Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie
On the morning of 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black – black clothes, black mask – rushed down the aisle towards him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are.
What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey towards physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.
Knife is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art – and finding the strength to stand up again.
Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality, Venki Ramakrishnan
We are living through a revolution in biology. Giant strides are being made in our understanding of why we age and die, and why some species live longer than others. Immortality, once a faint hope, has never been more within our grasp.
Examining recent scientific breakthroughs, Ramakrishnan shows how cutting-edge efforts to extend lifespan by altering our natural biology raise profound questions. Although we might not like it, does death serve a necessary biological purpose? And how can we increase our chances of living long, healthy and fulfilled lives? As science advances, we have much to gain. But might we also have much to lose?
Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan transforms our understanding of why we age and die – and whether there’s anything we can do about it.
The Foresighted Ambedkar: Ideas That Shaped Indian Constitutional Discourse, Anurag Bhaskar
In The Foresighted Ambedkar, Anurag Bhaskar argues that India’s Constitution was drafted not just between 1946 and 1950 but over the course of four decades. Dr Ambedkar was the only person to have been involved in all the stages related to the drafting of the Indian constitutional document since 1919. These stages bear the imprint of his contribution and role.
This book seeks to focus on Dr Ambedkar’s influence on the Indian constitutional discourse from 1919, when he entered public life, until the actual writing of the Constitution and even beyond. Covering the different constitutional moments as and when they happened, the book highlights Dr Ambedkar’s role in those moments.
Bhang Journeys: Stories, Histories, Trips and Travels, Akshaya Bahibala
For ten years, from 1998 to 2008, Akshaya Bahibala was in the grip of bhang, of ganja – drinking it, smoking it, experiencing the highs and lows of an addict on Puri’s beaches with hippies, backpackers and drop-outs from France and Japan, Italy and Norway. Then he drew back from the edge and tried to make a life, working as a waiter, a salesman, a bookseller.
He starts this journal-cum-travel book with startling, fragmented memories of his lost decade. From these, he moves to stories about people across Odisha whose lives revolve around ganja-bhang-opium. There is the owner of a government-approved bhang shop who takes pride in selling the purest bhang available and insists it can make people as forgiving and non-violent as Jesus. The opium cutter who learned as a boy how to massage a lump of opium with mustard oil and carve it into little tablets. The girl who survived cholera by licking opium and became a lifelong addict. The goldsmith whose opium de-addiction card entitles him to 20 grams a month, but who wishes it were 25. The ganja farmer who came from Punjab in a helicopter. A young man, a victim of ganja-and-bhang-fuelled paranoia, who believes Indian and American spies are out to get him.
Full of surprises and utterly distinctive, this book encapsulates the memories, journeys, facts and figures about the popular intoxicant.
Crypto Crimes: Inside India’s Best-Kept Secret, Mitali Mukherjee
The size of crypto investments in India stands at more than $10 billion, and about 15 million Indians have invested in cryptocurrencies. Most crypto traders are in the age group of 22 to 30 years, and hail from Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns. The volatility and easy money that crypto promises have turned it into a financial phenomenon. As the traders know, mining crypto coins is an arms race that rewards early adopters. And they are in a hurry.
So where and when did the chase for fast money begin to take so many wrong turns?
This book traces the murky underbelly of the crypto world and its mercurial spread across India-from the interiors of Uttar Pradesh, where crypto accounts are looted at gunpoint to quick black-to-white, switches for money in Bihar to the lure of drugs and parties in Karnataka and social media influencers who choose to be paid in crypto to circumvent both taxes and accountability.
Crimes range in both scale and concentration. In a chilling report, a Special Investigation Team reported that cryptocurrency is allegedly being used for transactions in narcotics, drugs, smuggling, investment of unaccounted money and illegal betting. Its latest use is to procure arms and weapons, becoming an easy conduit to fund terror activities against the Indian state. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
Ways of Being Indian: Essays on Religion, Gender and Culture, edited by Manoj Kumar Jena
The essays in this book discuss different ways in which identities are constructed in unique “Indian” contexts. The emergence of deras in Punjab reflects how continuing caste inequality and divergence over spiritual leadership has affected the egalitarian spirit of Sikhism, contradicting a basic feature of the faith – the tradition of common worship. In the matrilineal Khasi community, men – looking to gain equal inheritance rights – use arguments of ethnic purity and indigenous rights to downsize women’s autonomy and undermine the commanding socio-economic position that their own tradition gives them.
For male sex workers, their profession, paradoxically, becomes a means of sexual autonomy in the otherwise heteronormative world that they inhabit. A different kind of paradox marks the social lives of many Indian women: in Assam for instance, the celebration of menstruation coexists with a prohibition on menstruating women’s entry into temples and participation in auspicious events.
Workplace violence exemplifies how private biases infiltrate public spaces, reinforcing traditional marginalities, undeterred by legal safeguards. Similarly, the plight of indentured plantation workers in Malaysia demonstrates the operation of traditional patriarchy inside a foreign and highly sequestered workspace of plantations – within these spaces, women experience “double marginalisation”. And the government and middle-class response to the COVID-19 pandemic across India demonstrated the persistence of traditional biases which perpetuate inequality and oppression in the world’s largest democracy.
