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Halloween is here and we know how you can make it even more spooky!

Check out these books which will make you want to sleep with the lights on:

The Puffin Book of Spooky Ghost Stories

In this spine-chilling collection you will encounter a creepy spirit that occupies a deserted bungalow, the reincarnation of a goddess who wants the sacrifice of blood, an ominous swing that makes one fly far away into a dark, deathly world, and the sheer wrath of the dead.

Written by the best contemporary authors including Ruskin Bond, Jerry Pinto among others, The Puffin Book of Spooky Ghost Stories will have horror-story addicts craving for more.

Whispers in the Dark: A Book of Spooks

For all those who have trembled through Ruskin Bond’s tales of horror and mystery, here’s another collection of strange and dark stories from the master storyteller. Within these pages you will befriend Jimmy the jinn who has trouble keeping his hands to himself, be witness to the mischief of the Pisaach and Churel who live in the peepul tree, and find yourself in the company of a bloodthirsty vampire cat, among other tales and curiosities that are guaranteed to send a delicious shiver down your spine! Written in Bond’s inimitable style and riveting to the core, this beautifully illustrated book is a must-have for anyone with a taste for the macabre.

The Curious Case of the Sweet and Spicy Sweetshop 

Making and selling sweets day after day is the life of Vishnudas Mithaiwala, the owner of The Sweet and Spicy Sweetshop. However, when Laddoo appears at his doorstep one night, claiming to be his estranged sister Revati’s son, Vishnu’s life is thrown into confusion.
And Laddoo, worried about his parents, who have suddenly disappeared, is thrown another curveball-he senses a ghostly presence in the house! When a plot to steal the Mithaiwala family’s valuable recipe book is hatched, Laddoo tries to use this new psychic ability to save the day.

The Wind on Haunted Hill

The wild wind pushes open windows, chokes chimneys and blows away clothes as it huffs and puffs over the village by Haunted Hill, where Usha, Suresh and Binya live. It’s even more mighty the day Usha is on her way back from the bazaar.
In search of shelter, Usha rushes into the ruins on Haunted Hill, grim and creepy against the dark sky. Inside, the tin roof groans, strange shadows are thrown against the walls and little Usha shivers with fear. For she isn’t alone.

House of Screams 

When Muneera finds out she’s inherited her uncle’s old house on Myrtle Lane, she decides to move in with her husband, Zain, and their three-year-old son, Adnan. The promise of saving money and living in one of Bangalore’s nicest areas has them packing up their old lives at their tiny apartment and shifting to this sprawling bungalow.
But they soon realize there’s more to the house than its old-world charm.

Boo 

A collection of short stories, Boo by Shinie Antony will give life to your fears. Penned by Shashi Deshpande, Kanishk Tharoor, K.R. Meera, Jerry Pinto, Usha K.R., Jahnavi Barua, Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, Ipsita Roy Chakraverti, Jaishree Misra, Kiran Manral, Madhavi S. Mahadevan, Durjoy Datta and Shinie Antony, the tales in Boo will send chills down your spine.

Haunted

Haunted chronicles the real-life adventures of paranormal investigator Jay Alani in ten of the spookiest locations in India. Co-authored by Neil D’Silva, these exploits provide a ringside view of these hair-raising paranormal journeys for everyone who has an interest in exploring the dark side of the normal.

Which book will you be reading this Halloween?

Has politics always been an area of interest for you? Do you remember any particular time in your childhood when this interest started growing?

Indeed. I developed an interest in world affairs and politics at an early age. My father used to read the newspapers and discuss issues even when I was very young. After he passed away when I was ten years old, my elder brother, then a young army officer, shared his books with me and allowed me to purchase on his account at the London Book Company in Rawalpindi. We are an old military family. So history, military affairs, and of course, politics were always on my list of books. Though, and thank God for that, a heavy dose of poetry and fiction also helped feed the soul. Working in Pakistan Television on news and current affairs programs helped me see history being made, up close and in person.

What is your writing process like? One often hears of writers getting into a zone when writing about a certain topic, is that how you write, or is it in bits and pieces?

My wife will tell you that I can be very disciplined when it comes to writing. I work in one spot in a room that has a lot of table space for a mess of books and files in open topped boxes, arranged by chapter per my outline. Being a habitual early riser, I use the first few hours of the day, when the mind is rested and recharged, to do a lot of my work. It also makes the day longer and productive for me. A break for exercise and breakfast helps fuel the process. The six-day writing week is divided into planning, reading, note taking and then the actual writing. I work directly on my computer and sometimes forget to take breaks for mid-day meals. At one point, rather embarrassingly, I stood up a former US ambassador to Pakistan whom I had invited to my club for lunch for an interview because I started writing in the morning and did not break till 4 PM. My phone was switched off. And the door to my writing room closed.

Fortunately, he was very gracious in accepting my abject apology and we rescheduled the interview for later. It pays to have understanding friends and colleagues!

Which bit about bringing a book to its fruition is the most exciting for you?

At heart I remain a journalist. So the reporting is the most exhilarating part. I learn to pick up direct and indirect information. If the material is not in the main text, it sometimes makes for interesting footnotes!

You learn to listen and pick up leads in that process. Polite but firm questions are needed. Persistence pays off.  And using an indirect approach sometimes helps when you hit a dead end or face stonewalling. Always triangulate the information. Since some folks will shave or bend the truth, as they see it. Like a good lawyer, it helps to research the topic as much as possible so you have the answers to many questions that you ask. It helps keep things honest. In The Battle for Pakistan, I was very lucky in that everyone I approached for an interview was known to me because of my work on policy issues since 2008 in the United States and Pakistan. There was a level of established trust. Most people agreed to interviews on the record. Where the few interviewees went off-the-record, I resorted to triangulation to verify information.

