Diwali in Muzaffarnagar
Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

Author: Tanuj Solanki

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2018-01-25

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 9352775945

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Winner of the 2019 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar Award Muzaffarnagar, the infamous north Indian town that's a byword for unrest, and where skirmishes are prone to break out ever so often. This is a place where teenage love and friendships are tested by the violence that threatens to spill out at the slightest provocation. A town that always pulls you back into its ways, no matter how cosmopolitan the city has made you.In Diwali in Muzaffarnagar - Tanuj Solanki's new book of short stories after Neon Noon - young men and women straddle the past and the present, the metropolis and the small town, and also the parallel needs of life: solitude and family.Advance Praise for Diwali in MuzaffarnagarIntimacy and inevitable grief collide often in these haunting stories of kinship and frayed ties. Solanki writes with great sensitivity about women and men who circle around their roles in families and society, seeking identities that free them from the past, even as its hold on them remains insoluble. These are stories that ache with love, and brave the knowledge that only rarely does love transcend its attendant pain. -Sharanya ManivannanSolanki not only surprises me with his craft and voice but also revives my interest in short stories. His observations are precise, his language lyrical and his style extremely pleasing. Diwali in Muzaffarnagar is not just another collection of well-written stories. It is a reminder that we have a goldmine of tales from which gifted writers like Solanki can bring us dazzling pieces. - Anees SalimSolanki gradually opens a door into a fascinating world, putting to the sword patronizing myths about small-town India. - Prayaag AkbarSolanki's stories are brilliantly nuanced, that quintessential mofussil north Indian town - Muzaffarnagar, in this case - reflected in them with all its intimacy and prejudices. The small town is never romanticized, though, and there is an admirable matter-of-fact quality to how the stories progress and end. - Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar

The Machine is Learning
The Machine is Learning

Author: Tanuj Solanki

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2020-04-02

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 9389109477

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Saransh works at a life insurance company, as part of the Special Projects Group (SPG). Their current project is top-secret: the development of an Artificial Intelligence system that will leave 552 branch-level employees redundant overnight. Because of site-specific customizations, however, the system needs to collect information from the company’s various branches. Thus, begins a cycle in which Saransh travels across the country, interviewing the very people that his machine will replace soon. Meanwhile, his conscientious ex-journalist girlfriend Jyoti repeatedly questions Saransh’s complicity in the impending destruction of hundreds of lives. The Machine is Learning is a novel about twenty-first-century workplaces, love and the impact of technology in all of our lives. It interrogates a world order that accommodates guilt but offers no truly ethical course correction.

Neon Noon
Neon Noon

Author: Tanuj Solanki

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2016-07-10

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 9350296950

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He is a bruised man, adrift, keening for a lost love. His sorrow submerges everything: his agony is truest, his epiphanies greatest. Do you despise him? You're too late. He despises himself already.This is his story: Anne-Marie, his true love, has left him and their Mumbai flat. There is a girl who pretends to be a lesbian with whom he has an awkward encounter of the almost-coital kind. And then, when he goes to Pattaya looking for sex (when he could have gone to Interlaken looking for love), he finds Noon, just the sort of woman who might mend - and break again - his wounded heart; and he finds Orhan, who may or may not be the son he never had.Here is a debut at once pensive and feral, cutting down to our most private tragedies - and to that shameful inference we must all some day come to: we are neither heroes nor insects.

Provincials
Provincials

Author: Sumana Roy

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2024-03-26

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0300277644

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An enchanting and joyous exploration of life and creativity at the geographical edges of the modern world Who is a provincial? In this subversive book, Sumana Roy assembles a striking cast of writers, artists, filmmakers, cricketers, tourist guides, English teachers, lovers and letter writers, private tutors and secret-keepers whose lives and work provide varied answers to that question. Combining memoir with the literary, sensory, and emotional history of an ignored people, she challenges the metropolitan’s dominance to reclaim the joyous dignity of provincial life, its tics and taunts, enthusiasms and tragicomedies. In a wide-ranging series of “postcards” from the peripheries of India, Europe, America, and the Middle East, Roy brings us deep into the imaginative world of those who have carried their provinciality like a birthmark. Ranging from Rabindranath Tagore to William Shakespeare, John Clare to the Bhakti poets, T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee, V. S. Naipaul to the Brontës, and Kishore Kumar to Annie Ernaux, she celebrates the provincials’ humor and hilarity, playfulness and irony, belatedness and instinct for carefree accidents and freedom. Her unprecedented account of provincial life offers an alternative portrait of our modern world.

