He has received many honours and awards including the Padma Bhushan, Sahitya Akademi Award, Ghalib Award, Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award, Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid Award, and Soviet Land Award.
He has served as Director, All India Radio and Director, National Book Trust. He has also been Advisor (Information), Planning Commission of India.
Bachi Karkaria is one of India’s most highly regarded journalists. Her specializations are urban change and AIDS. Her popular column, ‘Erratica’, has been in the Times of India since 1993, to which she has added ‘Giving Gyan’, a straight-from-the lip advice column. She is now an international media trainer, and has authored several books.
J. Krishnamurti was a twentieth-century thinker, writer and speaker on spiritual issues. He did not expound any philosophy or religion but spoke extensively on the need for psychological revolution, emphasizing that such revolution cannot be brought about by any external entity—religious, political or social.
Yoginder Sikand is a writer, academic and author of several books on Islam-related issues in India. He works with the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Social Policy at the National Law School, Bangalore.
Akho was a medieval Gujarati Bhakti poet of the seventeenth century and a goldsmith by profession. He is known for his pungent satirical poetry written in a verse pattern he introduced, called the chhappa. He lived in Ahmedabad.
Gieve Patel is a poet, playwright, painter and translator as well as a doctor. He has written three books of poetry: Poems (1966); How Do You Withstand, Body (1976); and Mirrored Mirroring (1991). He is also the author of three plays and has held several exhibitions of his paintings in India and abroad. He lives in Mumbai.
André Malraux was a French author, statesman and traveller. His books include La Condition Humaine or Man’s Fate, The Temptation of the West, The Conquerors, The Psychology of Art and The Voices of Silence. He travelled extensively in Asia where he helped organize the Young Annam League in Indo-China and founded the newspaper, Indochina in Chains.
Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih writes poems and short fiction in Khasi and English. His collections of poetry in English include Moments and The Sieve. He is the author of Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends and the co-editor of Dancing Earth: An Anthology of Poetry from North-East India. His awards include the first Veer Shankar Shah-Raghunath Shah National Award for literature (Madhya Pradesh, 2008) and the first North-East Poetry Award (Tripura, 2004).
Count Hermann Keyserling was a philosopher and founder of the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1920, based on his recognition of the equal value and validity of non-Western cultures and philosophies. His various books include The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, America Set Free, Europe, The World in the Making, The Book of Marriage, Immortality, Creative Understanding and South American Meditations.
Zac O’Yeah used to work at a theatre in Gothenburg, Sweden, and toured with a pop group, Twice A Man, until he retired at twenty-five and came to India. Since his debut as an author in 1995, he has published eleven books, including the best-selling Gandhi biography Mahatma! Most recently, he published the futuristic detective novel Once Upon A Time in Scandinavistan, a weird story of reverse colonialism.
Meerabai was a mystic poet, singer, devotee of Lord Krishna and one of the most significant figures of the Vaishnava Bhakti movement. She lived in Rajasthan. Her passionate bhajans in praise of Giridhara Gopala (Krishna) are popular throughout india and have been translated worldwide.
Shama Futehally was a short-fiction writer, novelist, translator and critic. She taught English and cultural history for several years in Mumbai and Ahmedabad. She published two collections of short fiction, two novels (Tara Lane and Reaching Bombay Central) as well as a collection of children’s stories with Githa Hariharan.
Jeet Thayil is a poet, musician, novelist and librettist. His four poetry collections include These Errors Are Correct and English, and he is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. His novel Narcopolis is forthcoming. He is one half of the contemporary music project Sridhar/Thayil.
Allen Ginsberg was a poet, world traveller and spiritual seeker, well-known for his two lengthy works: the epic poem, Howl, and his biography of his mother, Kaddish. He was a leading figure of the Beat Generation in America, and a champion of civil and human rights, vigorously opposed to militarism, capitalism and sexual repression.
Deborah Baker is a biographer and essayist. She is the author of A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, a book on Allen Ginsberg’s Indian sojourn, and of Extremis: The Life of Laura Reading, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994.
Peter Ludwig Brent is the author of Godmen of India, Healers of India, The Edwardians, Gengis Khan, T.E. Lawrence and Lord Byron, among other books. Based in England, he made several visits to india, exploring the role of spirituality in general and of the guru in particular.
Suketu Mehta is the new York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize). He has also won several awards for his fiction. He is associate professor of journalism at New York University and is currently working on a non-fiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York for which he was awarded a 2007 Guggenheim fellowship.
Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian-born British novelist, essayist, journalist and critic, best known for his anti-totalitarian novel, Darkness at Noon (1940). In 1958 and 1959 he travelled to india and Japan to discover whether the East could offer a spiritual direction to the West. He concluded that it could not and discusses this failure in his book, The Lotus and the Robot (1960). In 1972 he was made a Commander of the British Empire.
Andrew Harvey is a mystical scholar, Rumi translator, poet, novelist, spiritual teacher and writer. He is founder-director of the Institute of Sacred Activism. His books include Teachings of Rumi, Teachings of the Christian Mystics, Sun at Midnight, Son of Man and The Direct Path, among others.
Madhu Tandan is a writer who lived for seven years in a Himalayan monastery which had a simple `soil to soul’ philosophy. Her experiences in the monastery, threaded by her dreams, inspired her first book, Faith and Fire: A Way Within. Her second book, Dreams & Beyond: Finding Your Way in the Dark explores the multiplicity of the dreaming mind by synthesizing research, theory, and people’s dreams, and balancing the perspectives of neuroscience, psychology, parapsychology, and spirituality.
Akkamahadevi was a twelfth-century mystic poet associated with the Veerashaiva movement of Karnataka. Her vachanas, a form of didactic poetry, are considered her most significant contribution to Kannada Bhakti literature.
H.S. Shiva Prakash, a well-known Kannada poet and playwright, is also a prolific translator from English to Kannada, and vice versa. The former editor of Indian Literature, he is Professor, School of the Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Recently, he has been posted as Director, Tagore Centre, Embassy of India, Berlin.
Rahul Srivastava lives in goa. He is co-founder of the Institute of Urbanology and URBZ along with Matias Echanove. He has been trained in urban anthropology. His novel, Murder on Kaandoha Hill, was published in 2007.
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, critic and musician. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia. His second CD of experimental music, Found Music, was released by EMI.
Aubrey Menen was an English novelist and travel writer of Irish and Indian parentage. Primarily a satirist, his essays and novels explore the nature of nationalism and the cultural contrast between his own Irish-Indian ancestry and his traditional British upbringing. His fascination with India is evident in his retelling of the Ramayana and his book on Hindu mystics, The New Mystics and the True Indian Tradition (1974).
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in Penguin Ananda by Penguin Books India 2011
This Collection published by 2018
Copyright © Arundhathi Subramaniam 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover Designer: by Jordan Morton
ISBN: 978-0-14341-414-8
This digital edition published in 2018.
e-ISBN: 978-9-353-05255-3
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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