As cliché as it might sound, what inspires you to write?

The desire to seek truth or the nearest approximation to it, so we can collectively learn from our past and avoid mistakes in the future. I remain committed to Waging Peace and see conflict as an aberration. Some of my friends disagree with this approach. Some even call it naive.  But I am stubborn in this missionary quest though the final product must be offered with a dose of humility and modesty.  Readers must make the final judgment.

Shuja Nawaz’s latest book, The Battle for Pakistan, untangles the complex US-Pakistan relationship in the past decade, with an aim to identify a path forward.

The Great Game in the Buddhist Himalayas is an attempt to provide several unknown insights into the India-China, India-Tibet and China-Tibet relationships. The book tries to take into consideration the overriding power of the conflicting cultural interests that are linked to the geopolitical interests of both China and India. At the same time, the book suggests how Buddhism could become a potential source for recultivating awareness towards an India–China congruity in the current context.

Read on to discover some interesting facts about the contentious India-China relationship:

1. It might seem a strange contradiction then that two ancient nations, India and China, bordering each other and sharing a spiritual destiny for thousands of years, have become bitter geopolitical rivals, especially in the Himalayas. Most tend to believe that the mutual mistrust has its genesis in colonial history when Indian troops fought for the British against the Chinese anti-colonial uprising (the Boxer Rebellion) between 1899 and 1901. The event, though unintended, was to underpin the course of the relationship between the two countries in modern times.

2. Tibet was never an issue of public importance in India even months after the March 1959 uprising in Lhasa. In fact, until 1958, there were hardly any serious differences between India and China, even though the need to sort out the discrepancies in boundary maps along with minor readjustments was felt by the two sides. Indian concerns related more to the difficulties faced by Indian traders in Tibet. The notes exchanged between the two countries in the early 1960s suggested that managing trading activities for India had become untenable because of the constant harassment faced by Indian traders.

3. Up until 1959, the border was not a serious issue even though there had been a few skirmishes arising out of discrepancies in maps, especially in the Aksai Chin and Barahoti areas. It was a time when the Chinese were consolidating their hold on Tibet. The controversy only erupted between September–November 1955 over Chinese troops preventing an Indian detachment from entering Damzan (south of the Niti Pass).

4. China sees a great advantage in employing Buddhism alongside its hard-power pursuits, especially to seek political and economic leverage in the context of China’s latest OBOR initiative in Asia. For quite a few years now, China has been conducting ‘Buddha relic diplomacy’ to improve ties and win important economic and infrastructure projects, such as in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. Buddhism is among the list of weapons that the Chinese seem to have considered best suited to employ even in the Indian Himalayan belt.  The Indian Buddhist Himalayan complexity is fast changing and could be a source of considerable concern for India’s security. In part, this seems to be arising from an excessive Tibetan influence (‘Tibetanization’) in the Himalayas via a gradual taking over of Indian institutions by Tibetan lamas in the Buddhist Himalayas.

To know more about the complexities of the Indo- China relationship, grab your copy of The Great Game in the Buddhist Himalayas today!

The aura of the Indian Administrative Service has remained intact over the years. In this humorous, practical book, T.R. Raghunandan aims to deconstruct the structure of the bureaucracy and how it functions, for the understanding of the common person and replaces the anxiety that people feel when they step into a government office with a healthy dollop of irreverence.

Here are a few things you didn’t know about the Indian bureaucracy!

Although higher civil services were in theory open to women since Independence, the first women officers who joined the government (Chonira Belliappa Muthamma to the foreign service in 1948 and Anna George to the administrative service in 1951) were inducted with reluctance and with the caveat that they must leave if they ever married. At that time, patriarchal and misogynistic ideas about the unsuitability of women at higher official levels were widely prevalent among colleagues, bosses and members of the public.

The first woman to top the IAS list was Anuradha Majumdar in 1970, the year in which a record number of women became civil servants.

The government is stubbornly loyal to the paper file. Unless a government office is buried under paper, preferably with fetid odour, it does not look and feel like a government office.

The blunt fact of the matter is that the bureaucracy, and particularly the IAS, is inherently suspicious of and, therefore, resistant to changes that introduce imponderables into the way the officers’ careers progress.

In an earlier era, the idea that an IAS officer should be a generalist had the makings of a    It was considered bad form for an IAS officer to quote an educational degree in a particular subject to seek a posting in a related department; indeed, it was bad form for an officer to ever ask for a post.

There is no doubt that one of the significant reasons why India is progressing is because there are large numbers of honest bureaucrats, who go about their work diligently and honestly, but are constrained not to speak about the changes they have brought about, because they are trained to be self-effacing.

IAS officers are sticklers for detail. They need to find out quickly as to whether the individual opposite them are (a) senior or (b) junior to them and/or whether they are (c) direct recruits or (d) promotees into the service. The nub of the matter is to find out the status and seniority of the other. A miscalculation of seniority in that introductory meeting can result in the destruction of one’s confidential reports. It is prudent for the ambitious officer to err on the side of caution and address any object that looks senior to her, animate or inanimate, as ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Bureaucracy But Were Afraid to Ask tells you all about the fast-tracked elite civil servant, who belongs to a group of generalist and specialized services selected through a competitive examination