Tag Archives: Non Fiction

In My Hands Today…

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Small Acts of Freedom – Gurmehar Kaur

In February 2017, Gurmehar Kaur, a nineteen-year-old student, joined a peaceful campaign after violent clashes at a Delhi University college.

As part of the campaign, Kaur’s post made her the target of an onslaught of social media vitriol. Kaur, the daughter of a Kargil martyr, suddenly became a focal point of a nationalism debate. Facing a trial by social media, Kaur almost retreated into herself. But she was never brought up to be silenced. ‘Real bullets killed my father. Your hate bullets are deepening my resolve,’ she wrote then.

Today, Kaur is doubly determined not to be silent. Small Acts of Freedom is her story. This is the story of three generations of strong, passionate single women in one family, women who have faced the world on their own terms.

With an unusual narrative structure that crisscrosses elegantly between past and present, spanning seventy years from 1947 to 2017, Small Acts of Freedom is about courage. It’s about resilience, strength and love. From her grandmother who came to India from Lahore after Partition to the whirlwind romance between her parents, from her father’s state funeral to her harrowing experiences since her days of student activism, Gurmehar Kaur’s debut is about the fierceness of love, the power of family and the little acts that beget big revolutions.

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Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory – Aanchal Malhotra

Remnants of a Separation is a unique attempt to revisit the Partition through objects that refugees carried with them across the border.

These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. They now speak of their owner’s pasts as they emerge as testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history.

A string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman’s determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her.

A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced upon leaving Mymensingh zila, now in Bangladesh. Written as a crossover between history and anthropology, Remnants of a Separation is the product of years of passionate research. It is an alternative history of the Partition – the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later.

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Dongri To Dubai : Six Decades of The Mumbai Mafia – S. Hussain Zaidi

Dongri to Dubai is the first ever attempt to chronicle the history of the Mumbai mafia. It is the story of notorious gangsters like Haji Mastan, Karim Lala, Varadarajan Mudaliar, Chhota Rajan, Abu Salem, but above all, it is the story of a young man who went astray despite having a father in the police force.

Dawood Ibrahim was initiated into crime as a pawn in the hands of the Mumbai police and went on to wipe out the competition and eventually became the Mumbai police’s own nemesis.The narrative encompasses several milestones in the history of crime in India, from the rise of the Pathans, formation of the Dawood gang, the first ever supari, mafia’s nefarious role in Bollywood, Dawood’s move to Karachi, and Pakistan’s subsequent alleged role in sheltering one of the most wanted persons in the world.

This story is primarily about how a boy from Dongri became a don in Dubai, and captures his bravado, focus, ambition, and lust for power in a gripping narrative. The meticulously researched book provides an in-depth and comprehensive account of the mafia’s games of supremacy and internecine warfare

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Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition – Nisid Hajari

Nobody expected the liberation of India and birth of Pakistan to be so bloody — it was supposed to be an answer to the dreams of Muslims and Hindus who had been ruled by the British for centuries.

Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s protégé and the political leader of India, believed Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand.

But in August 1946, exactly a year before Independence, Calcutta erupted in riots. A cycle of street-fighting — targeting Hindus, then Muslims, then Sikhs — spun out of control. As the summer of 1947 approached, all three groups were heavily armed and on edge, and the British rushed to leave.

Hell let loose. Trains carried Muslims west and Hindus east to their slaughter. Some of the most brutal and widespread ethnic cleansing in modern history erupted on both sides of the new border, searing a divide between India and Pakistan that remains a root cause of many evils. From jihadi terrorism to nuclear proliferation, the searing tale told in Midnight’s Furies explains all too many of the headlines we read today.

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Take Me Home: The Inspiring Stories of 20 Entrepreneurs from Small Town India with Big-Time Dreams – Rashmi Bansal

Parakram Singh Jadeja did it in Rajkot Deepak. Dadhoti did it in Belgaum. Vibhor Agrawal did it in Meerut. Take Me Home is the story of 20 entrepreneurs who have built remarkable enterprises, while remaining true to their roots. From small towns across India, they run giant global companies with locally trained talent. The ability to run a professional business is no longer limited by location. What you need is a vision and a mission and a burning desire. To ‘make it happen’, wherever you are.