The Zoo In My Backyard
₹290.00
Author: Usha Rajagopalan
What can you expect in a family of quirky adults, hyperactive children, and an assortment of pets? The author and her siblings shared their childhood with Kesavan, the incorrigibly curious black monkey; Judie, the nimble giant squirrel; Mini, the shy mouse deer that strayed; Psitta, the cackling parakeet; Devil, the runaway hound and many more creatures great and small. The adventures of the children and antics of their pets, together with the adults in the family make for a whole lot of fun and laughter ? not just in the backyard but indoors as well.
Interested readers may write to us at mup@manipal.edu about purchasing the book.
Categories: | Literature for Young Readers, Works in Fiction |
---|
Author | |
---|---|
Format |
Related products
-
Caught in the World of Binaries: Selected Poems of K S Nisar Ahmed
Author: K S Nisar Ahmed Editors: C N Ramachandran, M S Raghunath
Professor K S Nisar Ahmed (b 1936) is a geologist by profession and a major writer in Kannada. His first collection of poems, Manasu Gandhi Bazar (My Mind is like Gandhi Bazar) was published in 1960, and since then he has published poetry (15 collections), prose (five collections), and translations from Shakespeare and Neruda. He has been honoured with many awards, including ‘Padmashri’, Honorary D Litt (Kuvempu University), and Pampa Prashasti (Karnataka Government). Living between two languages and two cultures, Prof. Nisar has successfully achieved the balance necessary for the tight-rope walking as a poet. He believes that, “Only when you understand another religion (or culture or language), you really understand your own religion (or culture or language).” The present volume of 100 selected poems exhibits the multifaceted poetry of Nisar that reflects his creative pluralism. The 13 translators of the poems in this volume include A K Ramanujan, V K Gokak and Tejaswini Niranjana.
Interested readers may write to us at mup@manipal.edu about purchasing the book.
-
Mahāmmāyi
Author: Chandrasekhara Kambara, Translator: Kathyayini Kunjibettu
Mahāmmāyi is the story of the legend of Shatavithaayi – the Goddess of death, and her adopted son Sambhashiva. Out of affection for her son, Goddess Shatavithaayi blesses him with the “power of life”. The blessing was that death will evade the people who are treated by Sambashiva. But a certain condition set by Shatavithaayi forbade him from healing every ill man. The condition was that, if Shatavithaayi stood on the right side of the patient, Sambhashiva could treat that person and he would live; but, if she stood on the left side of the patient, he should not treat that person as his death was inevitable. Through a distinct method of story-telling, the story follows the life of Sambhashiva as he begins to question the ideas of fate and destiny. Thus, the conflict between fate and human efforts to change that fate is vividly described in this play. -
Kaitan Gandhi’s Freedom Struggle
Author: Na D’Souza Translator: B Gangadharamurthy
Kaitan Gandhiya Swatantrya Horata is one of the very few novels written in Kannada on the Gandhian phase of the Indian freedom struggle. It is not globally unknown that Gandhi not only changed the idiom of the struggle and successfully experimented his lifetime-belief in non-violence on the vast canvas but also made it decisively inclusive. Kaitan Gandhi’s Freedom Struggle thematically illuminates these two crucial aspects of the great struggle and grapples with the naked truth as Charles, the priest in the novel revealingly says,The rulers, whosoever it is, are rulers. Caste, colour, or country does not matter to them. All are wicked. Like in all true works of realist literature, the author, here too, creatively blends the individual, the social, and the historical in such a way that the novel poignantly unfolds the true spirit of quest for freedom and humanity.
Interested readers may write to us at mup@manipal.edu about purchasing the book.
-
If we meet again we shall smile
Author: Anushua Chakrabarti
People leave our lives. Some simply walk away from our world while some leave this world altogether. Through visuals, poetry and short stories, the author has a dialogue with the reader that takes them both through a journey full of characters that are no more, and yet have shaped the story. This fictional dialogue is a short trip down memory lane that visits the relationships one keeps hidden beneath.
Anushua Chakrabarti, originally from Kolkata, is a wandering minstrel. She lives on travel and music. Anushua has completed her MBA from TAPMI, Manipal, India, post which she worked in top technology brands like HP and Microsoft. She is presently back in Kolkata, driving social service through her acquired experience. Anushua has faced several childhood traumas but she believes she is what she is today, not in spite of it; but because of it.
