I read the book with great interest and found many inetresting details. The referencing is superb and the bibliography is perfect. A must for all students and researchers of Mughal history.

I am a professor of Mogal history and bought this book on recommendation of a colleague. I am glad that i bought this book as it was very informative, precise and in simple yet impressive text. One thing that I ,though, missed was photographs. I think the book would had been better with more pictures. But going by the broader picture i think that it is a really nice book. The book shows that Dr. Misra has an indepth knowledge of the subject.A must-read for all mughal history enthusiasts.

I always thought of history as a boring subject but after reading this book my viewpoint has undergone a drastic change. I saw the book at my local bookstore and decided to give the Mughal history one last chance. And am I happy I gave it one last chance. This book is wonderful! Its a must buy for all history lovers, especially the Mughal period. The language is simple yet educative, the topics are precise yet accurate and the book covers all topics of the Mughal dynasty without going into useless details. A million congrats Dr. Misra from my side.

I studied this book for 2 weeks before my first trip to Korea and Hong Kong. Wow! Very informative with lots of basic but important details about meeting rituals, business card etiquette and tons more! My Boss who has been traveling to Asia for 16 years wants a copy of this fabulous book!

Our consulting staff recommends this book to all business women travelling to Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. For each country, it covers rules of business and social etiquette, gift-giving, how to handle what westerners consider to be sexual harassment, a list of recommended hotels, restaurants and "in" nightspots, and helpful suggestions on how to conduct business successfully in the local culture. Truly a bargain at this price. John R. Jagoe, Director, Export Institute.

This is really the definitive book for novice birdwatchers in India, and remains very useful even as you grow more experienced. Its small size makes it much more portable and thus useful for field trips. The illustrations in the new edition are simply lovely and improve tremendously over those in the earlier editions. A must buy.

Beautiful hand drawn illustrations, detailed characteristics, habitat, calls and everything else you need to know to identify a bird. A real work of art.

This man is extraordinary! While we desire wealth, security, good health, and so much more, Vic Olsen's autobiography touches my heart as I see the tremendous passion and commitment of a Christian missionary to help the people of Bangladesh while ignoring the superficial desires of our society. His life trumps the stereotype delusional missionary of the same era portrayed in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. You may reject his perspective that Jesus Christ is the Messiah (although he provides a logical defense), but think again what this man did because he committed his life to Jesus Christ. Is not this world better off because of this man's decision? Now, what am I going to do?

If you're looking to do some missionary work and your going into the medical field, this is the book for you. Viggo Olsen's story in Bangladesh is extemely inspiring and lets you see how the Father truly works through him.

Reading this book tells Ambedkar was a great scholar.It all describes about how dalits , called lower caste people are treated. It tells about the how india showing two faces towards this community . Inside still these peoples kept separate and treated badly outside it try to create an image as enough and more benefits are given to this society

History, political history in particular is a chronology of rule. Who ruled and who were ruled? History is written by the historians but nevertheless, rulers strongly influence the historical writings. This is especially true in India where a minuscule minority ruled over the majority for centuries. Majority of the people were strictly barred from the opportunity of education till 150 years ago. Injustice has been done to the untouchables while writing the history of the independence of India. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's name is often omitted or finds only a terse mention in the books of history. He alone fought to get human rights for the Indian masses comprising backward classes , scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. He awakened the masses , made them aware of their pathetic conditions , infused the spirit of self respect and social equality. As the chief architect of the Indian constitution , has been singularly responsible for the firm establishment of modern political and social values in India. Dr. Ambedkar's followership is has surpassed that of Gandhi and Nehru. This is evident on his birth and death anniversary. Yet, this is not reflected even today in the historical or contemporary writings. This is a glaring anomaly in the writing of modern Indian history. The book 'Dalits and the Democratic Revolution : Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India' by Gail Omvedt is exceptional in this respect. This book brings out several veritable socio-political facts hitherto unknown to the intellectuals as well as to the common citizens. This book clearly highlights the fact enunciated by Dr. B.R.Ambedkar that the untouchability was basically a political problem rather than a social stigma. The role of Dalit movement under the leadership of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar as the harbinger of the new social order based on liberty, equality and fraternity in modern has been brought in light like never before . It was a fight against the advocates of the old social order of the caste based inequality as well as the relative reluctance of British to promote social reforms. The author has a holistic understanding of the historical conflict of Bramhnical and non Bramhnical ideologies. This has enabled her to present the entire subject in a proper perspective. This book is a must for the students of Indian sociology and Indian polity. Above average intellectual lay persons will find this book useful in analyzing perplexities of the contemporary politics as the genealogy of the current political problems can be traced in the failure of National political parties in honoring the political aspirations of the Dalits raised by Dr. B.R.Ambedkar.

Soldiers are often the best of us. We honor them, we respect them and we look up to them. There is nothing more moving than seeing a brave soldier standing at the border of his/her nation with only one thought in his/her mind and heart... that as long as I am here, no will every harm my family, my people, my nation where I can practice my own beliefs. This book shows some of them at their jobs. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to see the human spirit and vigilance at it's best. Soldiers are the best of us, no matter what nation they belong to.

