A Jubilant January – Check Out Our New Releases!

Moustache
S. Hareesh & Jayasree Kalathil

Vavachan is a Pulayan who gets the opportunity to play the role of a policeman with an immense moustache in a musical drama. The character appears in the play only in two scenes, and has no dialogue. However, his performance, and his moustache, terrify the mostly upper-caste audience, generating in them memories of characters of Dalit power and upper-caste terror, such as Ravanan. After the play, Vavachan, whose people were traditionally banned from growing facial hair, refuses to shave off his moustache.
Endless tales invent and reinvent the legend of the magic moustache in which birds roost, which allows its owner to appear simultaneously in different places and disappear in an instant, which grows as high as the sky and as thick as rain clouds, and turn Vavachan into Moustache, a figure of mythic proportions.
Originally published in Malayalam as Meesha, S. Hareesh’s Moustache is a contemporary classic mixing magic, myth and metaphor into a tale of far-reaching resonance.

Future Tense
Nitasha Kaul

The son of a former militant, Fayaz is an aimless bureaucrat whose marriage to his wife Zeenat has broken down.
His nephew Imran is a young student, a misfit in Srinagar, hoping to join a new kind of spectacular resistance.
Shireen, the granddaughter of a spy, discovers how her painful and divisive family story is deeply intertwined with the history of Kashmir. The paths of these characters intersect and diverge in Nitasha Kaul’s tour de force novel Future Tense, which traces the competing trajectories of modernity and tradition, freedom and suffocation, and the possibility of bridging the stories of different kinds of Kashmiris.

Messiah Modi: A Tale of Great Expectations
Tavleen Singh

One of India’s most influential columnists, and one not averse to controversy, Tavleen Singh was among the few mainstream ‘Delhi’ voices to see the Narendra Modi wave coming in 2014.
In Messiah Modi, she details her early support for Modi the candidate, followed by a helpless disenchantment with Modi the PM and the cabinet he headed. She tells the story of his first term as it unfolded. From lynchings to demonetization up to Article 370, she gives an intimate account of her subject.
In the 2019 verdict, and her own inability to get it right, she sees that she and her ilk have been swept to the margins of India; the masses of India speak in one voice, and that voice chants ‘Modi’. And yet, there is a marked difference between her enthusiasm of 2014 and her acceptance of 2019 as she examines whether Modi delivered on the promises he made in his first term. Is he the messiah so many hoped he would be?
This is Tavleen Singh’s frank and forthright reckoning of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Dreams of a Billion: India and the Olympic Games
Boria Majumdar & Nalin Mehta

As India gears up for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the country will focus once again on the moments of glory we have had on the largest sports arena in the world, featuring such stalwarts as Abhinav Bindra, Mary Kom and P.V. Sindhu. But it will also be time to ask again the question we ask ourselves every four years: Why does a country of a billion plus have so little to show for itself at the Olympics?
Dreams of a Billion gives the reader an inside view of what goes on backstage in the Indian Olympics world, alongside a quick history of how India has fared at the Olympics over the past century, and a look at how the Indian Olympics world has changed in the last decade. Which brings us to the question: How good is India’s preparation for Tokyo 2020? Can Tokyo be the game changer Indian sport wants it to be and hopes it will be?

The Making of Hero: Four Brothers, Two Wheels and a Revolution that Shaped India
Sunil Kant Munjal

In the early 1950s, four brothers got together and started a bicycle manufacturing unit in Independent India. Dayanand, Satyanand, Brijmohan and Om Prakash had arrived from the pre-Partition Pakistan and had nothing but a dream to excel in what they knew best – manufacturing.
Within a span of twenty years, Hero became the largest bicycle maker in the world. And in the next twenty years, it was the largest motorcycle maker in the world. This is the story of how the Munjal brothers, without any formal education or resources, worked like a cohesive unit and created a global manufacturing giant. In parallel, It is also the story of how an agrarian economy like India, with limited transportation, took wings on this two-wheeler revolution.
The book will go deep inside the ‘family’ spirit that drives each employee and explain why it has made the Hero Group, a world leader in many categories.

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