For centuries, India’s mystical allure has drawn in visitors in search of enlightenment, riches, romance, and adventure. In the mid-1990s, as a precocious twenty-three-year-old, author Eytan Uliel and his girlfriend set off on a journey of discovery, leaving behind the comforts of Sydney to backpack in India for four months. Limited to a budget of twelve dollars a day, they lived, ate and traveled like locals. The journey around the sub-continent took them north to south, east to west: from the holy city of Varanasi to the modern-day playground of Mumbai; from the desert fortresses of Rajasthan to the bucolic backwaters of Kerala. Along the way they sipped tea in Darjeeling, experienced a train ride from hell to Madras, got bit parts in a Bollywood film, ogled at the incomparable Taj Mahal, hung with hippies in Goa, and met a whole lifetimes’ worth of fascinating, entertaining and memorable characters. Head Waggling in Delhi offers timeless insight into life on the road in India—the good, the bad and the downright bizarre—filled with wry observation, affection, and humor.
While in college, a group of four young men establish a tradition: every year, they take a week-long adventure trip together. They go hiking, biking, or kayaking, traveling all around the world. They call it their Man Mission, an annual ritual that they keep for fifteen years. In the course of their travels, they hitch a ride with drug dealers in New Zealand, down kava shots on Fijian beaches, come face-to-face with a roaring lion in South Africa, luxuriate in a resort intended only for Vietnamese Communist officials, trek to Machu Picchu, and go ice climbing in Iceland. Over the years, they get married, start families, establish careers, and do all the stuff upright men are supposed to do. But when the challenges of real life come into conflict with the perfect lives they are supposed to be living, the yearly Man Mission becomes more than an annual getaway. It’s a source of stability and a place to find redemption. Part travel narrative and part roman à clef, this novel follows four regular guys as they find adventure together, and seek meaning and purpose, in a world where the traditional rules of “being a man” are no longer clear. “5 out of 5 stars”—Foreword Clarion Reviews “A fast-moving, fresh, multi-faceted story of exploration” —Louise Herron AM, CEO, Sydney Opera House “A candid account of a man’s viewpoint—4 out of 4 stars” —Online Book Club “Lively and well-told”—Blue Ink Review
The exotic and suspenseful New York Times Notable Book that tells the story of an eccentric guest-house keeper in Varanasi, India, and the passions evoked by her sacred city along the Ganges The Lonely Planet recommends the Saraswati Guest House, and meeting Madame Natraja, "a one-woman blend of East and West," as well worth a side trip. Over the course of a weekend, several guests turn up, shocked to encounter a three-hundred-some-pound, surly white woman in a sari. Then a series of Hindu-Muslim murders leads to a citywide curfew, and they unwittingly become her captives. So begins a period of days blending into nights as Natraja and her Indian cook become entangled in a web of religious violence, and their guests fall under the spell of this ancient kingdom--at once enthralled and repelled by the begging children, the public funeral pyres, the holy men bathing in the Ganges at dawn. This is a traveler's tale, a story about the strange chemistry that develops from unexpected intimacies on foreign ground. And Peggy Payne's extraordinary talent vividly conjures up the smells of the perfume market, the rhythms of holy men chanting at dawn, the claustrophobic feel of this ancient city's tiny lanes, and the magic of the setting sun over the holy Ganges. For anyone who has harbored a secret desire to go to India and be transformed, Sister India, called "mesmerizing" by Gail Harris and "a modern version of E. M. Forster's classic A Passage to India" by Dan Wakefield, takes you on this journey without ever leaving home.
Travel writer Philip Ward, who has explored fifty countries around the world, takes the reader to northwest India to discover the wonders of the state of Rajasthan and the cities of Agra and Delhi. Rajasthan, known as the Country of the Princes, is the nation's most popular tourist destination. This guide reveals the surprises of Delhi, a great twentieth-century Asian capital with a complex past, and explores the expected and unexpected pleasures of Agra, with its Taj Mahal and I'timad ad-Daula, Red Fort, and teeming bazaars. Here, too, are familiar destinations such as Jodhpur and Pushkar, as well as such off-the-beaten-track jewels as Kishangarh, Dig, Kumbhalgarh, Bundi, Kota, and Chittor. Intended for first-time visitors as well as experienced travelers, Northern India: Rajasthan, Agra, Delhi provides helpful and thoughtful observations on India's main attractions.
Passport Photos, a self-conscious act of artistic and intellectual forgery, is a report on the immigrant condition. A multigenre book combining theory, poetry, cultural criticism, and photography, it explores the complexities of the immigration experience, intervening in the impersonal language of the state. Passport Photos joins books by writers like Edward Said and Trinh T. Minh-ha in the search for a new poetics and politics of diaspora. Organized as a passport, Passport Photos is a unique work, taking as its object of analysis and engagement the lived experience of post-coloniality--especially in the United States and India. The book is a collage, moving back and forth between places, historical moments, voices, and levels of analysis. Seeking to link cultural, political, and aesthetic critiques, it weaves together issues as diverse as Indian fiction written in English, signs put up by the border patrol at the U.S.-Tijuana border, ethnic restaurants in New York City, the history of Indian indenture in Trinidad, Native Americans at the Superbowl, and much more. The borders this book crosses again and again are those where critical theory meets popular journalism, and where political poetry encounters the work of documentary photography. The argument for such border crossings lies in the reality of people's lives. This thought-provoking book explores that reality, as it brings postcolonial theory to a personal level and investigates global influences on local lives of immigrants.
