'Gopi, I can't believe a year has passed since I met you. You have brought me so much happiness!' In this second book in the bestselling Gopi Diaries series, Gopi is stronger, bigger, more confident than the little pup he was in the first book, but he is also cheekier and more mischievous! He faces new situations, new challenges, even new dog companions with endless energy and spirit. And then comes the day when he faces the biggest surprise of them all... Written in Sudha Murty's inimitable style, this simple story told from a dog's perspective shows us just why pets are so precious - for their love, devotion and boundless affection. This is a book for Sudha Murty's fans of all ages as Gopi paws himself yet again into the hearts of children and adults alike.

The Gopi Diaries is a series of three books for children about a dog called Gopi. Told in Gopi's voice, the first book, Coming Home, begins with Gopi going to his new home, and tells the story of how he settles down with his loving, human family. How Gopi sees the world around him and what he thinks of the people in his life give the story a truly unique flavour. Written in Sudha Murty's inimitable style, these are books children and adults will treasure as the simple stories talk of basic values even when told from a dog's perspective.

Gopi Kallayil, author of The Internet to the Inner-net and one of Google's best and brightest, uses stories from his high-tech work life and his personal life to explore what it means to be truly happy--and what makes us truly human. Happiness is a multimillion-dollar industry, catering to our deep desire to live a joyful life and to a belief that, as human beings, we deserve to be happy. Gopi Kallayil believes in reversing that equation. He holds that what we truly deserve is to be human, and that the key to happiness lies in being 100 percent who we are, reveling in our authentic selves, even if--maybe especially if--that means falling on our faces. Which Gopi has done. Many times. But he's also had spectacular success. This book explores the qualities that make us human and have helped to make Gopi successful and happy in both his personal life and his professional career. Told with Gopi's candor and humor, his deep compassion and his love of the absurd, The Happy Human spans the period from his first job as a software programmer in South China to his current position as an executive at Google in Silicon Valley. Each chapter captures an event in Gopi's life where he dug deep and found the means to express himself from a place of radical confidence: Singing live at Burning Man, even though he sings off-key and was terrified. Participating in a triathlon, with an open-water swim, when he had only swum in a pool. (Lifeguards pulled him into their boat to save him.) Speaking at Toastmasters International and being willing to be awful--which he admittedly was--before finally, years later, becoming one of their top speakers. He also weaves in accounts of others who have dreamed big and acted on their dreams. Gopi's stories and practices help us find happiness by embracing not only our own selves but the entire human experience, inspiring us to expect miracles daily, to use every fall as a chance to bounce, to go for what we want on every front, to live our lives full-out.

Coiled like a snake at the base of the spine, kundalini is the spiritual force that lies dormant in every human being. Once awakened, often through meditation and yoga practices, it rises up the spine and finds expression in the form of spiritual knowledge, mystical vision, psychic powers, and ultimately, enlightenment. This is the classic first-person account of Gopi Krishna, an ordinary Indian householder who, at the age of thirty-four, after years of unsupervised meditation, suddenly experienced the awakening of kundalini during his morning practice. The story of this transformative experience, and the author's struggle to find balance amid a variety of powerful physiological and psychic side effects, forms the core of the book. His detailed descriptions of his dramatic inner experiences and symptoms such as mood swings, eating disorders, and agonizing sensations of heat—and of how, with the help of his wife, he finally stabilized at a higher level of consciousness—make this one of the most valuable classics of spiritual awakening available.

