Aimless in Banaras

Aimless in Banaras PDF Author: Bishwanath Ghosh
Publisher: Tranquebar
ISBN: 9789389152005
Category : Vārānasi (Uttar Pradesh, India)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Aimless in Banaras

Aimless in Banaras PDF Author: Bishwanath Ghosh
Publisher: Tranquebar
ISBN: 9789389152005
Category : Vārānasi (Uttar Pradesh, India)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The City of Good Death

The City of Good Death PDF Author: Priyanka Champaneri
Publisher: Restless Books
ISBN: 1632062542
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go. Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi: India’s holy city on the banks of the Ganges has many names but holds one ultimate promise for Hindus. It is the place where pilgrims come for a good death, to be released from the cycle of reincarnation by purifying fire. As the dutiful manager of a death hostel in Kashi, Pramesh welcomes the dying and assists families bound for the funeral pyres that burn constantly on the ghats. The soul is gone, the body is burnt, the time is past, he tells them. Detach. After ten years in the timeless city, Pramesh can nearly persuade himself that here, there is no past or future. He lives contentedly at the death hostel with his wife, Shobha, their young daughter, Rani, the hostel priests, his hapless but winning assistant, and the constant flow of families with their dying. But one day the past arrives in the lifeless form of a man pulled from the river—a man with an uncanny resemblance to Pramesh. Called “twins” in their childhood village, he and his cousin Sagar are inseparable until Pramesh leaves to see the outside world and Sagar stays to tend the land. After Pramesh marries Shobha, defying his family’s wishes, a rift opens up between the cousins that he has long since tried to forget. Do not look back. Detach. But for Shobha, Sagar’s reemergence casts a shadow over the life she’s built for her family. Soon, an unwelcome guest takes up residence in the death hostel, the dying mysteriously continue to live, and Pramesh is forced to confront his own ideas about death, rebirth, and redemption. Told in lush, vivid detail and with an unforgettable cast of characters, The City of Good Death is a remarkable debut novel of family and love, memory and ritual, and the ways in which we honor the living and the dead. PRAISE FOR THE CITY OF GOOD DEATH “In Champaneri’s ambitious, vivid debut, the dying come to the holy city of Kashi to die a good death that frees them from the burden of reincarnation…. In sharp prose, Champaneri explores the power of stories—those the characters tell themselves, those told about them, and those they believe. . . . This epic, magical story of death teems with life.” —Publishers Weekly “Brimming with characters whose lives overlap and whose stories interweave, Champaneri’s exquisite debut delves into the consequences of the past, and how stories that are told can become reality even when they contain barely a shred of truth. As Pramesh discovers, the bitterness of past wounds can bring hope for redemption and life.” —Bridget Thoreson, Booklist “Lush prose evokes the thick, close atmosphere of Kashi and the intricate religious practices upon which life and death depend. Rumor and superstition hold sway over even the most level-headed people, twisting what’s explainable into something extraordinary—with tragic consequences. . . . The City of Good Death is a breathtaking, unforgettable novel about how remembering the past is just as important as moving on.” —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews, Starred Review "Champaneri’s Kashi is teeming and vivid . . . the book frequently charms, and it's as full of humor, warmth, and mystery as Kashi’s own marketplace." —Kirkus Reviews “The City of Good Death is the debut novel of Priyanka Champaneri but it has the confidence of a master storyteller. Drawing on the rich literary traditions of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, Champaneri’s epic saga will satisfy armchair travelers thirsty for adventure, and sick of looking out their windows.” —Chicago Review of Books "In intricate detail and with remarkable skill, Champaneri writes a powerful tale about the pull of the past and our aching need to understand the mysteries and misunderstandings that thwart our relationships. An atmospheric and immersive debut with a rich cast of characters you won’t soon forget." —Marjan Kamali, author of The Stationery Shop

Longing Belonging

Longing Belonging PDF Author: Bishwanath Ghosh
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789384030605
Category : Kolkata (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Tamarind City

