I opened A Rose on the Last Page on a night that felt ordinary. No grand intention. No search for meaning. Just a gap between two heavier reads. I told myself it would be a few poems before sleep. Something light. Something quick.   But sometimes the book you choose absentmindedly is the one that sits beside you longer than expected.   A Rose on the Last Page by Bharti Jain is not a dramatic collection. It doesn’t shout about heartbreak or decorate longing with complicated me

There’s something different about returning to a writer.   The first time you read someone, you observe them. The second time, you listen more closely.   Having reviewed earlier work by Bindu Unnikrishnan, I didn’t walk into Spilled Coffee and Some Laughs as a stranger. I walked in with memory. With familiarity. With a quiet expectation of honesty.   And this book met me there.   Some books arrive like loud announcements. This one feels like sitting across from someone who do

There are some books you don’t “start.” You gather the courage to open them.   When I picked up Coping With Cancer by Ramendra Kumar, I wasn’t just holding a Kindle edition. I was holding the possibility of fear. Cancer is not an abstract word for me. I know a couple of survivors personally. I’ve seen hospital corridors. I’ve heard the silence after a diagnosis. So yes, it took something in me to turn those first few pages.   And within minutes, I realized this wasn’t a book

The “aha” moments in life rarely arrive with fireworks. They arrive quietly — in the pause after a meeting, in the silence after a mistake, in the thought you can’t shake off. That quiet space is where A-HA! : The more you reflect, The more you become! by Sorbojeet Chatterjee operates.   From the very first pages, I sensed this wasn’t trying to be “another self-help book.” In fact, it almost resists that label. It doesn’t hand you a ten-step formula or a loud motivational ant

There are some books you read like a film. And then there are books you read like a conversation that refuses to end even after the lights come on. Bollywood, Hollywood and the Future of World Cinema by Rajesh Talwar belongs to the second category for me — less popcorn, more post-screening debate.   I have journeyed through many of Talwar’s works before — from his fiction that dissects ideology and identity to his sharp explorations of law and justice — and what has always in

There’s a particular kind of silence that follows a question you cannot answer — not because you lack intelligence, but because the pieces simply refuse to sit still. That is the silence I carried while reading Salt and Blood by Amit D'Souza. Not a loud, heart-racing thriller silence. A slower one. The kind that lingers like humidity before a storm that may or may not arrive.   At first glance, this is the story of Inspector Sheela Sawant investigating a body found under unse

There is a particular kind of love that does not begin with conversation. It begins with watching.   While reading Heart Overruled – A Bengali-Tamil Romance by Debanjana Mukherjee, I kept returning to the image of a sixteen-year-old girl at her sister’s wedding, standing amidst marigold garlands and ritual chants, quietly memorising the face of a man who barely registers her presence. That first encounter is brief, almost fragile. For Parineeta, it is seismic. For Aravind, it

There’s something unsettling about the idea that six ordinary days can reroute an entire life.   Not years. Not decades. Six days.   That quiet tension hums beneath Six Days in Bombay, the latest standalone from Alka Joshi, and it caught me off guard. I went in expecting historical richness and atmospheric detail. I did not expect to feel personally confronted by a young nurse’s hunger for a life larger than the one she’d been handed.   We meet Sona Falstaff in 1937 Bombay —

There are cities you visit. And then there are cities that sit inside you like unfinished conversations.   Reading Kolkata Ø KM by Swati Bhattacharyya felt less like turning pages and more like wandering through a house of echoes. Not haunted in a loud, theatrical way. Haunted the way memory is — soft-footed, patient, persistent.   This is not a book that rushes. It lingers. It circles. It asks you to sit with moments most of us hurry past.   What stayed with me most was the

There are cities that glitter at night. And then there are cities that swallow light whole.   Reading City Without Stars by Tim Baker felt like walking through one of the latter — a place where hope doesn’t disappear dramatically; it erodes quietly, layer by layer, until even the sky feels complicit.   Set in Ciudad Real, a fictionalised border town echoing the tragedies of Juárez, the novel drops us into a landscape where cartel wars rage in the shadows and hundreds of women

