Preview: Our Best Indian New Releases This Month

Orientalism Two: A Study of British Rule over India from A Saidian Perspective

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is a seminal work in the field of postcolonial culture studies. It critiqued Western scholarship about the Eastern world for its patronizing attitude and tendency to view it as exotic, backward and uncivilized.

Arvind Sharma, longstanding professor of comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, now takes up the Palestinian academic’s ground-breaking ideas – originally put forth predominantly in a Middle Eastern context – and tests them against Indian material. He explores in an Indian context Said’s contention that the relationship between knowledge and power is central to the way the West depicts the non-West.

Scholarly and accessible, Orientalism Two throws fresh light on Indian colonial history through a Saidian lens.

Get your copy here: http://amzn.to/2nfvNQw

Shiva to Shankara: Giving Form to The Formless

We live in times where people have extreme views. On the one hand, there are scholars who describe Shiva’s linga literally as a phallus and see all metaphoric meaning as embarrassed apology of the uneducated. On the other hand, we have puritanical Hindus who want to strip the Shiva linga of all sexual meaning and sanitize Shiva’s lore. In both cases, a symbol is being reduced to a sign.In Shiva to Shankara, Devdutt Pattanaik, India’s leading mythologist, seeks to bridge the gap. As he explores the layers of meanings embedded in Shiva’s linga, we discover why and how the Goddess transforms Shiva, the hermit, into Shankara, the householder.

Get your copy here: http://amzn.to/2mv9MhD

The Body Nirvana: More than Just A Weight Loss Book

The body listens, remembers and speaks to us. We receive the body’s messages all the time, although we seldom recognize them. Our body expresses its unmet needs and calls for attention in many ways. And so it is with weight. This is a puzzling matter only because some pieces of the puzzle are not in the box you were handed. Your weight is not a body issue. Excess weight is a multi-dimensional problem showing up as an oversized body.
Popular media is still full of diet and exercise advice that is based on sacrifice and punishment. Too few books use this research to show how weight can be reduced in a happier and healthier way. The Body Nirvana is about gradually letting go of everything that literally and metaphorically weighs you down. It is time to rejoice in your body’s vitality and its capacity to take you towards your life’s goals!

Get your copy here: http://amzn.to/2mv9nvy

Freedom: My Story

Growing up in a newly free India, film-maker Arunaraje Patil came to be deeply invested in the idea of freedom – for herself, those around her and for the society she was growing up in. To be truly independent, though, there was a lot of unlearning and disengaging she had to do: from conversations of the past, from who she knew herself to be and from the image that she had trapped herself in. It was with her fourth film Rihaee (1988) that Patil rediscovered herself and her own creative expression.
Freedom: My Story is the chronicle of a radical thinker and film-maker in a male-dominated world, her struggles, her inspirations, the prejudices she had to deal with and, ultimately, the freedom her art offered.

Get your copy here: http://amzn.to/2muZ4YE

No Strings Attached

‘The kiss caught fire, growing more urgent, more intimate, its tenor changing rapidly as their mouths fused and clung.’

They make each other breathless. Their kisses are dangerous. Their chemistry is simply off the charts.

Samar Pratap Singh and Nina Sabharwal can’t seem to keep their hands off each other. Yet, they don’t quite trust each other either: he thinks she’s eyeing bigger fish, she’s convinced he’s a heart-breaker. They have both decided that falling in love is simply not an option – no strings attached is how they roll. Only, the fact that they have to see each other at work every day makes situations stickier and the more their lives become intertwined, the more they realize that love—a real and lasting love—is just a leap of faith away. But will they make that leap? Can they?

Get your copy here: http://amzn.to/2mvbM9L