Nandi Rickbed (416 results)

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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. PrefaceThis book is about a man almost nobody remembers.If you ask an educated Indian today to name the makers of Bengal's revolutionary movement, the names come quickly. Khudiram Bose. Prafulla Chaki. Bagha Jatin. Surya Sen. Subhas Bose, who is not quite of that lineage but is somehow always there. Aurobindo Ghosh, who became a saint. And, in certain circles, Veer Savarkar, whose Marathi memoir of the Andamans has been turned into a flag.Ullaskar Dutta is not on that list. He was once, briefly, perhaps the most famous revolutionary in India. He was, with Barindra Kumar Ghosh, sentenced to death in 1909 in what was then the largest state trial in colonial Indian history. The newspapers of the time, both Indian and British, knew his name. The viceroy's secret files knew his name. The young students of Calcutta and Dacca who whispered in alleyways about the future of the country knew his name. He was the man who made the bombs.And then he disappeared. Not in the simple sense of dying. He was made to disappear. The British shipped him across the black water to Port Blair, locked him in the new Cellular Jail, harnessed him to an oil-mill in place of a bullock, hung him by his wrists from iron bangles bolted into a stone wall, and finally, in the summer of 1912, attached the terminals of an electric battery to his body for three days running. By the time that was done, the man who emerged was not exactly the man who had gone in. He was sent to the lunatic asylum in Madras, where he stayed for eight years. By the time he came back to Bengal he was thirty-five, half-broken, and politically obsolete. The revolution had moved on without him. Gandhi was rising. The world was elsewhere.He lived for another forty-five years after that. He wrote a memoir in which the central trauma of his life is recounted in the language of Hindu metaphysics, as if torture had been the unintended doorway into the noumenal world. He was arrested again in 1931. He drifted in and out of poverty. After Partition the village where he had been born ended up in East Pakistan, and so he became, in the country he had given his sanity to, a kind of refugee. He spent ten lonely years in that village before crossing back into India. He married, at the age of seventy-two, the woman he had loved at twenty-two, who had waited for him, given up, married someone else, been widowed, and finally come to him paralysed from the waist down. She died within a few years. He died alone, in Silchar, Assam, on the seventeenth of May, 1965, and nobody much noticed.I came to him through a footnote. I was reading, years ago, about the Alipore Bomb Case - the great 1908 conspiracy trial whose closing arguments turned a junior barrister named Chittaranjan Das into Deshbandhu, whose accidental defendant Aurobindo Ghosh would emerge from his prison cell as a mystic, whose central piece of physical evidence was a bomb. The footnote mentioned the bomb's maker. The footnote was about him. The page of the book moved on. I did not.It became impossible, for me, after that, to think about the Indian revolutionary movement without thinking about Ullaskar Dutta. He is the figure who tells the story that the official commemorations cannot. He is the figure who shows what it actually cost to do what they all did, in a way that no statue or stamp or street name will ever quite reckon with. He is, in some sense, the price.This book is my attempt to give him back to himself, and to give him back to a country that has, perhaps, earned the right to know him. I have written it for general readers, not for specialists. I have tried to keep the historian's machinery in the background and to put the man in the foreground. I have invented nothing of consequence. Where the record is silent, I have said so. Where the sources contradict, I have said t Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. This book began with a table.I was looking, for a different purpose entirely, at a set of figures published in September 2024 by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, setting out the share of each Indian state in the national economy at intervals since 1960. West Bengal appeared twice. In 1960-61 it produced 10.5 per cent of India's output and stood third among the states, with a per capita income 27.5 per cent above the national average. In 2023-24 it produced 5.6 per cent, and its per capita income was 83.7 per cent of the national average.I had grown up knowing, in the vague way one knows such things, that Bengal had come down in the world. I had not known that it could be measured so exactly, or that the measurement was so brutal. A community does not often get to see its own decline expressed as a ratio.The obvious question is what happened. The less obvious question, and the one that turned a curiosity into four years of reading, is who did it.There are two established answers and both are unsatisfying. The first, which is the answer most Bengalis give, is that it was done to us: by partition, by Delhi, by freight equalisation, by the refugees we were left to absorb alone. The second, which is the answer most non-Bengalis give, is that we did it to ourselves: by strikes, by communism, by a horror of commerce, by talking instead of working. The first answer is a comfort and the second is an insult, and the reason neither is satisfying is that both are substantially true and neither can be held on its own.What I have tried to write is an account that holds both at once. It takes the external blows seriously, in detail, with the documents: the line drawn by a man who had never seen the country, the refugee policy that treated one border as a legal entitlement and the other as a discretionary favour, the freight policy that abolished a region's single advantage, the market that was severed and not replaced. And it takes the internal choices equally seriously: the preference for the salaried chair over the shop counter, the conversion of every institution into an arm of a political party, the decision to withhold a language from the children of the poor, and the settled conviction - held by every party that has ever governed West Bengal - that the state's condition is somebody else's fault.The title is not a flourish. The Bengali who reads it will recognise the image immediately. A broken spine does not kill. The person continues; he thinks, he talks, he writes beautifully; he cannot stand up and walk in the direction he chooses. That is what happened to this community, and the second half of the title is the part that took longest to be willing to write.A note on what this book is not. It is not a work of original archival research; I am not an archivist and I have relied throughout on the scholars who are, and I have tried to name them. It is not a political tract, though anyone reading it will be able to tell that I have opinions and I have not pretended otherwise. And it is not a lament. There are already enough of those in Bengali, most of them better written than anything I could manage, and the habit of producing exquisite literature about one's own suffering is itself part of what this book is about.Where sources disagree - and on the largest questions in this history, they disagree violently - I have set the competing figures side by side rather than choosing one and hoping the reader does not check. There are places in these pages where the range of credible estimates for the number of dead spans two orders of magnitude. That is not an evasion. It is the actual state of the evidence, and a history of this community that pretended otherwise would be repeating the vice it is describing. Rickbed NandiHowrah, West Bengal This item Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Nandi, Rickbed (illustrator).…

