A Death In The Himalayas A Neville Wadia Mystery

Why would anyone kill a well-meaning foreigner like Clare Watson in a quiet neighbourhood in the foothills of the Himalayas? Yes, Clare was a fearless woman. But why would she venture into the dark forest after sundown knowing it fully well as leopard habitat? When a celebrity author-activist is found battered in a Himalayan forest spring, the event resounds internationally. India jumps into headlines once again as a country that is unsafe for women. Closer home, the tragedy divides the sleepy village into gentle folk who mourn the dreadful passing of their dear friend and the motivated elite who believe she was begging for trouble. As Neville Wadia picks his way through the blood-splattered hills of Birtola, he begins to unpack the deadly truth that killed Clare, only to realize there are other tender lives at stake. What kind of killer is at work here: a jealous lover, a dejected husband, a sharp land grabber, a wily politician or a disgruntled local? Tense and atmospheric, a Death in the Himalayas is a mesmerizing mystery about the little-known intimacies of an idyllic locale.

Somewhere deep in the archives of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) in the heart of New Delhi lies a set of papers that researchers and historians interested in recording the history of Indian intelligence, would love to get their hands on. Alas, those documents-transcripts of tape-recorded conversations with RN Kao, the legendary spy chief-are not going to be available until 2025, according to instructions left by him, months before he passed away in 2002. So until those tapes and papers are made public, any biography of Rameshwar Nath Kao or 'Ramji' to friends, colleagues and family would have to depend on personal memories of a vast array of individuals who knew him in different capacities and their interpretation of his personality and contribution.

The inside track to India's most powerful tycoons The eight business maharajas profiled here are among Asia's most powerful industrial tycoons, Their combined turnover runs into billions of rupees, and between them they employ some 650,000 people, while indirectly affecting the lives of millions more. Sip a cup of tea, drive to work, listen to music, build a house and the chances are that in these and a myriad other ways you are using products that they manufacture or market. By any yardstick, the achievements of these men would rank among the great business stories of our time. How did these men build their enormous empires? What are their management secrets? How did they thrive and prosper even as others failed? What is their vision for the future? Top business writer and industry insider Gita Piramal draws on exhaustive interviews and in-depth research to discover the answers to these and related questions in her profiles of the men who will lead the country's push to become an industrial superpower in the 21st century.

Dhirubhai Ambani's life is a rags-to-riches story, from Bombay's crowded pavements and bazaars to the city's extravagantly wealthy social circles where business tycoons, stockmarket speculators, smugglers, politicians and Hindi film stars mingle, make money, make and break marriages and carry out prolonged feuds. This is the story of a rising capitalist group in post-independence India. Until the arrival of Ambani, and now more like him, India's big business scene was dominated by a few industrial houses from British times. Ambani's Reliance group has risen to rival these houses in just 26 years since its foundation. By 1995, the group had 2.6 million investors, one in every eight Indian sharemarket investors, and is now so large that it has to hold its annual general meetings in football stadiums. Along with expansion, however, have come the intricate political connections, a whole raft of corruption charges and a rollercoaster of booms and crashes for Ambani and his company. This study shows how capitalism emerges by fair means and foul in the new industrial countries of the Third World and explores the life of an Asian tycoon.

The celebrated Hindi novelist Vishwanath is heartbroken by the recent loss of his son in a car accident. The tragedy breaks a long dry spell and spurs him to write a novel set in the household of Lala Motichand in the early decades of the twentieth century. It follows the lives of the wealthy lala and his three sons: self-confident Dinanath, the true heir to Motichand's mercantile temperament; lonely Diwanchand, uninterested in business and steeped in poetry; and illegitimate Makhan Lal, a Marx-loving schoolteacher relegated to the periphery of his father s life. And in an illuminating act of self-reflection, Vishwanath, the son of a cook for a rich sethji, also tells the story of the lala's personal servant, Mange Ram, and his son, Parsadi. Fatherhood, brotherhood and childhood, love, loyalty and poetry all come to the fore as sons and servants await the lala's oncoming demise, against the devotional landscape of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas. By writing about mortality and family, Vishwanath confronts the wreckage of his own life while seeking to make sense of the new India that comes into being in the first half of the twentieth century. Spellbinding and penetrating, Half the Night Is Gone raises questions of religion, literature and society that speak to our fractured times.

More than half a century after his death, Mahatma Gandhi continues to inspire millions throughout the world. Yet modern India, most strikingly in its decision to join the nuclear arms race, seems to have abandoned much of his nonviolent vision. Inspired by recent events in India, Stanley Wolpert offers this subtle and profound biography of India's "Great Soul." Wolpert compellingly chronicles the life of Mahatma Gandhi from his early days as a child of privilege to his humble rise to power and his assassination at the hands of a man of his own faith. This trajectory, like that of Christ, was the result of Gandhi's passion: his conscious courting of suffering as the means to reach divine truth. From his early campaigns to stop discrimination in South Africa to his leadership of a people's revolution to end the British imperial domination of India, Gandhi emerges as a man of inner conflicts obscured by his political genius and moral vision. Influenced early on by nonviolent teachings in Hinduism, Jainism, Christianity, and Buddhism, he came to insist on the primacy of love for one's adversary in any conflict as the invincible power for change. His unyielding opposition to intolerance and oppression would inspire India like no leader since the Buddha--creating a legacy that would encourage Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and other global leaders to demand a better world through peaceful civil disobedience. By boldly considering Gandhi the man, rather than the living god depicted by his disciples, Wolpert provides an unprecedented representation of Gandhi's personality and the profound complexities that compelled his actions and brought freedom to India.