Book cover of Birthday Stories  edited by Haruki Murakami featuring minimalist design and birthday-themed imagery. There is something quietly unsettling about birthdays once you cross a certain age. The cake is still sweet, the candles still flicker, but beneath the ritual there is an inventory being taken. What did I become this year? What slipped away unnoticed?   That is the emotional temperature of Birthday Stories, curated by Haruki Murakami — not festive, not nostalgic

There is a particular kind of silence that follows the collapse of something once believed to be eternal. Not the thunder of war, but the quieter, more dangerous hush—the kind that settles into abandoned halls, unsettled bloodlines, and inherited guilt. In The Shattered Empire, Atul Arjun Mohite chooses to begin there. Not at the height of glory, but in the aftermath of certainty.   The thousand-year-old Samrat Empire is already in ruins. A ruler dies without naming an heir.

Some people are afraid of heights. Some are afraid of failure. And some are afraid of the one moment where everything is supposed to look perfect.   The Landing begins in the cockpit, but it quickly makes it clear that the real descent is internal.   First Officer Anvi Singh is the kind of woman our culture celebrates without hesitation — disciplined, decorated, precise. A rising star trusted with lives thousands of feet above ground. She is trained for chaos. She knows her c

I picked up It’s Easy to Be Healthy by Malaika Arora expecting another glossy celebrity fitness book—the kind with curated routines, aspirational photos, and promises of overnight transformation.   But from the very first page, I realized this was different. It felt like sitting across from a friend at a quiet café in Mumbai, the monsoon pouring outside, the streets alive with honking taxis and street vendors, someone who has stumbled, tried, failed, and finally learned what

There’s something quietly unsettling about a tree that watches you. Not in a mythical, larger-than-life way — but in the way an old house watches its inhabitants age, fracture, betray, and forgive. That was the feeling I carried through The Parijat Tree and Other Stories by Sameer Nagarajan — the sense that these stories are not merely told, they are observed. Closely. Patiently. Almost clinically at times.   This collection moves across decades of Indian life — from the 70s

There’s a particular kind of confidence that comes from building something without excess. Not the loud confidence of billion-dollar funding rounds or glossy launch events—but the quiet certainty of knowing every screw, every line of code, every decision had to justify its existence.   LeanSpark feels like that kind of confidence.   I began reading it at a time when every startup headline seemed to scream “more”—more capital, more valuation, more speed. And here was a book ca

Some love stories don’t explode. They simmer. And Musafir Café feels exactly like that—two cups of chai growing cold between conversations that were never fully finished.   Divya Prakash Dubey places us gently into the lives of Sudha and Chander, two people introduced through the most traditional route possible—a parental matrimonial setup—only to find themselves questioning the very institution that brought them together. Sudha, a divorce lawyer who has watched marriages unr

I opened The United Nations Conspiracy late at night with the casual confidence of someone who believes they control their reading habits. One chapter, maybe two, I told myself. Somewhere between the first disappearance and the first coded warning, I glanced at the clock. Ten minutes had passed. It felt like an hour. My cup of warm water went cold beside me, unnoticed, as New York City stopped being a setting and turned into a living countdown. This book doesn’t unfold gently

I keep thinking about how casually we take photographs now. A thumb tap. A half-smile. A moment frozen without intention. Kachri Kamble: Selfie That Rewrote Politics made me uneasy about that casualness. It reminded me that in the age of spectacle, innocence doesn’t need to be loud to be punished—it only needs to be visible.   I read this book slowly, not because the narrative drags, but because it presses against something tender. Sandeep Sinha begins with an act so ordinary

Pune is the second city I’ve loved deeply, after Mumbai. I’ve been there countless times—often enough to know the older parts by instinct, to recognise the quiet charm of its lanes, and to slowly understand the language of its newer, faster edges too. If life ever asked me to move away from Mumbai, Pune would be the only city I’d agree to without a long internal argument. It has that rare quality of familiarity without ownership, closeness without pressure. Reading Pune Junct