Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.
Audiobooks Narrated by Vijayan Menon
Browse audiobooks narrated by Vijayan Menon, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
Veer Savarkar was one of the many fascinating characters in the Indian freedom movement. Listen to his story in a fictionalised interview format.
This is a work of fiction. This feature doesn't support or oppose any political party. Its purpose is only to entertain.
The 17th-century Jagat Seths are often referred to as India's Medicis for their wealth. Rich enough to sponsor the British win at Plassey, they were India's largest moneylenders of their time. The bull run came to an end with the execution of its patriarchs in 1763. With the single largest source of loans gone the British were soon scrambling for funds to pay for expensive military campaigns. One such campaign against Tipu Sultan proved back-breaking expensive and led to the establishment of India's first banking service 20 years after the Jagat Seths collapsed. It was called the Bank of Bengal!
The 1911 Delhi Durbar was the third and the last, and a very special one. It was an event of many historical firsts—the first time Delhi took over from Calcutta as India's capital, the first time a reigning British monarch visited India in person, and the first time an Indian king openly defied the British monarch outside of a war. The king in question was Sayajirao Gaekwad. From here onwards, his story was a story of defiance and insubordination with the most cautious mix of diplomacy. How did he manage that? Listen here!
Today, the American dollar is legal tender in as many as seven sovereign nations besides the United States of America. But there was a time, not too long ago, when another currency enjoyed a similar influence far from home. It was legal tender in half a dozen countries besides its own, all of them in a region that influences the global economy more than any other on the planet today. It's the Indian rupee. This is the rarely-told story of how a currency from a nation as impoverished as ours went on to enjoy such clout in one of the wealthiest parts of the world, and how it ended.
Hindu Hriday Samrat Bal Thackeray is a name to reckon with in the entire state of Maharashtra and beyond. Late Balasaheb founded the political party Shiv Sena with only a handful of people in the sixties and after that never looked back. The party and its graph kept climbing and dipping over the years, but Bal Thackeray's superstar status as the voice of the marathi people never took a hit. He was well known for his candidness, fearlessness and abject aggression in voicing opinions. Find out how a cartoonist not only laid the foundation of a powerful organization, but also successfully ran it for decades. Also listen to all the interesting and major incidents related to the journey of Balasaheb and Shiv Sena, and also the detailed story of the personal and professional challenges between the cousins, Raj Thackeray and Uddhav Thackeray.
Mahatma Gandhi sought India's independence, as did B.R. Ambedkar. Gandhi sought the emancipation of the oppressed, Ambedkar wanted that too. And yet, the two keystones of the monument called India couldn't be more antithetical to each other's principles. They held immense respect for each other and together, offered great solidarity to the greater good. So it's easy to lose sight of just how deeply opposed they were to each other in the fundamentals of their politics. Many are probably not even aware of such a difference between two of the tallest leaders of an emergent India. It is probably the least talked about political rivalry in the history of this country. This is the story of how their rivalry shaped the constitution of our country and its socio politics well into the 21st century.
History recorded him as the Butcher of Amritsar. On April 13, 1919, General Reginald Dyer ordered his men to open indiscriminate fire at a crowd of peaceful protesters in Jallianwala Bagh killing over a thousand right away. While this happened in Amritsar, a young Urdu poet in Aligarh dreamed of what would come to be known as purna swaraj or complete independence. This is the story of how the two men crossed paths to cost the British Empire its crowning jewel.
Aksai Chin is a barren wasteland that's disputed between India and China. Having caused at least one full-fledged war between the two nations already, the region continues to claim lives and resources like no other on the planet. This story charts the background to this problem tracing a line that cuts through 200 eventful years of politics and imperialism.
If the stories of Britain's affluence and American independence were boiled down to one single commodity, it has to be the humble ubiquitous tea. Although all of it first came from China, India is where the money to buy it came from. Sometime in the 18th century, this cash cow came down with a famine that killed two things — ten million Indians, and Britain's grip on the New World. This story explores how, and much more.
Two years after the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland, the exiled Polish army put 700 Polish women and children on a ship to virtually nowhere. 'If we live, we'll meet again,' is the last thing they heard from their families. After being denied by every country it touched, the ship finally reached Bombay where it was again rejected by the British. With nowhere left to go, help came from one Indian king. This is the story of Maharaja Jam Sahib, India's own Oskar Schindler.
Mahatma Gandhi's assassination was a culmination of many events and many actors that never enjoyed the centerstage in the broader discourse. Yes, Nathuram Godse pulled that trigger, but a lot more went into the project than just that. There was a disgraced barrister, a former Air Force officer, and an Indian army officer returning from Ethiopia after chasing out Mussolini's armies. Here, we'll take a roller-coaster ride along the chain of events that came together to equip the assassination that shook the world.
In the context of Christianity in India, few conversations ever invoke Agra; even fewer invoke the Mughals. Yet, one of the oldest churches on the subcontinent not only belongs to this city but only came about with enthusiastic Mughal patronage. Patronage that was neither political, nor commercial. Instead, it was an honest expression of intrigue, respect, and acceptance of a religion alien to the land. In and of itself, this was a rarity in Mughal India. This story explores the journey of Agra's lesser-known gem, the Church of Akbar.
