India House

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.

Every prime minister of independent India has guided, if not personally overseen, one prized portfolio: technology. If, in the early years, Nehru and his scientist advisors retained an iron grip on it, subsequent governments created a bureaucracy that managed everything from the country's crown jewels - its nuclear and space programs - to solar stoves and mechanized bullock carts. But a lesser-known political project began on August 15, 1947: the Indian state's undertaking to influence what the citizens thought about technology and its place in society.

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.

While the Puranas mention that Lord Brahma becomes an avatar whenever Lord Vishnu comes to Earth to establish dharma, it is in the Dasam Granth (one of the holy books of the Sikhs) that the avatars are actually listed. The common point in Hinduism and Sikhism regarding the avatars of Brahma is that they are seen as great thinkers and teachers. In this book, the authors, who run the popular website, Scientific Monk, delve into the lives of each avatar, their works and the philosophies presented by them.

Published on the eve of India's next general elections, The Verdict uses rigorous psephology, original research, and as-yet-undisclosed facts to talk about the entire span of India's electoral history from the first elections in 1952. Crucially, for 2019, it provides pointers to look out for, to see if the incumbent government will win or lose.

One of the largest consumer markets of the world, India is made up of lots and lots of small consumers―each earning and spending just a little bit that adds up to a lot. It is served by millions of small suppliers oozing innovation and customer intimacy, and is powered by digital infrastructure that does billions of unique and small transactions every day. In her new book, Rama Bijapurkar dismisses the easy and simplistic view of the Indian demographic and embraces all the complexities and opportunities that new India has to offer.

This book examines fifteen judgments that have influenced the financial destiny of India. With significant macroeconomic dimensions, these judgments, when explored, show a long-term impact on the economy.

There are not many Indian heroes whose lives have been as dramatic and adventurous as that of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. That, however, is an assessment of his life based on what is widely known about him. These often revolve around his resignation from the Indian Civil Service, joining the freedom movement, to be exiled twice for over seven years, throwing a challenge to the Gandhian leadership in the Congress, taking up an extremist position against the British Raj, evading the famed intelligence network to travel to Europe and then to Southeast Asia.

Chronicling the stories of 50 of India's leading Olympians for the first time ever in one comprehensive edition, Digvijay Singh Deo and Amit Bose bring you the games through the eyes of some of the best sportspersons in the country. These first-person accounts of Olympic medalists from 1948 till 2012, such as Balbir Singh, Leander Paes, Karnam Malleswari, Abhinav Bindra, and Sushil Kumar, and pioneers like Milkha Singh, P. T. Usha, and Anjali Bhagwat, reveal their hopes, superstitions, grit, and challenges.

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.

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.

Sita, the beloved princess of Mithila, is one of the most revered women in Indian history; so well known, yet probably the least understood. At every crossroad of her life, she chose acceptance and grace over self-pity. Her life was filled with sacrifice yet wherever she was, there was abundance. It was as if she was carved out of an intense longing for Rama, yet she had infinite patience.

The Age of Awakening tells India's economic story since the country gained independence. It unfolds a tale of titanic figures, colossal failures, triumphant breakthroughs, and great moral shortcomings. Weaving together vivid history and economic analysis, this book makes for a gripping narrative.

Twenty-one riveting stories from the battlefield about how India's highest military honor was won. The Brave takes you to the hearts and minds of India's bravest soldiers, all of whom won the Param Vir Chakra, India's greatest military honor. With access to the Army, families, and comrades-in-arms of the soldiers, Rachna Bisht Rawat paints the most vivid portrait of these men and their extraordinary deeds.

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.

The Maria girls from Bastar practice sex as an institution before marriage, but with rules—one may not sleep with a partner more than three times; the Hallaki women from the Konkan coast sing throughout the day; the Kanjars have plundered, looted and killed generation after generation, and will show you how to roast a lizard when hungry. The original inhabitants of India, these Adivasis still live in forests and hills, with religious beliefs, traditions and rituals so far removed from the rest of the country that they represent an anthropological wealth of our heritage.

Rahul Pandita was fourteen years old when he was forced to leave his home in Srinagar along with his family. They were Kashmiri Pandits—the Hindu minority within a Muslim-majority Kashmir that was by 1990 becoming increasingly agitated with the cries of 'Azaadi' from India. Our Moon Has Blood Clots is the story of Kashmir, in which hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits were tortured, killed and forced to leave their homes by Islamist militants and to spend the rest of their lives in exile in their own country.

The Indian Penal Code was formulated in 1860, three years after the first Indian revolt for independence. But it was only in 1870 that Section 124A was slipped into Chapter VI, defining the offense of Sedition in a statute for the first time in the history of common law. When India became independent in 1947, the Constituent Assembly expressed strong reservations against sedition as a restriction on free speech as it had been used as a weapon against freedom fighters, many of whom were a part of the Assembly. And yet it has survived....

So who really spearheaded India's Freedom Struggle? Millions of ordinary people—farmers, labourers, homemakers, forest produce gatherers, artisans and others—stood up to the British. People who never went on to be ministers, governors, presidents, or hold other high public office. They had this in common: their opposition to Empire was uncompromising. In The Last Heroes, these footsoldiers of Indian freedom tell us their stories.

In 2022, India, second only to the US, produced more unicorns than any other country in the world. Although ours is a vibrant ecosystem that encourages young minds to take the entrepreneurial plunge, the road ahead is full of pitfalls. Unlocking Unicorn Secrets captures the entrepreneurial journeys of some of India's new-age founders and looks at the challenges they faced and how they overcame them.