Short ironic sketches of the life of a respected middle-aged leader of an Indian NGO, supposedly one of India's best-known, weaving conflicting character threads of a complex person, as much a victim of his circumstances and his profession, as a willful perpetrator of shady deals in the name of development and benevolence. The pastiches show that an NGO manager is not such a dedicated 'Gandhian' leader of civil society as development organizations make him out to be, but like most other people, he struggles to make a living, bending principles along the way. Most times, the officials, the foreigner donors, academics, feminists, businessmen with a social conscience, and other do-gooders are no better than he is, though they do not see as clearly what they are about as he does. He finally emerges with a national award for his services to Humanity.

Escapades of self-serving do-gooders, national leaders, babus, and other frauds, Indian and International.

Short-listed for the 2010 National Business Book Award Renowned author and journalist Sheila McLeod Arnopoulos uses her talent for investigative reporting to take us deep into the poorest villages in India. Yet, far from being passive victims of their circumstances, the women who live there have joined forces and are making astute use of microcredit to break the cycle of poverty. Microcredit was made famous by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and consists of very small loans made primarily to women for the production of essential commodities or to start small businesses. Basing the book on a number of trips to India between 2001 and 2008, Arnopoulos shows her sense of solidarity and desire for authenticity by sharing the daily life of these villagers. The first-person account of her extensive travels focuses primarily on these women’s inspiring success stories. After witnessing many such situations first-hand, she believes that these villages have a potential strength equal to that of the modern, high-tech cities in India.

In a typical village somewhere in the Deccan, justice arrives in a different form... A middle-aged Dalit mid-wife, Ramulamma goes about her day performing her services as a dai, looking for odd jobs in surrounding villages and occasionally in the city, and countering constant ill-treatmeant from the local Inspector Sahib. But there’s more to Ramulamma than her torn sari and the gold stud twinkling on her nose reveal. Through her wisdom and canny intuition, she finds her way around the most intractable problems with the deftest touch. She brings to book a powerful landlord for the rape and murder of a young Dalit girl, saves a falsely accused thief from a miserable fate, and demonstrates to abusive policemen (and occasionally her high-born patrons) in her signature, subtle style the real meaning of duty. With delicate wit and never-failing empathy, the twelve stories in this delightful collection expose the hypocrisies of our sharply divided society and celebrate the self-empowerment of its oppressed.

The Marmas (Vital points) are very sensitive, tender and vulnerable points in human body. Injury to them leads to deformity or even to death. Therefore, the knowledge of the Marmas is very essential for physicians and surgeons. This book is an attempt in this direction. Based on 54 verses of Suśruta Saṃhitā Sārira, Chapter 6, it explains the Ayurvedic concept of Marmas, along with their various types, location in the body, nature, their size, anatomy, physiology, pathology and possible treatments. It also tries to correlate the Ayurvedic Marmas with the vital points in other alternative systems of medicine—Yoga, Unani, Siddha, Homoeopathy and Acupuncture.