In March 2009 Manvendra Singh, the BJP’s candidate for the Barmer Lok Sabha constituency, launched his election campaign to retain the seat that he had won with a record margin in 2004 and lovingly nurtured as a member of Parliament for five years.

Over two months, he criss-crossed his sprawling constituency straddling Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, covering 34,000 kilometres in temperatures often nearing 50°C, to meet his constituents. They included herders and headmen; communities of traditional balladeers and craftsmen; youth groups and hoary old political fixers; Muslim pirs, Jain munis and Hindu priests.

Campaign Diary, a daily record of those gruelling weeks of canvassing voters, is a compelling portrait of democracy in action in one corner of India, and shows the impact of local, national and international issues and policies at the grass-roots level. Vividly bringing to life the heat and dust, the intrigues and infighting, the moving personal encounters and comic episodes that make up the Great Indian Election Circus, Campaign Diary is also an honest and insightful account of the rewards—and the heartbreak—of a life in politics. 

Orphaned at birth, seventeen-year-old Korobi Roy has enjoyed a privileged childhood with her adoring grandparents in Kolkata. But she is troubled by the silence that surrounds her parents’ death and clings to her only inheritance from them: the unfinished love note she found hidden in her mother’s book of poetry. The young woman dreams of one day finding a love as powerful as her parents’, and it seems her wish has come true when she meets the charming Rajat, the only son of a high-profile business family.

On the night of their engagement party, Korobi’s grandfather dies of a sudden heart attack. His death reveals the family’s financial problems as well as a dark secret. This secret will shatter Korobi’s sense of self and will take her out of her sheltered Kolkata life into a search, in the company of an attractive stranger, across America, a country that she finds at once dangerous, unwelcoming and alluring. What she discovers at the end will force her to make the most difficult choice of her life. No one tells such heart-stopping stories with as much color and emotion as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Oleander Girl is the writer at her very best.

In this collection of essays, profiles and reportage, Ian Jack explores a wide and unlikely range of subjects, which he encountered in more than thirty years of reporting from India and its subcontinental neighbours.
Some of the India he describes has vanished: the drift of coal smoke from passenger trains, tea drunk from clay kulhads at country junctions. Some of it remains obscure: Orwell’s birthplace in Motihari, the Anglo- Indian search for a homeland in McCluskiegunge. Some of it perseveres: the Nehru–Gandhis, the distress, the politics, and the hospitality. The choice is eclectic: he writes about G.D. Birla and river steamers on the one hand, and Benazir Bhutto and railway accidents on the other. But every piece in this selection is informed by the author’s acute insights and superb eye for detail, expressed in luminous, evocative prose.

Nuclear power has been held out as possibly the most important source of energy for India. And the dream of a nuclear powered India has been supported by huge financial budgets and high level political commitment for over six decades. Nuclear power has also been held out as safe, environmentally benign and cheap. Physicist and writer, M.V. Ramana shows that nuclear power has been more expensive than conventional forms of electricity generation, that the ever-present risk of catastrophic accidents is heightened by observed organizational inadequacies at nuclear facilities, and that existing nuclear fuel cycle facilities have been correlated with impacts on public health and the environment. He offers detailed information and analysis.