‘... nobody who lives there, nobody at all, has much good to say about Delhi.’ Along with Milton Keynes, Detroit and Purgatory, Delhi is one of the world’s great unloved destinations. So when Elizabeth Chatterjee makes her way from the cool hum of Oxford to the demented June heat of heat of Delhi to research her PhD, she find herself both baffled and curious about the je ne sais quoi of this city of ‘graveyards and tombstones’. As flanêur and sagacious resident, Liz takes us through the serpentine power structures, the idyll, the bullshit—peeling layer after layer of the city’s skin to reveal its aspirations, its insecurity, its charm and finally its urban dissonance. Uncannily perceptive, predictive, and hysterical, Delhi Mostly Harmless puts a firm finger on the electric pulse of Delhi.
A group of writers familiar with the diversity of experiences available in North India offer their views on accommodations, restaurants, shopping, and sights.
Ever since Herodotus reported that it was home to gold-digging ants, travelers have been intrigued by India in all its beguiling complexity. This superb anthology gives us some of the best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that has been written about the world’s second most populous nation over the past two centuries. From Mark Twain’s puzzled fascination with Indian castes and customs, to Allen Ginsberg’s awe at the country’s spiritual and natural splendors, or from J. R. Ackerley’s delightful recollections of his visits with an eccentric gay Maharajah, to Gore Vidal’s unforgettable scene in his novel Creation, in which his character finally meets the Buddha and is bewildered–all twenty-five selections in India in Mind reveal a place that evokes, in the traveler, reactions ranging from fear and perplexity to astonishment and wonder. Edited and with an introduction and chapter notes by the award-winning novelist Pankaj Mishra, India in Mind is a marvel of sympathy, sensitivity, and perception, not to mention outstanding writing. From the Trade Paperback edition.
This is the first definitive biography of arguably India’s most influential and powerful civil servant: P.N. Haksar, Indira Gandhi’s alter ego during her period of glory. Educated in the sciences and trained in law, Haksar was a diplomat by profession and a communist-turned-democratic socialist by conviction. He had known Indira Gandhi from their student days in London in the late-1930s, even though family links predated this friendship. They kept in touch, and in May 1967, she plucked him out of his diplomatic career and appointed him secretary in the prime minister’s Secretariat. This is when he emerged as her ideological beacon and moral compass, playing a pivotal role in her much-heralded achievements including the nationalization of banks, abolition of privy purses and princely privileges, the Indo-Soviet Treaty, the creation of Bangladesh, rapprochement with Sheikh Abdullah, the Simla and New Delhi Agreements with Pakistan, the emergence of the country as an agricultural, space and nuclear power and, later, the integration of Sikkim with India. This power and influence notwithstanding, Haksar chose to walk away from Indira Gandhi in January 1973. She, however, persuaded him to soon return, first as her special envoy and later as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission where he left his distinctive imprint. Exiting government once and for all in May 1977, he then continued to be associated with a number of academic institutions and became the patron for various national causes like protecting India’s secular traditions, propagating of a scientific temper, strengthening the public sector and deepening technological self-reliance. Successive prime ministers sought his counsel and in May 1987, he initiated the reconstruction of India’s relations with China. He remained an unrepentant Marxist and one of India’s most respected elder statesman and leading public figures till his death in November 1998. Drawing on Haksar’s extensive archives of official papers, memos, notes and letters, Jairam Ramesh presents a compelling chronicle of the life and times of a truly remarkable personality who decisively shaped the nation’s political and economic history in the 1960s and 1970s that continues to have relevance for today’s India as well. Written in Ramesh’s inimitable style, this work of formidable scholarship brings to life a man who is fast becoming a victim of collective amnesia.
The concluding volume of a critical English edition of the monumental Indian epic The seventh and final book of the monumental Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the Uttarakāṇḍa, brings the epic saga to a close with an account of the dramatic events of King Rāma's millennia-long reign. It opens with a colorful history of the demonic race of the rākṣasas and the violent career of Rāma’s villainous foe Rāvaṇa, and later recounts Rāma’s grateful discharge of his allies in the great war at Lankā as well as his romantic reunion with his wife Sītā. But dark clouds gather as Rāma, confronted by scandal over Sītā’s time in captivity under the lustful Rāvaṇa, makes the agonizing decision to banish his beloved wife, now pregnant. As Rāma continues as king, marvelous tales and events unfurl, illustrating the benefits of righteous rule and the perils that await monarchs who fail to address the needs of their subjects. The Uttarakāṇḍa has long served as a point of social and religious controversy largely for its accounts of the banishment of Sītā, as well as of Rāma’s killing of a low-caste ascetic. The translators’ introduction provides a full discussion of these issues and the complex reception history of the Uttarakāṇḍa. This translation of the critical edition also includes exhaustive notes and a comprehensive bibliography.
