It’s the trip of a lifetime—a textile-based tour of colorful Rajasthan, India featuring more than 200 lush photographs depicting everyday life in one of the most vibrant regions in the world. ”Get lost in the beauty of the photographs in Patterns of India, a striking journey through the colorful Indian state of Rajasthan.”—BuzzFeed Patterns of India is a visual experience that offers intimate insights into the diverse and richly hued Western Indian culture. Color is the thread that binds the vast country together, defining every aspect of life from religion and politics to food and dress. Organized by the five dominant colors royal blue, sandstone, marigold, ivory, and rose, this book explores how deeply color and pattern exist in a symbiotic relationship and are woven into every part of the culture. For instance, the fuchsia found in the draping fabric of a sari is matched by the vibrant chains of roses offered at temple, and the burnt orange spices in the marketplaces are reflected in the henna tattoos given to brides and wedding guests. While every color is imbued with meaning, it is often within the details of patterns that the full story comes to light. Photographer and writer Christine Chitnis spent over a decade traveling through, getting to know, and falling in love with the intricate patterns of everyday Rajasthani life. With history and culture-based essays woven throughout the more than 200 stunning photographs of architecture, markets, cuisine, art, textiles, and everyday goings-on, Patterns of India captures the beauty and essence of this unique part of the world.

Features beautiful black and white line drawings of Indian patterns, allowing readers to colour them in their own style. With snippets of information on techniques, media and colours, this is a unique introduction to modern and traditional Indian art.

This study draws from postcolonial theory, science fiction criticism, utopian studies, genre theory, Western and Indian philosophy and history to propose that Indian science fiction functions at the intersection of Indian and Western cultures. The author deploys a diachronic and comparative approach in examining the multilingual science fiction traditions of India to trace the overarching generic evolutions, which he complements with an analysis of specific patterns of hybridity in the genre’s formal and thematic elements – time, space, characters and the epistemologies that build the worlds in Indian science fiction. The work explores the larger patterns and connections visible despite the linguistic and cultural diversities of Indian science fiction traditions.

This book explores the exclusion of community groups from the perspective of people’s equal opportunities and equal access to newly generated economic benefits, tracing the factors determining their denial and exclusion. Paying specific attention to watershed development projects, it considers the detailed processes involved in the denial of institutional and livelihood opportunities to resource-poor groups, and discusses potential avenues for their meaningful social inclusion in the governance of natural resources.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

In India: A Sacred Geography, renowned Harvard scholar Diana Eck offers an extraordinary spiritual journey through the pilgrimage places of the world's most religiously vibrant culture and reveals that it is, in fact, through these sacred pilgrimages that India’s very sense of nation has emerged. No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes of Indian culture. Every place in this vast landscape has its story, and conversely, every story of Hindu myth and legend has its place. Likewise, these places are inextricably tied to one another—not simply in the past, but in the present—through the local, regional, and transregional practices of pilgrimage. India: A Sacred Geography tells the story of the pilgrim’s India. In these pages, Diana Eck takes the reader on an extraordinary spiritual journey through the living landscape of this fascinating country –its mountains, rivers, and seacoasts, its ancient and powerful temples and shrines. Seeking to fully understand the sacred places of pilgrimage from the ground up, with their stories, connections and layers of meaning, she acutely examines Hindu religious ideas and narratives and shows how they have been deeply inscribed in the land itself. Ultimately, Eck shows us that from these networks of pilgrimage places, India’s very sense of region and nation has emerged. This is the astonishing and fascinating picture of a land linked for centuries not by the power of kings and governments, but by the footsteps of pilgrims. India: A Sacred Geography offers a unique perspective on India, both as a complex religious culture and as a nation. Based on her extensive knowledge and her many decades of wide-ranging travel and research, Eck's piercing insights and a sweeping grasp of history ensure that this work will be in demand for many years to come.

Terricolous lichens, a habitat specialist group of lichens play a vital role in maintenance and ecological stability of soil crusts with reference to their physical stability, hydrology and growth of soil microflora. Terricolous lichens in Indian lichenological studies haven’t been taken up as a functional group. Terricolous Lichens in India, Volume 1: Diversity Patterns and Distribution Ecology is the first ever publication dealing with soil lichens of India. Divided into five chapters, this volume discusses the lichenological researches in India with reference to terricolous lichens, the altitudinal distribution patterns of terricolous lichens, comparative assessment of distribution with global patterns, and the photobiont diversity and influence of novel molecular clades of photobiont in determining ecological preferences of soil lichens in India. Written by experts in the field and supplemented with numerous photographs, Terricolous Lichens in India, Volume 1: Diversity Patterns and Distribution Ecology is a comprehensive resource that addresses the major drivers of terricolous lichens distribution in India.