.....Yes! I Matter
.....Yes! I Matter

Author: aakaanksha singh

Publisher: Partridge Publishing

Published: 2013-11

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1482814218

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.....Yes! I Matter is a vivid and a very realistic depiction of the life, times and dilemmas of a typical middle-class Indian Housewife. The Plot revolves around the love, the pain, the surrender and most of the time, call of duty, that forms the core of a housewife. Six Decades of freedom, a vibrant democracy and a young and dynamic billion population. With the world coming closer, both virtually and logistically; India certainly has announced its entry on the world stage and how? The plot of this novel is neatly weaved around three generations of very strong, thinking and ever giving Indian women. Lead by the protagonist Savitri, it revolves around the life of five women and their families. The book witnesses the process rediscovery, going the various phases of realization, actualization and the subsequent changes.

The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel
The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel

Author: Manu Joseph

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2013-01-07

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0393344657

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A quirky and darkly comic take on domestic life in southern India. The PEN Open Book Award called Manu Joseph "that rare bird who can wildly entertain his readers as forcefully as he moves them." In The Illicit Happiness of Other People, Joseph brilliantly brings his talents to the story of an Indian Christian family living far afield in south India. It has been three years since seventeen-year-old Unni Chacko mysteriously fell from a balcony to his death. His family—journalist father Ousep, who smokes two cigarettes at once “because three is too much”; mother Mariamma, who fantasizes gleefully about murdering her husband; and twelve-year-old love-struck brother Thoma with zero self-esteem, have coped by not coping. When the post office delivers a comic drawn by Unni that had been lost in the mail, Ousep, shocked out of his stupor, ventures on a quest to understand his son and rewrite his family’s story. Combining family drama with philosophy, social satire with satisfying storytelling, The Illicit Happiness of Other People reminds us that the greatest mystery of all—the one most worth our time and energy—is understanding the people we love.

Everyday Communalism
Everyday Communalism

Author: Sudha Pai

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780199466290

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With the demolition of the Babri Masjid and subsequent riots of the late 1980s and 1990s in Uttar Pradesh, the period that followed appeared relatively peaceful. Only at the turn of the century, India witnessed a strong wave of communalism in early 2000s. After the Godhra riots of Gujarat in 2002, Uttar Pradesh saw a series of them--in Mau in 2005, Lucknow in 2006, Gorakhpur in 2007, and Muzaffarnagar in 2013--announcing the return of fundamentalism in the Bharatiya Janta Party's core agenda of Hindutva politics. Everyday Communalism not only attempts to explore the anatomy of a Hindu-Muslim riot and its aftermath, but also examines the inner workings that enable deep-seated polarization between communities. Pai and Kumar show that frequent, low-intensity communal clashes pegged on routine everyday issues and resources help establish a permanent anti-Muslim prejudice among Hindus legitimizing majoritarian rule in the eyes of an increasingly polarized, intolerant, and entitled majority community of Hindus. Uttar Pradesh's rising cultural aspirations; economic anxieties to move away from its traditionally backward status; a deep caste-marked agrarian crisis; and sharp inequalities and acute poverty further play into the making a new post-Ayodhya phase of Hindutva politics.

Manjhi's Mayhem
Manjhi's Mayhem

Author: Tanuj Solanki

Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited

Published: 2022-11-21

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 9354928161

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Introducing Sewaram Manjhi in this explosive novel that combines a tight mystery and an anti-hero who refuses to back down. Sewaram Manjhi works as a security guard outside a posh Bombay café. On the surface, he's not unlike millions of invisible Indians who make the city tick, but there is a difference: he holds rage in his heart, and he will go to any length to snatch a chunk of the good life. Enter Santosh, hostess at the restaurant across the street. A damsel in distress, Santosh has a strange request for Manjhi, and far be it from him to say no. What follows is tabaahi - mayhem - as Manjhi finds himself caught in a web of lies and deceit, and on the trail of a bag full of money that will lead to broken noses, bloody heads, sex, seduction, and murder. If he succeeds, Manjhi might finally discover what it means to be in control of one's destiny in a land where birth determines fate.

An Indian Englishman
An Indian Englishman

Author: Jack Gibson

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2008-08-15

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 1435734610

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John Travers Mends (Jack) Gibson was born on March 3, 1908 and died on October 23, 1994 at the age of 86.In some ways, Jack was the last Indian Englishman. He came ten years before independence and stayed on 47 years after it, rendering dedicated service to the country of his adoption for 57 years. Jack's journey started as a school teacher at The Doon School. He was the last English Principal of Mayo College and the last English President of the Himalayan Club. He was the last, and for most of the time the only English resident of Ajmer. He must have been just about the last Englishman to have been honored by both the British and Indian Governments.Brij Sharma is a journalist based in Bahrain. He spent much of his childhood and youth in Dehra Dun, and while not a product of The Doon School, he has known its campus, the surroundings of the city and much of the mountainous terrain described in Gibson's letters.http://www.jtmgibson.com