This is indeed a great effort by the authors. It revealed some of the exotic features of Pakistani Armed Forces. It unveiled some of those facts of Asian war strategies that were not yet discovered by the rest of the world. But this book needs to be updated half yearly due to the continuous change in the battle equipments and war planning in the Sub-Continent.

Disclaimer: Yasmeen and Mihail Lari are related to my wife. Regardless, I am going to provide as objective a review as I can.

I throughly enjoyed what I have read in this book so far! The maps, the illustrations, the descriptions, make this book come alive in a way that makes it simply a joy to read. Particularly if you have lived in Karachi for any length of time.

I have often seen that the inhabitants of a city - any city - are often the least knowledgeable of the history of their locale. This is not very surprising, I suppose, because there is a tendency to assume that "I already know my home town"! I find this book (and other history books that relate to my country!) opens up new revelations and provides knowledge that I simply did not have about Karachi.

I throughly recommend this book to everybody, particularly if you have any acquaintance with the region or the city. The book covers details that are not found elsewhere.

This is a must read for anyone interested in Karachi and its history. I highly reccomend this book.

"Eminent Historians: Their Techniques, Their Line, Their Fraud" is arguably the most important book published in India since 1947. Arun Shourie is the author of 14 other books, several of them brilliant exposé of the Indian Communist party's long-standing anti-national policies, the foreign Christian missionaries' covert activities in India, and the Congress party's corruption and pseudo-secular policies that culminated in the massacre of thousands of innocent Sikhs in Delhi in 1984.

His writings have won him major awards including the International Editor of the Year.
"Eminent Historians," the ironic title of his latest book comes from the self-description a group of Marxist historians, most of them academics, arrogated for themselves while signing a newspaper petition during the Ayodhya controversy. The Marxist party line is to project Hindus as exploitative feudalists and Muslims as liberators!

Arun Shourie's major thesis: During the past fifty years, "this bunch of Marxist historians have been suppressing facts, inventing lies, perverting discourse, and derailing public policy" by seizing control of institutions such as the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the National Council of Educational Research Training (NCERT), large parts of Indian academia, and nearly all of the English-media newspapers and publishing houses.

Included as principals in this group of Marxist historians are Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra, K.M. Shrimali, K.M.Pannikar, R.S. Sharma, D. N. Jha, Gyanendra Pandey, and Irfan Habib. This group has, Shourie charges, "worked a diabolic inversion: the inclusive religion [Hinduism], the pluralist spiritual search of our people and land, they have projected as intolerant, narrow-minded, obscurantist; and the exclusivist, totalitarian, revelatory religions and ideologies -- Islam, Christianity, Marxism-Leninism-- they have made out to be the epitome of tolerance, open-mindedness, democracy, secularism!" By promoting each other's publications and puffing up their reputations, this group has long been "determining what is politically correct." One measure of the insidious control these "verbal terrorists" have been exercising over the English-medium publishing industry in India is that Arun Shourie, despite his huge readership, had to self-publish his books.

For several decades, these "eminent historians" have striven hard to continually denigrate Hindu cultural history, the oldest surviving civilization in the world, by "blackening the Hindu period and whitewashing the Islamic period." Indeed, Shourie should have challenged them to refute American historian Will Durant's assertion in his 'The Story of Civilization": "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within." Or that of French historian Alain Danielou's statement, in his Histoire de l' Inde : "From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilisations, wiped out entire races."

As the book's subtitle promises, Shourie succeeds in unmasking these self-proclaimed eminents of "their technology, their line, their fraud" by focusing on specifics as exemplified below: his own television debates with some of these "eminent historians"; their failures to respond to published challenges by historians and scholars of persuasions other than Marxist; their documented efforts at distorting established historical evidence.

In July 1998, Manoj Raghuvanshi, host of a popular ZEE TV program called Aap ki Adalat, Aap ka Faisla (Your Court, You Judge) invited Arun Shourie and one of the "eminents," K. L. Shrimali. Raghuvanshi posed the question first to Shrimali whether Aurangzeb was a religious bigot. Despite Raghuvanshi's repeating the question, Shrimali gave no clear answer, only asserting that Aurangzeb's court had many Hindu nobles. Shourie countered this by pointing out that there were many Indians among the persons honored by the British with titles - - and both for the same reason. In Shourie's words: "How does this wipe away the destruction of Hindu temples by Aurangzeb? Aurangzeb had entertained no doubt about the fact that his primary impluse was the religious one. And that he faithfully implemented an essential element of his religion, Islam, that is to destroy the places of worship of other religions." As evidence, Shourie read out several passages from Sita Ram Goel's book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, The Islamic Evidence. All Shrimali could mumble was that it was a "questionable source." When Shourie pressed the point that the source was the Akhbarat (Newsletter) of the Court of Aurangzeb himself written on the very day the news reached the court, the "eminent" historian merely repeated "questionable source." Shourie comments: "So, when an 'eminent' historian says that the sources were questionable, they must be questionable" - - this is their technology when cornered."

