Bøker av Omair Ahmad

'Every dog is a storyteller, but dogs do not write... So, once they find out you are awriter, they will want to tell you their stories, ask you to put them down...'In my tongue they say you can never straighten a dog's tail. How much more difficult tostraighten a dog's tales, then? And so I set them down for you in these pages... Only, bewarned: these are the tales of a small dog, recorded. And all dogs are storytellers, and allstorytellers are liars. Believe what you will of them, but believe at your own peril.'Kallu, a mongrel of modest proportions who roams the streets of Gorakhpur,has some stories to tell of his town. But dogs cannot be trusted to speak thetruth, so the narrator of this collection-a web as complicated as the mess ofcables and electric wires suspended over the galis of Gorakhpur-tries to siftfact from fantasy.But what is fact and what fantasy when a jailer escapes his own executionand comes back home riding an elephant, claiming to have been pardoned byQueenVictoria?When the star pickpocket of Gorakhpur is bested by aWhitetourist?When a young man falls in love with a street dog and uses him as aweapon, and a gangster decides to wear an assassin's bullet round his neck?When one Gorakhpuri boy walks all the way to China and comes face toface with Deng Xiaoping, and another is propelled to America by a smuttymagazine?Over a decade after his international bestseller The Storyteller's Tale, and theaward-winning Jimmy, the Terrorist, one of India's most distinctive authorsreturns to fiction with a funny, quirky, unputdownable chain of stories aboutthe heroes, villains and oddballs of Gorakhpur, the legendary small town-asfamous as it is notorious-in the heart of India.

A small, sparsely populated kingdom at the eastern end of the Himalayas, Bhutan is often described as one of the most isolated countries on earth. In this unprecedented portrait an informed and insightful mix of political history and travel writing Omair Ahmad shows that the opposite, in fact, is true. Located at the intersection of several political, cultural and religious currents, Bhutan has been a part of, and been shaped by, some of the most transformative events in Asian and world history.Beginning with Padmasambhavas epic work to establish Buddhism in the Himalayas, The Kingdom at the Centre of the World tells the story of Bhutans emergence as an independent Buddhist nation in the seventeenth century under the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, who turned his back on Tibet; the exploits of Jigme Namgyal the Black Regent who united Bhutan and fought the armies of British India to a standstill; and the remarkable Wangchuk monarchs, who have ruled Bhutan since the beginning of the twentieth century.Alongside, the book also examines events around Bhutan that have affected it profoundly: the rise and fall of Tibet and the Mongol and British empires; the spread of Nepali-origin people across South Asia; Sikkims dramatic loss of sovereignty; and the conflicting territorial ambitions of India and China.Most fascinating of all, the book argues that it is in Bhutan more, perhaps, than in any other nation that alternative modes of governance and progress are being tested in an increasingly homogenized world. As it chooses Gross National Happiness (GNH) over Gross National Product (GNP), grapples with a complicated refugee crisis, experiments with a guided democracy and tries to retain its cultural heritage while it opens up to the world, Bhutan could have important lessons for us all