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'Haunting ... lingers in the mind long after the final page is turned' Sunday Times 'A compelling whodunnit ... Devastating' Financial Times 'Transfixing' New York Times 'A powerful, unflinching account of misogyny, female shame and the notion of honour' Observer ___________________ A masterly and agenda-setting inquest into how the deaths of two teenage girls shone a light into the darkest corners of a nation Katra Sadatganj. A tiny village in western Uttar Pradesh. A community bounded by tradition and custom; where young women are watched closely, and know what is expected of them. It was an ordinary night when two girls, Padma and Lalli, went missing. The next day, their bodies were found – hanging in the orchard, their clothes muddied. In the ensuing months, the investigation into their deaths would implode everything that their small community held to be true, and instigated a national conversation about sex, honour and violence. The Good Girls returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli's short lives and shocking deaths, daring to ask: what is the human cost of shame?
&Lsquo;A Classic . . . Beautiful Lyricism, Poetic Passages And Evocative Descriptions Of Goa&Rsquo; &Mdash;Deccan Herald On A Gloomy November Evening In A Sleepy Village In Goa, It&Rsquo;S Time For Yet Another Funeral. The Girl Is Dead And No One In Azul Is Surprised. But Two Men Who Knew And Loved Her Are Achingly Curious To Discover What Made Her Give Up Her Life To The Sea. As They Turn The Pages Of Her Diary, A Story Unravels&Mdash;Of Loneliness And Abandonment, Of Memories Branded So Deep That They Return To Haunt The Soul, And Of Hope So Powerful That It Negates Reality And Opens The Doors To A Future That Is Never To Be. Richly Atmospheric And Written With Unusual Lyricism, The Girl I...
Following the Bombay Communal Riots of 1992 which saw neighbour pitched against neighbour in fierce bouts of internecine violence, came the retaliatory bomb blasts of 1993 and the name change to Mumbai in 1995. Mumbai Noir captures the essence of a city dominated by wealth and the lack of it, where the shadowy aspects of life are never far from the ordinary person. Psychopath Romeos stalk ordinary women, men flirt with death in dance bars and families fall through the cracks of communal living in this phenomenal collection of noir literature.
It was an ordinary night when the two girls, Padma and Lalli, went missing from the tiny village of Katra Sadatganj. When the next day dawned, their bodies were found - hanging in the orchard, their clothes muddied. The ensuing investigation would implode everything that their small community held to be true. Amid conflicting testimonies, destroyed evidence and accusations of police corruption, their deaths ignited a national conversation about sex, honour, violence - and shame.
After decades of imperfect secularism, presided over by an often corrupt Congress establishment, Nehru's diverse republic has yielded to Hindu nationalism. India is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Since 2014, the ruling BJP has unleashed forces that are irreversibly transforming the country. Indian democracy, honed over decades, is now the chief enabler of Hindu extremism. Bigotry has been ennobled as a healthy form of self-assertion, and anti-Muslim vitriol has deluged the mainstream, with religious minorities living in terror of a vengeful majority. Congress now mimics Modi; other parties pray for a miracle. In this blistering critique of India from Indira Gandhi to the present, Komireddi lays bare the cowardly concessions to the Hindu right, convenient distortions of India's past and demeaning bribes to minorities that led to Modi's decisive electoral victory. If secularists fail to reclaim the republic from Hindu nationalists, Komireddi argues, India will become Pakistan by another name.
A self-proclaimed 'myth buster by trade', over her long-ranging career as a journalist and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich has delved with devastating wit and insight into the social and political fabric of America. Had I Known gathers together Ehrenreich's most significant articles and excerpts from the last four decades - some of which became the starting point for her bestselling books - from her award-winning article 'Welcome to Cancerland', published shortly after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, to her groundbreaking investigative journalism in 'Nickel and Dimed', which explored living in America on the minimum wage. Issues she identified as far back as the 80s and 90s such as work poverty, rising inequality, the gender divide and medicalised health care, are top of the social and political agenda today. Written with remarkable tenderness, humour and incisiveness, Ehrenreich's describes an America of struggle, inequality, racial bias and injustice. Her extraordinarily prescient and relevant perspective announces her as one of most significant thinkers of our day.
It is not only the past that lies in ruins in Patna, it is also the present. But that is not the only truth about the city that Amitava Kumar explores in this vivid, entertaining account of his hometown. We accompany him through many Patnas, the myriad cities locked within the city—the shabby reality of the present-day capital of Bihar; Pataliputra, the storied city of emperors; the dreamlike embodiment of the city in the minds and hearts of those who have escaped contemporary Patna's confines. Full of fascinating observations and impressions, A Matter of Rats reveals a challenging and enduring city that exerts a lasting pull on all those who drift into its orbit. Kumar's ruminations on one of the world's oldest cities, the capital of India's poorest province, are also a meditation on how to write about place. His memory is partial. All he has going for him is his attentiveness. He carefully observes everything that surrounds him in Patna: rats and poets, artists and politicians, a girl's picture in a historian's study, and a sheet of paper on his mother's desk. The result is this unique book, as cutting as it is honest.
Sonia Faleiro was a reporter in search of a story when she met Leela, a beautiful and charismatic bar dancer with a story to tell. Leela introduced Sonia to the underworld of Bombay's dance bars: a world of glamorous women, of fierce love, sex and violence, of customers and gangsters, of police, prostitutes and pimps. When an ambitious political politician cashed in on a tide of false morality and had Bombay's dance bars wiped out, Leela's proud independence faced its greatest test. In a city where almost everyone is certain that someone, somewhere, is worse off than them, she fights to survive, and to win. Beautiful Thing is a vivid and intimate portrait of one reporter's journey into the dark, pulsating and ultimately damaged soul of Bombay.
Servants of the Goddess weaves together the heartbreaking, yet paradoxically life-affirming stories of five devadasis—women, in the clutches of an ancient fertility cult, forced to serve the gods. Catherine Rubin Kermorgant sets out attempting to make a documentary film about the lives of present-day devadasis. Through her, we meet and get to know the devadasi women of Kalyana, a remote village in Karnataka. As they grow to trust Kermorgant and welcome her as an honorary sister, we hear their stories in their own words: stories of oppression, discrimination, violence and, most importantly, resilience. Kermorgant becomes a part of these stories and finds herself unwittingly enmeshed in a world of gender and caste bias which extends far beyond Kalyana—all the way to Paris, where the documentary is to be edited and produced. Servants of the Goddess is a testament to women’s strength and spirit, and a remarkably astute analysis of gender and caste relations in today’s rural India.
For fans of David Sedaris and Nora Ephron, here is a humorous, irreverent, and poignant look at the gifts, stereotypes, and inevitable challenges of aging, based on the wildly popular New York Times essay from award-winning journalist Steven Petrow. Soon after his 50th birthday, Steven Petrow began assembling a list of “things I won’t do when I get old”—mostly a catalog of all the things he thought his then 70-something year old parents were doing wrong. That list, which included “You won’t have to shout at me that I’m deaf,” and “I won’t blame the family dog for my incontinence,” became the basis of this rousing collection of do’s and don’ts, wills and won’ts tha...