Many consider the autobiography to be a Western genre that represents the self as fully autonomous. The contributors to Speaking of the Self challenge this presumption by examining a wide range of women&'s autobiographical writing from South Asia. Expanding the definition of what kinds of writing can be considered autobiographical, the contributors analyze everything from poetry, songs, mystical experiences, and diaries to prose, fiction, architecture, and religious treatises. The authors they study are just as diverse: a Mughal princess, an eighteenth-century courtesan from Hyderabad, a nineteenth-century Muslim prostitute in Punjab, a housewife in colonial Bengal, a Muslim Gandhian devotee of Krishna, several female Indian and Pakistani novelists, and two male actors who worked as female impersonators. The contributors find that in these autobiographies the authors construct their gendered selves in relational terms. Throughout, they show how autobiographical writing—in whatever form it takes—provides the means toward more fully understanding the historical, social, and cultural milieu in which the author performs herself and creates her subjectivity. Contributors: Asiya Alam, Afshan Bokhari, Uma Chakravarti, Kathryn Hansen, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Anshu Malhotra, Ritu Menon, Shubhra Ray, Shweta Sachdeva Jha, Sylvia Vatuk

The Internet has become humanity’s invisible central nervous system, connecting us at the speed of thought. More people today have access to mobile phones than have access to clean drinking water. Yet the most important technology is still the one within us: our brain, body, and consciousness. A fast-paced career in the high-tech industry combined with a deep yoga and meditation practice has allowed Gopi Kallayil—Google’s Chief Evangelist for Brand Marketing and one of the leading voices encouraging yoga and mindfulness in the workplace today – to integrate his inner and outer technologies to a remarkable degree. Wisdom from his yoga mat and meditation cushion guides his professional career, and his work life provides the perfect classroom to deepen his wisdom practice. The Internet to the Inner-Net guides the rest of us to do the same. In some three dozen wide-ranging, sometimes provocative essays, Gopi shares his experiments in conscious living and offers insight, inspiration, and rituals – including yoga, mindful eating, and even napping – to help us access our own inner worlds. If you’re looking for grounded practical wisdom that might simultaneously help you become more creative, adaptable, enthusiastic, effective, or resilient, you’ll find it in this user’s manual for the technology within – along with colorful insight into the successful Google culture. In five sections, from "Log In" (which offers mindful ways of connecting and engaging) to "Clear Out Your In-Box" (shedding what doesn’t serve you to make space for what does) to "Thank You for Subscribing" (a reminder to live with gratitude), Gopi lays out practices and perspectives that you can use starting right now to live with more purpose, fulfillment, and joy.

"What happened to me that early morning during the Christmas of 1937 changed the course of my life and outlook. I sat in a small room in a house on the outskirts of Jammu. I was meditating. Practice had accustomed me to sit in the same posture for hours without discomfort, and as I sat breathing slowly and rhythmically, my attention was drawn towards the crown of my head, contemplating an imaginary lotus in full bloom, radiating light. I sat unmoving and erect. My whole being was so engrossed in the contemplation of the lotus that for several minutes I lost touch with my body and surroundings. The only objet of which I was aware was a lotus of brilliant colour, emitting rays of light. During a spell of intense concentration I suddenly felt a strange sensation below the base of the spine, at the place touching the seat, while I sat cross-legged on a folded blanket spread on the floor. The sensation was so extraordinary and pleasing that my attention was forcibly drawn towards it. My heart beat wildly, and I found it difficult to bring my attention to the required degree of fixity. The sensation extended upwards, growing in intensity. Then, suddenly, with a roar like that of a waterfall, I felt a stream of liquid light entering my brain through the spinal cord. What had happened to me? Was I hallucinating? Or had I by some strange fate succeeded in experiencing the Transcendental? I had read glowing accounts, written by learned men, of great benefits resulting from concentration and of the miraculous powers acquired by yogis through meditation. Was there, after all, really some truth in the repeated claims of the sages and ascetics of India, made for thousands of years that it was possible to apprehend reality in this life if one practised meditation in a certain way? Little did I realize that from that day onwards I was never to be my old normal self again. I had unwittingly and without adequate knowledge, roused to activity the most powerful power in man. I had stepped unknowingly upon the key to the most guarded secret of the ancients, and thenceforth for a long time, I had to live suspended by a thread, swinging between life and death, between sanity and insanity, between lights and darkness, between heaven and earth." An extraordinary autobiographical account of what happens in the mind and body when Kundalini gets spontaneously aroused... one of the clearest journals documenting spiritual transformation and mental evolution onto a higher plane of consciousness.