Interested readers may write to us at mup@manipal.edu about purchasing the book.
-
Akka Mahadevi, the questioning poet-saint
Author: D A Shankar
This book presents the mystical ruminations and literary excellence of Akka Mahadevi, the earliest example of a gender-liberated woman writer, credited with the composition of over four hundred and forty remarkably self-explorative Vachanas. Akka Mahadevi represents a powerfully authentic female voice of the radical, egalitarian Sharana Movement, which questioned the socially established barrier between genders and ushered in a world of socio-cultural equality.
In this book, the author explores the questioning spirit intrinsic to Akka Mahadevi’s life and writings, as she questions the widely held conventional norms: the traditional husband-wife relationship, her parents, elders; she questions Basavanna and Allama for their habituated patriarchal manner of speaking, and she bravely questions her personal deity whom she loves and adores. Apart from discerning a credible ‘history’ and background to Akka’s works, this book makes available a rendition of her selectively profound and memorable Vachana in modern English, that crosses the ?the gulf of language and the gulf of time.
Interested readers may write to us at mup@manipal.edu about purchasing the book.
-
The Other Face
Author: Na Mogasale Translator: N T Bhat
Set in a fictitious village called Kanthapura in Kasaragod district, Mukhāntara spans across the life of seven generations of a Havyaka Brahmin family. A story about the realities of living in a society marked by caste distinctions, the desire to find communal harmony and the tribulations of the characters through the entirety of the novel, it is also a tale of changing times and people. After unexpectedly coming into possession of a huge portion of land, Thirumalēshwara Bhat of Īshwarīmūle becomes a satisfied man. But childless, Thirumalēshwara Bhat and his wife Pārvathakka decide to adopt Venkappaiah and also give shelter to his widowed mother, Rathnamma. Venkappaiah is to inherit Thirumalēshwara’s vast wealth but when Krishnaiah, the illegitimate child of Thirumalēshwara and Rathnamma is born, rivalry ensues. Through the overlapping narratives of the characters, we get a glimpse into their journey from tradition to modernity. The characters strive to reshape new values when old values are slowly questioned and erased as they move on and are swept along in the waves of globalization.
Interested readers may write to us at mup@manipal.edu about purchasing the book.
Also available on
eBook available on
-
Two Plays – The Sahyadri Saga and The World of Swayamvara
Author: Akshara K V Translator: Jayanth Kodkani
These two plays negotiate with the real problems of contemporary India. If Sahyadri Kanda is about the ripples caused in the life of the people in a village on the Western Coast which will soon have a nuclear plant, Swayamvaraloka, is an allegorical narrative set in a small village that extends to include the larger contemporary world. Both the plays dwell on the seeming binaries of village-city, success-failure, modern-traditional while examining the nature of human relationships in the changing world. These plays also reflect an ambition to elevate the real experience to a mythical level. While most playwrights attempt to echo contemporary concerns by reinterpreting history and mythology, for these plays, the epics, their grandeur, the struggle, the wars are not episodes that happen in kingdoms and palaces and battlefields, they are also that which takes place in the microworld of one’s consciousness. Each character in these plays find their own dharma, yet it offers no model for the reader, and remains only a pointer to the complex process of finding it.
Also available on
eBook available on
-
Sati Kamale
Author: S U Paniyadi Translators: B Surendra Rao, K Chinnappa Gowda
This eponymous novel is centred on Kamale, who is an embodiment of wifely virtue. For fifteen long years Kamale lives the life of a widow to the outside world, nurturing the hopes of reuniting with the husband one day. Alone in the room, each night she wears her marks of a married woman with the dagger gifted by Umesha next to her. It could be seen as an exposition on the then existing indigenous discourse in India in the 19th century and early 20th century. Kamale, in her rigorous commitment and in retrieving her husband from ‘death’, is fashioned after Savithri in an intertextual reference to Mahabharata’s episode of “Satyavan and Savithri”. The novel might look conservative for the present-day reader, but it is a representative literary work of the time when Paniyadi, among many others, wanted to regain the independent status of the Tulu language which had somehow slipped out of its pedestal.
Interested readers may write to us at mup@manipal.edu about purchasing the book.