Esther David

When Juliet and Romiel get married and relocate to Israel, they rent out their Apartment 107 in Ahmedabad's Shalom India Housing Society to Jews. Each character who inhabits the house has a story to tell: about run-ins with the other residents, the diminishing community of Jews, cross-cultural conflicts, and the difficulty of choosing between India and Israel. Prophet Elijah, whom the Bene Israel Jews of western India believe in, plays an important role in their lives, appearing at critical or amusing moments and wreaking havoc with his mischief, but ensuring that ultimately peace prevails. Bombay Brides - as most Jewish men of Ahmedabad are married to women from Mumbai - is drawn from Jewish homes in Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Kochi, Kolkata and Alibaug. This is a story about home, heritage, rites, rituals, roots and what it means to be one of the last survivng members of a community in a vast multi-cultural country like India.

Bombay Brides

Twenty-Two Extraordinary Stories From The Lives Of Women We Have Always Known. What Happens When Women Decide To Shed Their Inhibitions And Speak Out About Their Deepest Feelings? What Stories Lie Behind Their Closed Doors In The Slums And Pols Of Ahmedabad? This Sparkling Collection Tells Us About The Dreams And Aspirations, The Victories And Defeats Of Women We Have Met Every Day-On The Streets, At Home, In Our Neighbourhoods. In Simple Unadorned Prose Esther David Recounts The Stories Of Maya Desai, Tormented By The Knowledge Of Her Beauty And Driven To Suicide By A World Which Refuses To Recognize Her True Self; Of Vesti, Who Meets An Unlikely Saviour After Being Branded As A Witch; Of Amina, Who Never Steps Beyond The Threshold Of Her House, But When Her Family Begins To Fall Apart, Proves To Be A Tower Of Strength; And Of Vidya, The Wife Of An Itinerant Performer, Who Comes Across A Strange Apparition In The Course Of A Somnolent Afternoon. There Are Young Women And Old, Struggling Against Disappointment, Failed Love And The Death Of Near Ones. At Times Funny, At Times Disturbing, These Stories Are A Testament To Their Heroic And Moving Endeavour To Rise Above Their Limitations. The Cover Shows A Detail From A Painting By Amit Ambalal

By the Sabarmati

A biography of Ahmedabad from a winner of the Sahitya Akademi award There are many legends around the founding of Ahmedabad. One has it that some time in 1411 AD, a dog was looking for easy prey on the banks of the Sabarmati when a hare attacked him and drove him away. Sultan Ahmed Shah witnessed the scene and, impressed by the hare's spirit, decided to build a city right there.Now, six hundred years later, Ahmedabad is a city at the intersection of the old and the new. Centuries-old dargahs and havelis stand alongside high-rises and glitzy shopping malls. Once known for its textile mills, it is now one of the world's fastest developing cities. But while the fortifications of the walled city crumbled long ago, divisions between its varied groups have come to the fore, pulling them apart.Esther David, a member of Ahmedabad's small Bene Israel Jewish community, is a storehouse of city stories. In Ahmedabad: City with a Past, she takes the reader on an intimate rickshaw ride through a city full of life and wondrous contradictions.

City with a Past

Ahmedabad

Enrico Gerding

David Sarne

Onn Shehory

This volume contains 18 thoroughly refereed and revised papers detailing recent advances in research on designing trading agents and mechanisms for agent-mediated e-commerce. They were originally presented at the 11th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC 2009) collocated with AAMAS 2009 in Budapest, Hungary, or the 2009 Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA 2009) collocated with IJCAI 2009 in Pasadena, CA, USA. The papers focus on topics such as individual agent behavior and agent interaction, collective behavior, mechanism design, and computational aspects, all in the context of e-commerce applications like trading, auctions, or negotiations. They combine approaches from different fields of mathematics, computer science, and economics such as artificial intelligence, distributed systems, operations research, and game theory.

AAMAS Workshop, AMEC 2009, Budapest, Hungary, May 12, 2009, and IJCAI Workshop, TADA 2009, Pasadena, CA, USA, July 13, 2009, Selected and Revised Papers

Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Designing Trading Strategies and Mechanisms for Electronic Markets

Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2010 A gripping story of a lone Jewish woman battling land sharks to keep her community alive Rachel lives alone by the sea. Her children have long migrated to Israel as have her Bene Israel Jew neighbours. Taking care of the local synagogue and preparing exquisite traditional Jewish dishes sustains Rachel's hope of seeing the community come together again at a future time. When developers make moves to acquire the synagogue and its surrounding land, Rachel's vehement opposition takes the synagogue committee and the town by surprise. Written with warmth and humour, Book of Rachel is a captivating tale of a woman's battle to live life on her own terms. Continuing the saga of the unique Bene Israel Jews in India, it adds to Esther David's reputation as a writer of grace and power.

Book of Rachel

Le livre de Rachel

Sofia Ceppi

Chen Hajaj

Valentin Robu

Ioannis A. Vetsikas

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 17th and 18th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce, AMEC TADA 2015 and 2016, which took place in Istanbul, Turkey, in May 2015, and in New York City, USA, in July 2016. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Both workshops aim to present a cross-section of the state of the art in automated electronic markets and encourage theoretical and empirical work that deals with both the individual agent level as well as the system level. Given the breadth of research topics in this field, the range of topics addressed in these papers is correspondingly broad. They range from papers that study theoretical issues, related to the design of interaction protocols and marketplaces, to the design and analysis of automated trading strategies used by individual agents - which are often developed as part of an entry to one of the tracks of the Trading Agents Competition.

Esther David

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