Winner of The Hindu Prize 2018 (Non-fiction) Shortlisted for the 3rd JIO MAMI Word to Screen Award 2018 If you insist that you do not know me, let me explain myself … you will feel, why, yes, I do know this person. I’ve seen this man. With these words, Manoranjan Byapari points to the inescapable roles all of us play in an unequal society. Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit is the translation of his remarkable memoir Itibritte Chandal Jivan. It talks about his traumatic life as a child in the refugee camps of West Bengal and Dandakaranya, facing persistent want—an experience that would dominate his life. The book charts his futile flight from home to escape hunger, in search of work as a teenager around the country, only to face further exploitation. In Kolkata in the 1970s, as a young man, he got caught up in the Naxalite movement and took part in gang warfare. His world changed dramatically when he was taught the alphabet in prison at the age of 24—it drew him into a new, enticing world of books. After prison, he worked as a rickshaw-wallah and one day the writer Mahasweta Devi happened to be his passenger. It was she who led him to his first publication. Today, as Sipra Mukherjee points out, ‘issues of poverty, hunger and violence have exploded the cautiously sewn boundaries of the more affluent world’, rendering archaic the comfortable distances between them. Despite ‘Chandal’ explicitly referring to a Dalit caste, this narrative weaves in and out of the margins.

About the Book SHORTLISTED FOR THE JCB PRIZE, THE DSC PRIZE, THE CROSSWORD BOOK AWARD IN 2019 AND THE MATHRUBHUMI BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE IN 2020 It’s the early seventies. The Naxalbari Movement is gathering strength in Bengal. Young men and women have left their homes, picked up arms to free land from the clutches of feudal landlords and the state, and return them to oppressed landless farmers. They are being arrested en masse and thrown into high-security jails. In one such jail, five Naxals are meticulously planning a jailbreak. They must free themselves if the revolution is to continue. But petty thief Bhagoban, much too happy to serve frequent terms for free food and shelter, has been planted by Jailor Bireshwar Mukherjee among them as a mole. Only, Bhagoban seems to be warming up to them. There’s Gunpowder in the Air is a searing investigation into what deprivation and isolation can do to human idealism. And Manoranjan Byapari is perhaps the most refreshing voice to emerge from Bengal in recent times.

'When the house of history is on fire, journalists are often the first-responders, pulling victims away from the flames. Deep Halder is one of them.' - Amitava KumarIn 1978, around 1.5 lakh Hindu refugees, mostly belonging to the lower castes, settled in Marichjhapi an island in the Sundarbans, in West Bengal. By May 1979, the island was cleared of all refugees by Jyoti Basu's Left Front government. Most of the refugees were sent back to the central India camps they came from, but there were many deaths: of diseases, malnutrition resulting from an economic blockade, as well as from violence unleashed by the police on the orders of the government. Some of the refugees who survived Marichjhapi say the number of those who lost their lives could be as high as 10,000, while the-then government officials maintain that there were less than ten victims.How does an entire island population disappear? How does one unearth the truth and the details of one of the worst atrocities of post-Independent India? Journalist Deep Halder reconstructs the buried history of the 1979 massacres through his interviews with survivors, erstwhile reporters, government officials and activists with a rare combination of courage, conscientiousness and empathy.

This book shares how we can make the choice to rise above our hypercompetitive society and align with our goals and ourselves.

About the Book FROM THE WINNER OF THE HINDU PRIZE 2018 AND THE SHAKTI BHATT PRIZE 2022 This powerful trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels begins in East Pakistan. It tells the story of little Jibon, who arrives at a refugee camp in West Bengal in the arms of his Dalit parents escaping from the Muslim-majority nation. He grows up perpetually hungry for hot rice in the camp where the treatment meted out to dispossessed families like his is deplorable. When he is barely thirteen, Jibon runs away to Calcutta because he has heard that money flies in the air in the big city. His wildly innocent imagination leads him to believe that he can go out into the world, find work and bring back food for his starving siblings and clothes for his mother whose only sari is in tatters. And once he leaves home, through the travels of this starving, bewildered but gritty boy, we witness a newly independent India as it grapples with communalism and grave disparities of all kinds.

Karma Sutras decodes the secrets of effective leadership in these uncertain times. It is a blueprint for success in the organizational and personal sphere. The book contains management mantras from one of India's foremost thought leaders. It will help you navigate the technologydriven culture of 21st century business. Karma Sutras throws light on the leadership practices needed for the VUCA world. It vividly encapsulates the scientific and spiritual truths about organization, work, selfmastery and the purpose of leadership in the postCovid world. Laced with small, insightful narratives from current issues to motivating stories and relatable quotes, the book caters to aspiring leaders and firsttime managers alike. It provides deep anchors in spirituality for managers struggling in a disruptive world. Finally, Karma Sutras will teach you the art of effective followership. As the author rightly says, '. . . in each follower there is an emerging leader'.

This book analyses the power that religion wields upon the minds of individuals and communities and explores the predominance of language in the actual practice of religion. Through an investigation of the diverse forms of religious language available — oral traditions, sacred texts, evangelical prose, and national rhetoric used by ‘faith-insiders’ such as missionaries, priests, or religious leaders who play the communicator’s role between the sacred and the secular — the chapters in the volume reveal the dependence of religion upon language, demonstrating how religion draws strength from a past that is embedded in narratives, infusing the ‘sacred’ language with political power. The book combines broad theoretical and normative reflections in contexts of original, detailed and closely examined empirical case studies. Drawing upon resources across disciplines, the book will be of interest to scholars of religion and religious studies, linguistics, politics, cultural studies, history, sociology, and social anthropology.