian Puranas,” he adds.

Neelakantan says he is often mistaken for an asura, for he too has curly hair. He had enough of the pranks of little asuras who irritated him in his sleep and so, he decided to give it back to them in this book.

He has authored books like The Rise of Sivagami (Baahubali: Before the Beginning, Book 1); Asura: Tale of the Vanquished; Ajaya: Roll of the Dice; Ajaya: Rise of Kali; Vanara: The Legend of Baali, Sugreeva and Tara; and, most recently, Chaturanga (Baahubali: Before the Beginning, Book 2).

Book seeks to decode white collar crimes

(New Delhi, Sep 26, 2020) An IRS officer analyses a variety of white collar crimes in areas like investment, health, education and even religion by examining regulatory and enforcement issues and suggests measures to curb them in his new book.

In You Just Got Cheated: Understanding White Collar Crimes, commissioner of Income Tax Sibichen K Mathew seeks to provide insights on the nature of these crimes, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of such frauds with anecdotes and examples.

There are disasters, maladies, and miseries happening in this world, some of which are beyond human control while others are due to human control, he says, adding white collar crimes belong to the second category as these are results of deliberate actions by the powerful.

The book, published by SAGE India, focuses on the subject from the perspective of victims.

When corporate criminals and greedy public servants join hands to indulge in various types of crimes, the regulatory enforcement becomes lax, farce and ineffective, Mathew says.

In the end, the victims – the public who were adversely impacted, the shareholders who lost their investments, the consumers who got a raw deal, the employees who lost their jobs and the financiers who lost what they lent – suffer without any recourse, he adds.

On religious crimes, the author says people always tend to take a cue or draw inspiration from the actions and views of those who are of their own kind (kindred spirits or peers) and such propensity plays a vital role in shaping their preferences even before forming a view or taking a decision on a choice before them.

The presence and influence of religious leaders, fellow worshippers or prayer group members can make people attracted towards specific projects without analysing the proposals rationally, he says, adding this was exploited by fraudsters like Ephren Taylor II in the US in 2009 and 2010.

“He, through the indirect patronage of church leaders, victimised hundreds of church members by defrauding about USD 1.6 million from them. Touting himself as prudent investment manager, he conducted wealth management seminars in parishes across the country,” Mathew writes.

He quoted extensively from scriptures and urged people to invest in the socially conscious projects he is managing.

He swindled USD 11 million through the ponzi scheme by defrauding thousands of people of their retirement savings, the author says.

Hearing about such happenings, one can easily conclude that businesses and frauds raising the banner of faith and taking the name of God can be more successful, he argues.

Arupa Kalita’s Sahitya Akademi-winning book now in English

(New Delhi, Sep 26, 2020) Noted Assamese writer Arupa Patangia Kalita won the Sahitya Akademi award for her book Mariam Austin othoba Hira Barua and this engrossing collection of stories has now been published in English.

In these intimate portraits, women navigate family, violence, trauma, ambition and domesticity with caution, grace and a quiet resilience.

According to the Sahitya Akademi, these short stories reflected the humanitarian outlook and sincerity of the author and her lucid style of writing and the suggestiveness in the language are remarkable in themselves.

It termed the collection as an important contribution to the genre of Indian fiction in Assamese.

Written in a variety of styles, from gritty social realism, folklore to magical realism, the stories in The Loneliness of Hira Barua have been translated into English by Ranjita Biswas. Among the many tales is the one about Hira Barua, which is the title story of the book, published by Pan Macmillan India.

Barua is an ageing widow living in a conflict-ridden region of Assam with her tiny dog, a Tibetan spaniel, and she fears she is beginning to resemble a lonely Englishwoman named Mariam Austin from her past. The dog was named Sonali and Barua often had monologues with her, fondly calling her Sonamoni.  

Barua and Austin have a lot in common. Austin was the landlady of the rented quarters where Barua’s uncle used to live. The Englishwoman too was a widow and though had a son and a daughter, they lived far away.

The old lady was quite lonely and only had her dog, a Labrador named Robert, for company. Like Barua, she would also talk to Robert day and night, sometimes laughed too, and even showed mock anger.

Barua’s only son Arnab was in the Air Force, married a non-Assamese girl, and lived outside the state. She lost her husband due to illness.

Kalita’s powerful voice is brought to fresh and vivid life in this collection. Other stories include The Call Girls at the Shelter Home, The Girl with Long Hair, Ayengla of the Blue Hills, Surabhi Barua and the Rhythm of Hooves, The Half-burnt Bus at Midnight and A Cup of Coffee from Aunt Brinda.

Sadhguru to talk about karma in new book

(New Delhi, Sep 23, 2020) Spiritual teacher Sadhguru will come out with a book early next year in which he will seek to demystify karma and its many aspects.

Titled Karma: A Yogi’s Guide to Creating Your Own Destiny, it will be published under Penguin Random House’s literary imprint on mind, body and spirit, Penguin Ananda.

This book is a deep dive into understanding karma and its consequences, albeit in a new perspective, which will give people the opportunity and awareness to navigate the course of their own destiny, the publishers said.