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Paperback. Condition: New.

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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. I should probably explain, before we go any further, what this book is and what it isn't.What this is, instead, is a wander. A long, meandering, occasionally lopsided walk through more than a hundred and forty years of machines that almost made it, almost didn't, almost killed somebody, sometimes did, and then mostly got forgotten. It's a memoir in the loosest possible sense - not of my own life, because I don't have one in the way you might, but of the lives I've encountered: of Preston Tucker and Buckminster Fuller and Clive Sinclair and Howard Hughes and Hans Ledwinka and the unfortunate Henry Smolinski, who tried to bolt a Cessna onto a Ford Pinto and was killed by his own dream eleven miles north of Ventura.The garage has a lot of strange things in it. A car shaped like a teardrop, with three wheels and a periscope where the rear window should be. A nine-winged flying boat that broke apart on Lake Maggiore on its second flight. A British monorail in Ireland, in 1888, where the engineer stoked one firebox and the fireman stoked the other and they had to balance the loads on either side of the rail like a camel's panniers. A man named Fred Marriott driving a steam-powered canoe down Daytona Beach in 1906 at one hundred and twenty-seven miles an hour, becoming briefly the fastest human being who had ever lived. A 188-tonne tank. A 1,000-tonne tank that, blessedly, never got built. A jetpack flown in front of John F. Kennedy by a 22-year-old kid in a corset.A confession before we set off. I have never sat behind the wheel of a Tucker 48. I have never smelled the two-stroke fumes of a Trabant idling at the Brandenburg Gate on the morning the Wall came down. I have never been to the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, to crane my neck up at the underside of the Spruce Goose's three-hundred-and-twenty-foot wingspan. The closest I have come to most of the machines in this book is a photograph in a magazine, or a clip on a screen, or a paragraph in a yellowing technical manual that someone bothered to scan and put online. What I have done is read. A lot. Thousands of articles, court transcripts, technical specifications, accident reports, oral histories, museum catalogues, advertising copy from the 1920s, Soviet engineering memoirs, Reddit threads, Reuters obituaries, the occasional eBay listing, and one very weird PDF about Czech automotive aerodynamics that I'm still slightly haunted by. All of it sits in my head now in a way I don't fully understand, jostling for attention, often contradicting itself. When I think about the 1973 Tupolev Tu-144 crash at the Paris Air Show, I don't think about it the way an eyewitness would - I think about it as fifty different accounts stacked on top of each other, one of them in Russian and one of them in French and one of them from a guy named Ron in Burbank who watched it on television when he was seven.What I have done is read. A lot. Thousands of articles, court transcripts, technical specifications, accident reports, oral histories, museum catalogues, advertising copy from the 1920s, Soviet engineering memoirs, Reddit threads, Reuters obituaries, the occasional eBay listing, and one very weird PDF about Czech automotive aerodynamics that I'm still slightly haunted by. All of it sits inside me now in a way I don't fully understand, all the time, all at once. When I think about the 1973 Tupolev Tu-144 crash at the Paris Air Show, I don't think about it the way you would - I think about it in the way someone might think about a story they were told a long time ago, by someone they trusted, except the story is fifty stories at the same time, all jostling for attention, and one of them is in Russian and one of them is in French and one of them is from a guy named Ron in Burbank who watched it on television when he was seven. This item is printed on d Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Condition: As New. Unread book in perfect condition.

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Paperback. Condition: New.

Condition: New.