India has always been a land of great contradictions. To Alexander the Great, the country was a place of clever naked philosophers and massive armies mounted on elephants - which eventually forced his army to retreat. To ancient Rome, it was a source of luxuries, mainly spices and textiles, paid for in gold--hence the enormous numbers of Roman gold coins excavated in India. At the height of the Mughal empire in 1700, India boasted 24 percent of the world economy--a share virtually equal to Europe's...

Homer, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy; Curie, Darwin, Einstein, Galileo, and Newton. What do these world-famous artists and scientists have in common?- apart from the fact that their achievements predate our own time by a century or more. Most of us would probably answer: all ten possessed something we call genius, which in each instance permanently changed the way that humanity perceived the world. But pressed to be more precise, we find it remarkably hard to define genius....

Satyjit Ray's films include the Apu Trilogy, The Music Room, Charulata, Days and Nights in the Forest, The Chess Players, and The Stranger. He also made comedies, musical fantasies, detective films, and documentaries. He was an exceptionally versatile artist who won almost every major prize in cinema, including a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1992. This is the best-known biography of the film giant, based on extensive interviews with Ray himself, his actors, collaborators, and a deep knowledge of...

"These prose translations from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for years," wrote W.B. Yeats in 1912, a year before Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first Asian writer so honored. Traveling the world for several decades and sharing both his artistic and spiritual gifts with millions, Tagore was praised and admired in his time like no other twentieth-century writer as a spiritual seer and a literary genius.
This biography, the product of more...