Commenting on his upcoming book, Sadhguru says, “When I looked at the variety of misconceptions surrounding the word ‘karma’, I saw that it is one of the most misunderstood aspects of life. People need to see that karma is not just bondage, it can also become a process of liberation. This book has been conceived as a manual of this process.”

According to Vaishali Mathur, publisher (Indian language publishing) at Penguin Random House India, karma is a subject which needs a deeper level of understanding and accounts for much of the existential debate these days and who better than Sadhguru can provide that insight.

Milee Ashwarya, Publisher (Ebury Publishing and Vintage Publishing) at Penguin Random House India, says Sadhguru has the ability to explain the most complex concepts simply and lucidly, and that is what makes his reach global and his impact long lasting.

The book will be simultaneously launched in the US and India in early 2021.

Sadhguru, a speaker and an opinion-maker, is also the founder of Isha Foundation.

Rana Safvi gets Yamin Hazarika award

(New Delhi, Sep 23, 2020) Historian Rana Safvi has been conferred an award instituted in memory of Yamin Hazarika, the first woman from the Northeast to join the central police service.

Safvi, who has published several books on culture, history, and monuments of India, was chosen for her “contribution to the syncretic culture of India”.

Hailing from Assam, Hazarika was selected for the NCT of Delhi, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli Police service (DANIPS) in 1977. She held the post of assistant commissioner of Police in Chanakyapuri (Delhi) and went on to become deputy commissioner of police (Crime against Women Cell) in the national capital.

In the crucial period after the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Hazarika was in-charge of three key police stations. In 1998, she was posted in Bosnia as part of the UN peacekeeping force. But her life was tragically cut short by destiny as she succumbed to cancer at the age of 43 in 1999.

The ceremony was held online on Tuesday though Hazarika’s daughter Huma presented the silver salver to Safvi in Delhi.

Assam DGP Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta was the guest of honour. He recalled the contribution of Hazarika and also spoke about her grit and determination.

The award is given every year by a collective of women professionals since 2015. Previous winners are author Indrani Raimedhi, athlete Tayabun Nisha, actor Moloya Goswami, environmental activist Purnima Devi Barman and social activist Hasina Kharbhih.

‘A Flight to Catch’: Trip that changed lives

(New Delhi, Sep 22, 2020) Trainer-turned entrepreneur Pooja Valeja analyses the relationship in a couple’s life and how they emotionally react to each other in her debut novel.

A Flight to Catch: A Tale of Unspoken Words is the story of Pritz and Patel and their unexpected trip to Canada.

“The book is a blend of drama and comedy with a pinch of suspense and aromas of romance. At some stage in life, most of us go through difficult times of taking decisions.

“Sometimes we tend to make things more complicated than they really are and tagging it as ‘It’s complicated’ looks like an easier option. The fictional characters weave emotions through various instances and they are sure to make you love them,” says Valeja.

The book explains the nuances and the delicate feelings of a transcending relationship from being acquaintances, to the closest of friends, to lovers and eventually a twist.

Inspired by Valeja’s personal life experiences, the tale encompasses various characters and the journey they embarked upon. The storyline has intense questions in every chapter on the functionality of the mind and decision making.

Unlike JD-U, BJP has little room for flexibility in Bihar: Book

(New Delhi, Sep 21, 2020) The BJP has little room for flexibility in Bihar unlike the JD(U) and has to stick with Nitish Kumar, accepting him as the bigger partner in the state, claims a new book.

In The Battle for Bihar, journalist Arun Sinha tells the intertwined stories of poll-bound Bihar’s political theatre and Nitish’s rule.

He says Bihar is currently divided into three political estates: the BJP, the JD(U) and the RJD.

“The BJP has farmed the plantations of upper castes and banias; the JD(U) of the economically backward classes and mahadalits; and the RJD of the Yadavs and Muslims. The JD(U) has its estate in the middle, with a flexibility to level up the fence on either side and emerge as the winner with a combined harvest,” he says.

“The BJP has no room for such flexibility. It could combine with the RJD only as self-destructively as fire could with water. It, therefore, has to stick with Nitish, and keep him in good humour by accepting him as the bigger partner in Bihar,” Sinha writes in the book, published by Penguin Random House.

The author says the JD(U) and the BJP are like “beasts of two different species living in the same den: they prayed together but worshipped separately; they hunted together but ate separately; they fought together but weaponised separately. They acted to strengthen each other but worked to weaken each other”.

According to him, senior JD(U) leaders say they were wary that the BJP, with the RSS grassroots organisation behind it, was better equipped to ensure the success of the maximum number of its candidates, as well as to cause the defeat of some JD(U) candidates by undermining their support in order to come out with a larger number.

Though it has been the BJP’s dream to have a chief minister of the party in Bihar, the national BJP leadership wants to handle the subject with care, the book says.

“Despite the desire within a section of the state BJP to fight elections on its own, the leadership has not been very warm to the idea, as there is nobody in the party’s state unit who has the stature, worthiness and popularity to swing the electorate in the party’s favour,” it says.

“The state’s politics is dominated by backward castes and the BJP has no charismatic leader to choose from. The choice before the BJP’s national leadership is limited to dependence on Nitish, and that tips the scale in his favour,” it further says.