Finding Calcutta
Author | : Mary Poplin |
Publisher | : InterVarsity Press |
Total Pages | : 226 |
Release | : 2011-01-28 |
Genre | : Religion |
ISBN | : 0830868488 |
Mary Poplin's chronicle of her volunteer work with the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta provides an inside glimpse into Mother Teresa's life of service to the poor. Transformed by the experience, Poplin discovered how all of us can find our own places of meaningful work and service.
The Epic City
Author | : Kushanava Choudhury |
Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
Total Pages | : 380 |
Release | : 2018-01-09 |
Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | : 163557157X |
Shortlisted for the 2018 Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voice. Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable depiction of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.
The Calcutta Chromosome
Author | : Amitav Ghosh |
Publisher | : Penguin Books India |
Total Pages | : 263 |
Release | : 2011-04-19 |
Genre | : Fiction |
ISBN | : 0143066552 |
From Victorian lndia to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes readers on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I.D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan, a man obsessed with the medical history of malaria, and into a magnificently complex world where conspiracy hangs in the air like mosquitoes on a summer night.
Calcutta Nights
Author | : Hemendra Kumar Roy |
Publisher | : Niyogi Books |
Total Pages | : 106 |
Release | : 2020-01-06 |
Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | : 9389136458 |
Calcutta nights (Raater Kolkata) is the real-life story and memoir of the enigmatic ‘Meghnad Gupta’, pen name of famed Bengali fiction writer Hemendra Kumar Roy. Translated into English by Rajat Chaudhuri almost a century after the first publication of Raater Kolkata in 1923, Roy reveals to contemporary readers The darkest secrets of an earlier Calcutta. The first two decades of the last century, the backdrop for this book, were politically turbulent times. Those days, Calcutta, the erstwhile capital of British India, was teeming with people from different parts of the country besides Europeans and other foreigners. It was a city of sin, pleasure and suffering. Indians who arrived and settled here mingled with locals, some of them picking up dress, manners and the wanton lifestyles of the Bengali ‘Babu’, while others kept their identities intact. All this created a unique cosmopolitan setting, coloured with shades of debauchery, darkness and crime that this first-hand account brilliantly recounts. Written in an age very different from ours, certain views of the author could be jarring for the present times. However, these need to be tempered by the understanding of the sociopolitical contexts and the distance of a century separating us from Meghnad Gupta’s Calcutta. Calcutta nights is the hootum pyanchar naksha (published in 1862 and penned by kaliprasanna Sinha) of the early twentieth century, a book that will help anyone understand the contrasts and colours of a unique Indian metropolis.
A Life Apart
Author | : Neel Mukherjee |
Publisher | : Random House India |
Total Pages | : 364 |
Release | : 2015-09-10 |
Genre | : Fiction |
ISBN | : 8184007132 |
A Life Apart tells two stories. Ritwik, twenty-two and orphaned, escapes from a devastating childhood of abuse in Calcutta to what he considers to be a new world, full of possibilities, in England, where he has a chance to start all over again. But his past, especially the all-consuming relationship with his mother, is a minefield: will Ritwik find the salvation he is looking for? Set in India, England and in Raj Bengal, this award-winning first novel is about dislocation and alienation, outsiders and losers, the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories, and the consolations of storytelling. Unsentimental yet full of compassion, and written with unrelenting honesty, this scalding debut marks a new turning point in writing from India.
Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta
Author | : Debjani Bhattacharyya |
Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | : 485 |
Release | : 2018-05-24 |
Genre | : Nature |
ISBN | : 1108681727 |
What happens when a distant colonial power tries to tame an unfamiliar terrain in the world's largest tidal delta? This history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengal Delta from 1760 to 1920 involves land, water and humans, tracing the stories and struggles that link them together. Pushing beyond narratives of environmental decline, Bhattacharyya argues that 'property-thinking', a governing tool critical in making land and water discrete categories of bureaucratic and legal management, was at the heart of colonial urbanization and the technologies behind the draining of Calcutta. The story of ecological change is narrated alongside emergent practices of land speculation and transformation in colonial law. Bhattacharyya demonstrates how this history continues to shape our built environments with devastating consequences, as shown in the Bay of Bengal's receding coastline.