Greengardens Media is proud to welcome Vinita Kinra, whose story "The Curse of a Nightingale" shook the world and gave her a staggering fan following. Pavitra in Paris is a powerhouse collection of 11 short stories crafted with unparalleled genius that take the reader on a roller coaster journey from dazzling New York City to remote Indian villages with stopovers at Seattle, Vancouver, Paris, Bamiyan, Jaipur, New Delhi, Patna and Mumbai. In the title story, a poor old Indian farmer is travelling to Paris with his masters. The author brilliantly unveils the emotional upheavals of this savage human in the midst of cultured urban travellers who mock him as a brute primate. The 10 other stories are 10 captivating worlds of arranged marriages, lone journey through Thar Desert, finding a groom in an open bazaar, desperation of a snake charmer, falling in love with a high school student while being his mother's age, finding lifelong friendship with a parrot, committing suicide to teach your family a lesson, and coming face-to-face with your mother's turbulent past during your own engagement dinner. Vinita Kinra's literary prowess and her intensely compelling prose, embellished with poems and songs, promise to make history.

Man has been searching for the meaning of life even from before the birth of Christ. Various religious/spiritual disciplines have developed over the centuries. But inevitably the solution was to escape from life towards a nirvana or a heaven that gave peace and salvation but left this earth unchanged. The Mother and Sri Aurobindo had a contrary view however, formulated upon their experiences and realizations. There is more to life than to escape from it.

The Dark Side of Church/State Separation analyzes the Enlightenment's attack upon the Judeo-Christian tradition and its impact upon the development of secular regimes in France, Germany, and Russia. Such regimes followed the anti-Semitic/anti-Christian agenda of the French Enlightenment in blaming the Judeo-Christian tradition for all the ills of European society and believing that human beings can develop their own set of values and purposes through rational means, apart from any revelation from God or Scripture. Stephen Strehle's analysis extends our understanding of church/state relations and its history. He confirms the spiritual roots of modern anti-Semitism within the ideology of the Enlightenment and recognizes the intimate relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity. Strehle questions the absolute doctrine of church/state separation, given its background in the bigotries of the philosophes. He notes the nefarious motives of subsequent regimes, which used the French doctrine to replace the religious community with the state and its secular ideology. This detailed historical analysis of original sources and secondary literature is woven together with special appreciation for the philosophical and theological ideas that contributed to the emergence of political institutions. Readers will gain an understanding of the most influential ideas shaping the modern world and present-day culture.

After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the subcontinent, Western-led ashrams and utopian communities remained in and around the former French territory of Pondicherry—most notably the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and the Auroville experimental township, which continue to thrive and draw tourists today. Unsettling Utopia presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Jessica Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires. Namakkal examines the colonial histories of the Aurobindo Ashram and Auroville, arguing that their continued success shows how decolonization paradoxically opened new spaces of settlement, perpetuating imperial power. Challenging conventional markers of the boundaries of the colonial era as well as nationalist narratives, Unsettling Utopia sheds new light on the legacies of colonialism and offers bold thinking on what decolonization might yet mean.