Author's journeys on steam locomotion in India.

Branch line to eternity

Business & Money

Bill, Aitken

Industries

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Born to a poor family in the village of Puttaparthi in southern Andhra Pradesh, Sathyanarayan Raju was a bright, talented and confident boy whose charitable nature and religiosity belied his tender age. Deeply suspicious of his spiritual precociousness, his father made him go through a traumatic exorcism. But the boy already had a devoted band of followers and, when he was thirteen, announced that he was the Shirdi Sai Baba reborn. Today, Sri Sathya Sai Baba has an estimated thirty million followers worldwide.  Acclaimed travel writer and self-described `spiritual nomad' Bill Aitken tells us why so many royalty, wealthy industrialists, influential politicians, as well as the poor flock to Puttaparthi. Sai Baba's message, he reveals, can be summed up in one word: love. It is as simple as it is profound, not unlike how his devotees see the Sai himself the embodiment of deep spirituality wedded to simplicity, elegance and grace.  Yet, the Sai phenomenon is less about producing vibhuti from thin air and more about modern-day miracles. Miracles like free schools and universities, super-speciality hospitals which provide free treatment to all and revolutionary projects like the one which has brought drinking water to a million villagers in drought-prone Rayalseema.  Aitken's study is neither a hagiographic exercise in myth-making nor a dry, objective account of the Sai's life. While never shy of expressing his deep love and reverence for Sai Baba, he squarely confronts the controversies and criticisms which inevitably dog those who claim acquaintance with the holy.

Sri Sathya Sai Baba: A Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

India Penguin

Machine Code Programming on the Psion Organiser

Reference

Kuma Publishing Ltd

Graphics Programming on the Psion Series 3

Computers & Technology

Software

Zanskar

History

Asia

Rupa&Co

Footloose in the Himalaya

Travel

Orient Blackswan

<p>Away from over-used tourist trails and trekking routes, Bill Aitken wanders through the Himalaya. His inclination is to enter disused colonial dak bungalows and ruined temples, meander in wild glades above the treeline carpeted with wild flowers, filling his water bottle from mountain springs and waterfalls. Having left his native Scotland in his twenties to circumnavigate the world, Aitken reached the Himalaya and stopped, enraptured. He began wandering through these mountains then, and has only stopped on and off in the last forty years to do more mundane things like travelling the Deccan on his motorbike or chasing the last steam locomotive in India. His journeys in the mountains have ranged from Arunachal to Kashmir, from the icy heights of Zanskar and the Nanda Devi to the small towns of Mussoorie and Ranikhet. For Aitken, travel in the Himalaya is as much about the spirit as about landscapes, leeches, and aching knees. This sets him on a lively trail of holy men, both saintly and fraudulent, across all the pilgrim centres of the Himalaya. He travels in bulging buses to Rishikesh and Badrinath, Kedarnath and Gangotri. He seeks out tiny disused temples to little-known deities like Anasuiya, and discovers a village with temples dedicated to Duryodhana. He spends seven ascetic years in an ashram at Mirtola. All along he gropes for an answer to the question: what power does the Himalaya possess that has drawn generations of seekers to it? If anything distinguishes Aitken from the regular travel writer, it is his inspired craziness. With his wide-ranging, sometimes eccentric, interests, this book is replete with literature, geology, philosophy, and folklore. There are detours into hill gossip, stories of local ghosts, accounts of local customs, and exasperated asides about political ineptitude. Bill Aitken s intimate knowledge of the Himalaya, absorbed through a lifetime, makes this more a native s account than a traveller s.</p>

Travel Writing

Permanent Black

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Books by Bill, Aitken