Satish Chandra's Medieval History, a textbook for Class XI students, asserts that "sometimes Sufi saints also played a role although they were generally unconcerned with conversions." Shourie comments: "If this eminent historian were to read the accounts of these Sufis, he would learn how they acted as the advance scouts of the armies of Islam!" In NCERT sponsored books, notes Shourie, "Two sentences from the Koran: 'To you your religion, to me mine,' and 'There is no compulsion in religion' which are flatly over-run by the text itself, to say nothing of the entire history of Islamic rule over 1400 years, those two sentences are flaunted as proof-positive of Islam being not just committed to peace and tolerance, they are proof that it is The Religion of Peace and Tolerance!"

Unfortunately, it will take a long time for undoing the harm done by the pseudo-secular historians to the Indian psyche: "they have used these institutions to sow in the minds of our people [the Hindus] the seeds of self-hatred."

For anyone interested in contemporary India, this is a must-read book.

Arun Shourie is once more at his cutting best in this exposé of the devious ways in which the cabal of "Eminent Historians" manipulate, massage, and murder History with all their undertones of Marxist ideology, masquerading a shabby brand of secularism.

Here you will find the excesses of such "eminences" as Romila Thappar, Satish Chandra, Irfaan Habib, R S Sharma, and an assortment of fellow travellers. A veritable brood who have cornered the writing of History as seen though their own warped, pinko tinted spectacles. And for this "service" to scholarship, the brood has lost no opportunity to monopolise state largess, siphon off grants for various projects without delivering. The few times this pretend-busy brood has deigned to deliver, then the output of any "research" has been so immersed in the ideology prescribed by some foreign, totalitarian, failed Party and State, that it defies the description of scholarship.

No wonder that none of the eminences or their intellectual offspring have had the guts to respond to the issues that Shourie raises here. They deploy the same strategy as they do in their historical "researches" - first ignore it, then decry it as petty, from an amateur, hurl personal insults, falsify facts.

Remember: these "eminences" have made a career out of claiming that Aurangzeb was a just ruler, that the Caste System was the sole reason for India's problems, that Islam brought equality, that the systematic destruction of countless temples was an economic exercise and had absolutely nothing to do with the hatred and contempt that the Islamic invaders had for Indian culture and traditions.

For "eminences" who deny the history as written by the chroniclers themselves of the invasions, of pillage, of destruction, of the rape that they carried out in honour of their iconoclasm, it is easy to falsify even recent history like the events around partition; like the Ramjanambhoomi dispute; like Secularism and minority rights.

Shourie's book is an excellent antidote to the .... from these eminences that still passes off as "academic research". It is shameful that the likes of Thappar still warrant respect in the academic community. But, the good news is that their time is nigh! Shourie and others like him are making sure of it.

Well, wait a minute, let me qualify that title: Unfamiliar to the vast majority of Americans (me included), for whom the world west of Monaco and south of Munich is pretty much unknown territory. Malcolmson divides his book into four sections: Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. They're more or less independent of each other, but bound together by a common theme: how different groups of people see, think about, and define themselves.

Each of the four sections is a patchwork of smaller segments, some pages long and others only a few sentences. Some of the segments are Malcolmson's sketching-in of history, some records of his own reactions to things he saw or heard, some records of what other people said to him. It can be dizzying and disorienting at the beginning of a section, like looking at two square inches out of the middle of an impressionist painting, but as you read on the details resolve themselves into a coherent picture. By the end of a section, you feel like you understand--a little anyway--how the Romanians or Turks or Uzbeks think about the world and its inhabitants (themselves and others).

This is *not* a conventional travel narrative *or* a conventional history book. Its historical scope is too sweeping for the one, and its focus too personal for the other. As a portrait of the places and people Malcolmson visited, however, it may contain more Truth than either would alone.

Highly recommended.

(I hate to use superlatives but) this was by far the most interesting book on the subject. It does a good job of conveying to the reader, what makes the people on the Steppe's of Central Asia and Anatolya tick. Do not expect a Lonely planet style "Guide Book".

This is a truly excellent account of ethnic mobilization in south India. Through the detailed and absorbing examination of a case, the author explores the nuances of ethnic identity and mobilization and the sustained importance (contrary to the dominant view) of populist politics in today's world. This is an important contribution to understanding Indian democracy, which shows the limits of most contemporary accounts. By drawing on strands in political science, sociology and historical anthropology, the book provides an innovative approach to theorizing in the social sciences.

Subramanian's text is the definitive work on Dravidian politics. Tightly woven and finely nuanced, "Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization" is a vital addition to the Indian social science canon. The text shall be of immense value to historians, social scientists, students, and professionals working in the field of Indian politics or seeking a thorough introduction to it.