India House

India has the second-largest legal profession in the world, but the systemic delays and chronic impediments of its judicial system inspire little confidence in the common person. In India’s Legal System, renowned constitutional expert and senior Supreme Court lawyer Fali S. Nariman explores the possible reasons.

India’s Five-Year Plans were one of the developing world’s most ambitious experiments. After nearly two centuries of colonial rule, planning the economy was meant to be independent India’s route from poverty to prosperity. Planning Democracy explores how India married liberal democracy to a socialist economy. Planning not only built India’s data systems, it even shaped the nature of its democracy. The Five-Year Plans loomed so large that they linked surprisingly far-flung contexts—from computers to Bollywood to Hindutva.

Kalki Divekar grows up a daughter of Kingston—a city the British built on the ashes of Bombay. The older generation, including her father, have been lost to the brutal hunt for rebels. Young men are drafted to fight wars they will never return from. And the people of her city are more interested in fighting one another than facing their true oppressors. When tragedy strikes close to home, Kalki begins to play a dangerous game with small acts of resistance, tempered by cautious, level-headed Yashu and fortified by Fauzia, whose dreams of the future awaken Kalki’s heart.

In this concluding volume of the Savarkar series, exploring a vast range of original archival documents from across India and outside it, in English and several Indian languages, historian Vikram Sampath brings to light the life and works of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the most contentious political thinkers and leaders of the twentieth century.

When Meena finds snakebites on her chest, her worst fears are realized: someone is after her and she must flee India. As she plots her exit, she learns of the Trail, an energy-harvesting bridge spanning the Arabian Sea that has become a refuge for itinerant vagabonds and loners on the run. This is her salvation. Slipping out in the cover of night, with a knapsack full of supplies including a pozit GPS, a scroll reader, and a sealable waterproof pod, she sets off for Ethiopia, the place of her birth.

Sixteen Stormy Days narrates the riveting story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India—one of the pivotal events in Indian political and constitutional history, and its first great battle of ideas.

More than half of India is under the age of 25, and the country is set to have the youngest population in the world by 2021. But India's millennials are nothing like their counterparts in the West. Snigdha Poonam's remarkable cultural study of the unlikeliest of fortune-hawkers travels through the small towns of Northern India to investigate the phenomenon that is India's Generation Y. She travels through India's badlands to uncover a theater of toxic masculinity, spirited ambition, and a kind of hunger for change that is bound to drive the future of our country.

In a rare attempt to understand the Indianness of Indians - among the most intelligent people in the world, but also, to a dispassionate eye, perhaps the most baffling - V. Raghunathan uses the props of game theory and behavioral economics to provide an insight into the difficult conundrum of why we are the way we are. He puts under the scanner our attitudes towards rationality and irrationality, selflessness and selfishness, competition and cooperation, and collaboration and deception.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, one of the greatest men to walk this earth, begins the story of his life with descriptions of his childhood in Porbandar and Rajkot in Gujarat, his schooldays, his early marriage, the lessons he learnt when he tried stealing, told lies and smoked cigarettes, and his unshakable devotion to his parents. He then tells us of his journeys abroad, first to England and then to south Africa, and narrates in simple, lucid language his transformation from a shy, diffident young man with a chronic fear of public speaking to a fearless lawyer and leader.

Victorian England sets the stage for a passionate, unforgettable romance between a diplomat's daughter and a notorious mercenary who has targeted her father for assassination.

Sometime, somewhere, the conspiracy of silence around Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) in Indian homes had to be shattered. This path-breaking audiobook attempts to give that sexually abused child a powerful voice. In Bitter Chocolate, journalist and best-selling author Pinki Virani travels across the country to record the testimonies of the police, doctors, child psychologists, mental health professionals, social workers, lawyers, and the traumatized victims themselves. The audiobook opens with an account of the author's own experience.

As a $3-trillion economy, India is on her way to becoming an economic superpower. Between 1991 and 2011, the period of our best growth, there was also a substantial decline in the number of people below the poverty line. Since 2011, however, there has been a marked retreat in the high growth performance of the previous two decades. What happened to the promise? Where have we faltered? How do we change course? As professional economists as well as former civil servants, Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah have spent most of their lives thinking about and working on these questions.

Black Friday is a ghastly account of the one of the biggest terrorist attacks on Bombay, in 1993. The book chronicles the devastation caused to life and property due to the attacks and the trauma, both physical and mental, undergone by the people at large post the terrorist attacks and the consequent rift between the communities of Hindu and Muslims and hatred and clashes which often turned extremely violent.

On 26 January 1950, the Constitution of India was adopted formally and came into effect. Its preamble set out in brief the enlightened values it enshrined and hoped to engender. In a radical shift from mainstream constitutional history, this book establishes Dr B.R. Ambedkar's irrefutable authorship of the preamble by uncovering the intellectual origins of its six most central concepts—justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, dignity, and nation.

A stone-age hand axe, an enchantingly sculpted yakshi, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and even an HMT watch―can these things have anything in common? Yes, they can! Each of these has been conceived by the human mind and shaped by the human hand. Each object has a voice, not just of rulers and conquerors, but also of the common people. Most significant of all, each carries stories of how communities and identities were built on the Indian subcontinent.

Understanding humans and human nature is one of the toughest jobs. Many time what seems right and good or vice versa can be completely different if explored to proper depth. In many instances, we all form an opinion about the people we meet without actually knowing anything about them. But hearing and learning about such instances helps us to redefine our thought process and become wiser. Sudha Murty's book Wise and Otherwise will take you to a journey across the length and breadth of India through narrations of 51 stories inspired by the extensive travels of the author herself.

Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960’s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union, a revolutionary act, results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.

Shashi Tharoor shows compellingly that India stands at the intersection of the most significant questions facing the world today. If democracy leads to inefficient political infighting, should it be sacrificed in the interest of economic well-being? Does religious fundamentalism provide a way for countries in the developing world to assert their identity in the face of Western hegemony, or is there a case for pluralism and diversity amid cultural and religious traditions?

"I thought the nation was coming to an end", wrote Khushwant Singh, looking back on the violence of Partition that he was witness to over half a century ago. He believed then that he had seen the worst that India could do to herself. But after the violence in Gujarat in 2002, he felt that the worst, perhaps, is still to come. Analysing the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the burning of Graham Staines and his children, the targeted killings by terrorists in Punjab and Kashmir, Singh confronts the absolute corruption of religion that has made us among the most brutal people on earth.

In the 1970s, Rajesh Khanna achieved the kind of fame that no film star had ever experienced before or has since. But then he saw it all vanish. They say superstardom destroyed him. But was it something else buried deep in his past? In this riveting biography, award-winning journalist Yasser Usman examines Rajesh Khanna's dramatic, colorful life in its entirety, from little-known facts about his childhood to the lowdown on his relationships and rivalries, from his ambitious hopes to his deep-seated insecurities.