Tamarind City PDF Author: Bishwanath Ghosh
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789357767774
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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About the Book A WITTY, OBSERVANT AND PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY OF A REMARKABLE CITY-CHENNAI From moody, magical Madras to bursting-at-the-seams, tech-savvy Chennai, the two aspects of the city are inseparable. As Bishwanath Ghosh tells us, while Chennai is usually known as conservative and orthodox, almost every modern institution in India-from the army to the judiciary; from medicine to engineering-traces its roots to Madras. Today the city once again figures prominently on the global map as 'India's Detroit', a manufacturing giant and a hub of medical tourism. There have been sweeping changes since Independence, but even as Chennai embraces change, its people hold its age-old customs and traditions close to their hearts. It is this city that Bishwanath Ghosh explores, delving into its past, roaming its historic sites and neighbourhoods, and meeting a wide variety of people-from a top vocalist to a top sexologist, from a yoga teacher to a percussionist, from a yesteryear film star to his own eighty-five-year-old neighbour. What emerges is an evocative portrait of this unique city, drawn without reservation-sometimes with humour, sometimes with irony-but always with love. About the Author Bishwanath Ghosh, an Indian writer and journalist, best known for his literary travelogues which describe the essence of India. In 2009 he published the bestselling Chai, Chai: Travels in Places Where You Stop but Never Get Off, which The Telegraph (Kolkata) called "a delightful travelogue with a difference." He is also the author of Longing, Belonging (2014), which is a portrait of present-day Kolkata, Gazing at Neighbours (2017) and Aimless in Banaras.

Return Of The Aryans

Return Of The Aryans PDF Author: Bhagwan Gidwani
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9351184579
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 944

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A sweeping saga of ancient india Return of the Aryans tells the epic story of the Aryans – a gripping tale of kings and poets, seers and gods, battles and romance and the rise and fall of civilizations. In a remarkable feat of the imagination, Bhagwan S. Gidwani takes us back to the dawn of mankind (8000 BC) to recreate the world of the Aryans. He tells us why the Aryans left India, their native land, for foreign shores and shows us their triumphal return to their homeland... Vast and absorbing, the novel tells the stories of characters like the gentle god, Sindhu Putra, spreading his message of love; the physician sage Dhanawantar and his wife Dhanawantari; peaceloving Kashi after whom the holy city of Varanasi is named; and Nila who gave her name to the river Nile... Richly textured and with a cast of thousands, the epic adventure of the Aryans come gloriously alive in the hands of the bestselling author of The Sword of Tipu Sultan.

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India PDF Author: Mytheli Sreenivas
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295748850
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

Chai Chai

Chai Chai PDF Author: Ghosh, Bishwanath
Publisher: Tranquebar Press
ISBN: 9789380032863
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Bishwanath Ghosh had alighted from his train at Itarsi station to stretch his legs and grab a glass of tea before he resumed his journey.

Lost and Found in Banaras

Lost and Found in Banaras PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789385854668
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi PDF Author: Geoff Dyer
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030737808X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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A New York Times Notable Book A Best Book of the Year: The Economist, The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Slate.com, and Time In Venice, at the Biennale, a jaded, bellini-swigging journalist named Jeff Atman meets a beautiful woman and they embark on a passionate affair. In Varanasi, an unnamed journalist (who may or may not be Jeff) joins thousands of pilgrims on the banks of the holy Ganges. He intends to stay for a few days but ends up remaining for months. Their journey—as only the irrepressibly entertaining Geoff Dyer could conjure—makes for an uproarious, fiendishly inventive novel of Italy and India, longing and lust, and the prospect of neurotic enlightenment.

The Bureaucracy of Beauty

The Bureaucracy of Beauty PDF Author: Arindam Dutta
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1135864039
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
The Bureaucracy of Beauty is a wide-ranging work of cultural theory that connects literary studies, postcoloniality, the history of architecture and design, and the history and present of empire. Professor Ananya Roy of UC Berkeley calls it a "fantastic book," and in many ways this is the best description of it. The Bureaucracy of Beauty begins with nineteenth-century Britain's Department of Science and Arts, a venture organized by the Board of Trade, and how the DSA exerted a powerful influence on the growth of museums, design schools, and architecture throughout the British Empire. But this is only the book's literal subject: in a remarkable set of chapters, Dutta explores the development of international laws of intellectual property, ideas of design pedagogy, the technological distinction between craft and industry, the relation of colonial tutelage to economic policy, the politics and technology of exhibition, and competing philosophies of aesthetics. His thinking across these areas is ignited by engagements with Benjamin, Marx, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, Kant, Mill, Ruskin, and Gandhi. A rich study in the history of ideas, of design and architecture, and of cultural politics, The Bureaucracy of Beauty converges on the issues of present-day globalization. From nineteenth-century Britain to twenty-first century America, The Bureaucracy of Beauty offers a theory of how things - big things -change.