Sometime early in the twenty-first century India will overtake China as the most populous nation in the world. For all its size and importance, India is a relatively unknown nation to the rest of the world, trapped in its own self-absorption, suspicious of the outside world, unwilling to interact as a nation among nations. Torn by racial violence and conflict, impoverished, ardent, mystical, religious, exciting, dangerous, and powerful - India is all of these things and more. Barbara Crossette gives us a brilliant short introduction to the world's largest democracy. In Part I, she looks at the inner self and tries to draw some general conclusions for the uninitiated on the nature of Indian myth and psychology. Part II deals with daily realities - the violence of contemporary Indian society, problems of ethnicity, caste, and religion, the plight of children, bureaucracy in sports, the darshan effect, and the growing power of the secular middle class. Part III treats politics: the problems of political history and self-definition, India and its neighbors, and the relationship between the United States and India. An afterword looks, tenuously and tentatively, toward India's hope for the future.

India: Facing the Twenty-First Century (The Essential Asia)

History

Crossette, Barbara

Asia

Indiana Univ. Pr

Experienced travelers tell about their favorite places to stay. ... Over 500 places with special charm in every state and Canada. Includes an Index By State and Index By Inn Name.

America's Wonderful Little Hotels and Inns

Travel

Food, Lodging & Transportation

St.Martin's Press

For the European and later the American colonial soldier, the civil administrator and his clerk, the merchant, the missionary, and the families who followed them east of Suez, daily life was less a matter of advancing the glory of God or empire than a battle for survival against sunstroke, dysentery, cholera, malaria, and a host of other unnamed deadly fevers as well as little-examined, vague indispositions that in hindsight would probably be diagnosed as clinical symptoms of depression. Later, medical scholars coined a phrase for it: tropical fatigue.” Pity John Ouchterlony. By the time they brought him to the healing hills, it was too late. On April 29, 1863, Lieutenant Colonel Ouchterlony of the Royal Madras Engineers died of jungle fever brought on by exposure while in the execution of his duty,” says a memorial plaqueone of manyat St. Stephens Church in Ootacumund, a British colonial town in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India. Others were luckier. They got to Ooty in time and survived the perilous East, at least for another season, by rising above its pestilential lower reaches. On litters, in chairs, on ponies, by foot if they were able, Europeans in Asia nearly two centuries ago began climbing into the hills in search health, relaxation, and sometimes their sanity.They called the refuges they createdlittle European towns carved from rocky mountainsides or nestled in the meadows of high plateaus”hill stations.” Colonialism came and went, but the hill stations remain. They are no longer European, but most have not lost their unique appeal. After all, the plains still fry in the sun and the cities of Asia have only grown larger, noisier, and more polluted. New generations of Asians are rediscovering hill stations and turning them into tourist resorts with luxury hotels and golf courses. Hill stations still cling to their history, and the story they tell reveals a lot about how colonial life was lived. They also have a future, if environmental damage and overpopulation do not destroy the forested hills and mountains that gave them their spectacular settings and pleasant climates.Hill stations began to appear, albeit at different times in different places, when the era of initial exploration and conquest was waning, wives and families arrived in substantial numbers, and life had become a bit more routine. By then, colonial societies could take stock of their longer-term needs and, regrettably, look for ways to build walls around themselves to shut out native populations. Through the age of European mercantile empire building and colonialism that began with the turn of the sixteenth century, hill stations were largely a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Most were established between 1820 and 1885, though the Dutch were early with Bogor in Indonesia and the French came later with Dalat in Vietnam and the Americans with Baguio in the Philippines. The British themselves built a second generation of hill stations after World War I in southeast Asia.In early 1997, Barbara Crossette set off on a journey of several months to see Asia anew through its great hill stations, moving from mountain to mountain from Pakistan, across India, to Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. A year earlier, Crossette had made a trip to the highlands of Indonesian Sumatra, the land of the Minangkabau and Batak people, where the idea of this kind of journey came together.

The Great Hill Stations Of Asia

Basic Books

Over 300 places with special charm. . . in every state and in Canada.

America's Wonderful Hotels: 2

Dutton Adult

Tantric Buddhism, with its complex and fascinating rites, rose to its highest levels on the trans-Himalayan Tibetan plateau, where it had flowered since the eighth century. But now the small kingdoms -- Sikkim and Ladakh among them -- where the teachings and miracles of the great lamas were revered have been gobbled up by bigger powers. The story of that loss is a prelude to Barbara Crossette's richly evocative journey into the historical past and courageous present of Bhutan, where the Buddhist world can still be seen intact, peaceful, harmonious -- and threatened. We enter a landscape of frozen peaks, high windy flatlands, and deep verdant valleys where, until the 1960s, the Bhutanese lived a medieval existence -- where temples and monasteries, monks and lamas, provided not only spiritual but legal and even medical sustenance. We move through farmlands, villages, and towns whose clusters of painted ornamental buildings and wooden half-timberings might be illustrations for old fairy tales, where thanks to Bhutan's devoted rulers change has thus far been gradual; where the tolerance, good humor, generosity -- and gorgeous ritual -- of Himalayan Buddhism continues to shine through. Into this setting creep the tensions, deep and destructive, that threaten to wound Bhutan despite its best efforts to ward off the outside world. We see how open borders and recent air links have led to high-stakes smuggling of temple treasures and gold, as well as the ravages of AIDS; how tourism is importing dollars, distance from village roots, and a new urban phenomenon -- burglary. Westerners tend to take from the Buddhist world only what seems at the moment relevant to them: today it is meditation and elements of oriental medicine. The Buddhist way of life that this book reveals is much more -- a rich amalgam of theology spiced by legend, superstition, astrological interpretation, and the worship of natural phenomena; a religion that binds each man and woman to the cosmos and to the gods while it prescribes the earthly rituals that ease the human passage from birth to death. A splendorous culture is under siege. In this book we have a rare and memorable portrait of a corner of the world where it can still be experienced.

So Close To Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas

KNOPF

For more than a thousand years Tibet, Sikkim, Ladakh, and Bhutan were the santuaries of Tantric Buddhism. But in the last half of this century, geopolitics has scoured the landscape of the Himalayas, and only the reclusive kingdom of Bhutan remains true to Tantric Buddhism. As she travels through Bhutan and its neighbots, Crossette introduces readers to a world that has emerged from the middle ages only to find itself peering into the abyss of modernity.

So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Crossette, Barbara. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Crossette, Barbara

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Crossette, Barbara. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

India: Facing the Twenty-First Century (The Essential Asia)

America's Wonderful Little Hotels and Inns

The Great Hill Stations Of Asia

America's Wonderful Hotels: 2

America's Wonderful Hotels: 2

So Close To Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas

So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas

The Great Hill Stations Of Asia