Every director’s fail-safe artiste
The 1970s were indeed the golden era of Bollywood. In the decade that revolutionized Hindi cinema, there was one actor who was every director’s fail-safe artiste. When he entered the frame, the audience would sigh with relief, “Nothing can go wrong now!”
Sanjeev Kumar was the antithesis of the typical Bollywood hero doing romance and action. Not one to crave glamorous roles, he was more interested in versatility. From his mature roles in films like Mausam and Aandhi to his comic timing in Angoor or the angst of person with disabilities in Koshish, he was truly a thinking man’s actor. His expressive face, inflections and pauses, natural ease for lip-syncing, all of it made him the complete package.
Written by his nephew Uday Jariwala and Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta, this biography takes us through Sanjeev Kumar’s journey to becoming one of the greatest actors Bollywood has seen, with personal essays by his friends Gulzar, Randhir Kapoor, and co-stars Sharmila Tagore, Moushumi Chatterjee and Tanuja, among others.*
The creative heart of a publishing house
{{/usCountry}}The creative heart of a publishing house
{{/usCountry}}In 1984, a time when the publishing landscape was becoming increasingly corporate, Nigel Newton decided to start a new independent literary publishing company. In 1986 Bloomsbury Publishing began its life in a small office above a Chinese restaurant in Putney, London. As the offices shifted first to Soho Square and then to Bedford Square, with branches opening in New York, Sydney, Oxford and New Delhi, its list took shape. There were to be books from all over the world, some becoming Nobel, Booker and Women’s Prize winners, some to be million copy bestsellers, and some to become modern classics.
In Bloomsbury 35 its editors-in-chief Liz Calder and Alexandra Pringle have made selections from novels they have published on Bloomsbury’s adult list, from each year of Bloomsbury’s life, forming an anthology that represents the creative heart of Bloomsbury. Featuring work from Margaret Atwood, Susanna Clarke, Jeffrey Eugenides, Richard Ford, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Khaled Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri, Colum McCann, Madeline Miller, Michael Ondaatje, Caryl Phillips, George Saunders, Will Self, Kamila Shamsie, Ahdaf Soueif, Jeanette Winterson, and many more, it is a celebration of Bloomsbury’s first 35 years. *
An eyewitness account of the Punjab conflict
Punjab went through a politically turbulent period between 1978 and 1994, triggered by the rift between Sikhs and Nirankaris, and fuelled by the operations Blue Star, Woodrose and Black Thunder I and II. Narrated as an eyewitness account by Ramesh Inder Singh, then the district magistrate of Amritsar, and later the chief secretary of Punjab, this book affords an insider’s view of the events that ignited the strife and created the socio-political fault lines that divided Punjab in those years. It also describes the terrorist violence in Punjab, the state response to the military operations, the death of thousands of innocent citizens, the shocking assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the subsequent lynching of close to 3,000 Sikhs in the national capital of Delhi, which set in motion a devastating ethno-national movement in Punjab.
Based on extensive research and first-hand accounts of those who lived through those volcanic years, Turmoil in Punjab: Before and After Blue Star is an eye-opening narrative of the genesis of the Punjab conflict, the rise of radicalism and the Khalistanis, and the elimination of militancy from the state.*
*All copy from book flap.