In a small medieval palace on Kathmandu’s Durbar Square lives Nepal’s famous Living Goddess-a child chosen from the Buddhist caste of goldsmiths whose role is to watch over the country and protect its people. Once she attains puberty, another girl takes her place.
To Nepalis she is the embodiment of Devi and for centuries the kings of Nepal have sought her blessing to rule. Legends swirl about her. But the facts remain shrouded in secrecy and closely guarded by the Living Goddess’s priests and caretakers. Why are Buddhist girls worshipped by Hindu monarchs? Are the initiation rituals as macabre as they are rumoured to be? And what happens to Living Goddesses once they attain puberty?
Using myth, religion, history and her unprecedented access to the priests, caretakers and ex-Living Godessess, Isabella Tree takes us deep into this hidden world. Through it she draws a vivid portrait of the girl-goddess, the beliefs and practices of traditional Nepal, and the uneasy journey it now makes towards modernity. Deeply felt and written over many years of travel and research, The Living Goddess is a profound, compelling and extremely moving book.
Archives: Books
Touching Lives
Touching Lives is is the story of journeys to far corners of India meeting people whose lives have been transformed by technology. It is the account of people who have forged a different destiny for themselves, breaking the cycle of poverty and helplessness, with a little help from ISRO. Throwing light on some of the million tiny revolutions sweeping the country, the book takes us from Jhabua to interior Karnataka, from the Sundarbans to Chamoli in Garhwal. It is our chance to meet everyday
A Strange Kind Of Paradise
A Strange Kind of Paradise is an exploration of India’s past and present, from the perspective of a foreigner who has lived in India for many years. Sam Miller investigates how the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, Arabs, Africans, Europeans and Americans came to imagine India. Spanning the centuries from Alexander the Great to Slumdog Millionaire, Miller’s account features, among others, Thomas the Apostle, the Chinese monk Xuanzang, Marco Polo, Babur, Clive of India, Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles and Steve Jobs-all of it interspersed with the story of his own 25-year-long love affair with India. At once scholarly and thought-provoking, delightfully eccentric and laugh-out-loud funny, this book is destined to become a much-loved classic.
Yuva India
Yuva India takes a deep dive into the lives of India’s young men and women. In unravelling what makes them tick, the book uncovers the phenomenon of ‘attitudinal convergence’ that is rapidly growing across youth cohorts in India. Tracing its origin to the arrival of and exposure to a ‘composite culture’, the research behind ‘convergence’ zeroes in on how a young India is defining itself using new-age sensibilities.
Drawing on insights collected over a decade, Ray documents and analyses how young men and women in India approach issues of identity, image, sexuality, spirituality, personal relevance, social connections and community, and professional pursuits. In a one-of-a-kind analysis, using comprehensive data from across the nation, Ray scrutinizes young India’s psyche to make sense of their aspirations.
Filled with numerous first-person accounts and brand stories, Yuva India provides an insightful understanding of India’s most valuable asset, its youth population. The present and the future of India’s young, it reveals, will be invaluable not just for business and brand managers, but also for all those who wish to engage with them.
The Tusk That Did The Damage
When a young elephant is brutally orphaned by poachers, it is only a matter of time before he begins terrorising the countryside, earning his malevolent name from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries with leaves.
Manu, the studious son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger and is drawn into the alluring world of ivory hunting.
Emma is working on a documentary set in a Kerala wildlife park with her best friend. Her work leads her to witness the porous boundary between conservation and corruption and she finds herself caught up in her own betrayal.
As the novel hurtles toward its tragic climax, these three storylines fuse into a wrenching meditation on love and revenge, fact and myth, duty and sacrifice. In a feat of audacious imagination and arrestingly beautiful prose, The Tusk That Did the Damage tells an original and heart-breaking story about how we treat nature, and each other.
Panty
Darkly glamorous and fiercely erotic heroines take the centre stage in these two novellas. In Panty, when a mysterious young woman arrives in Calcutta and moves into a guesthouse, she finds in an otherwise empty wardrobe a soft and silky panty in leopard-skin print. She thinks the woman who wore it must have possessed a wild sexual nature. A sensation of companionship envelops her; the sexual lives of the two women begin to mingle and blur.
In Hypnosis, another young woman—a TV journalist on perpetual night duty—has an unconsummated but passionate affair with a famous musician that leaves her shattered. In a nightmarish sequence of events that follow, she allows herself to be hypnotized and drugged to aid her search for love.
Exposing our darkest desires and deepest fears when it comes to love, the effect of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s ferocious storytelling is deliciously anarchic and deeply unsettling.
Maya
Sometimes you lose what is real. But . . .
Dan and Krish have invented a gadget that they know will change the way augmented reality is perceived. When the gadget is still in its trial phase, an accident kills Krish’s sister, Maya. Little does he know that Dan and Maya were deeply in love. For both, the pain of her loss is intense, but Dan will not accept losing Maya, and challenges the powers that be that took her away. He sets about creating something unique that he knows will fulfil Maya’s dream of becoming a dancer and also satisfy his need to be with her. But is it the right thing to do?
Maya is set in a world between reality and virtual reality, and explores human relationships through its lens
Neither a Hawk nor a Dove
An authoritative and revelatory account of Pakistan’s politics
Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri is one of Pakistan’s most important diplomats, and was the country’s foreign minister 2002-07. In this book, he provides the ultimate insider’s account of Pakistan’s foreign policy, especially the peace process with India including the Kashmir framework (hailed at the time the most promising-ever dialogue between Pakistan and India since Independence) and the complex Pakistan-US-Afghanistan-India quadrangular relationship. Kasuri talks frankly about his Indian interlocutors, his three counterparts Pranab Mukherjee, Natwar Singh and Yashwant Sinha and the two prime ministers he worked with-Dr Manmohan Singh and A.B. Vajpayee. He also gives us a rare insight into the minds of the Pakistan Army, the contribution of the Foreign Office and his warm but complex relationship with President Musharraf. Blending analysis with choice anecdote, Neither a Hawk nor a Dove gives us a comprehensive and revealing account of Pakistan’s politics and the political compulsions of those at the helm.
Indianomix
A quirky look at India using popular economics
Why does the stock exchange dip during a lunar eclipse? Why don’t cars with safety features lead to fewer injuries? Why did Nehru ignore the Chinese threat in the lead-up to the 1962 war? Why is it that a stranger might risk his life to save yours on one day, and a street full of passers-by might casually watch you bleed to death on another? Why did pollsters wrongly predict a BJP victory in 2004, and what was the real reason for their defeat? And why is India’s Independence Day not, in fact, on the day on which it’s celebrated?
In pithy, sparkling, bite-sized chapters, economists Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya tackle these seeming mysteries and unearth the real reasons why ‘we are like this only’. The answers are entertaining and surprising at every turn, and reveal a picture of modern India as never seen before.