Some biographies tell you what a person accomplished. A few make you wonder what that person was willing to lose along the way. That was the thought I kept returning to while reading The Unyielding Judge by Gauri Grover, a book about her grandfather, Justice A.N. Grover. I began the book expecting to encounter a distinguished judge and an important chapter in India's constitutional history. I did. But somewhere along the way, the book became less about the position Justice Gr

There is something deeply unsettling about a story in which the people you are supposed to save are also the people you are supposed to fear. That was the thought I kept returning to after finishing Code 103 Redacted: Patient Zer0 by Sidhant Khanna. On the surface, the ingredients are familiar. A school. A bioengineered pathogen. Children who suddenly become frighteningly different. A tactical unit sent in before the infection can spread beyond the building. We have seen vari

We like success stories because they make life look simpler than it really is. Someone starts with very little. They work hard. They keep going. They overcome obstacles. Eventually, they arrive somewhere impressive. It is a comforting sequence. It tells us that effort matters. But there is a problem with the neat version of the story. Two people can work equally hard and still not have the same road ahead of them. One may have access to better education. Another may have to f

काही दिवसांपूर्वी एका पुस्तकाचं मुखपृष्ठ पाहिलं. नाव वाचलं. गुज अंतरी. मनातलं काहीतरी. आपण सगळेच काही ना काही मनात ठेवतो. काही गोष्टी बोलतो. काही अर्धवट सांगतो. आणि काही गोष्टी अशा असतात ज्या कुणालाच सांगायच्या नसतात. पण बाईच्या बाबतीत हा न सांगितलेला भाग कदाचित थोडा मोठा असतो. कारण बाईने काय करावं याबद्दल आपल्या समाजाकडे मतं फार आहेत. ती कशी दिसावी. काय घालावं. कुठे जावं. कुणाशी बोलावं. किती हसायचं. किती बोलायचं. लग्न कधी करायचं. लग्नानंतर कसं वागायचं. आई झाल्यावर कसं वागायच

A murder mystery set inside the corporate world becomes a story about ambition, reputation, power and the things people choose to hide. There is something immediately interesting about a murder at a corporate retreat. Perhaps because the corporate world is supposed to be controlled. There are meetings, presentations, targets, hierarchies, performance reviews and carefully chosen words. People know what they are expected to say. They know what they should not say. They know ho

A book about Neem Karoli Baba, faith and the strange ways in which someone can remain present after they are gone. There is a point in most relationships with death when absence becomes the final fact. The person is no longer there. A photograph remains. A few belongings remain. Their voice may remain in an old recording. Their words may remain in our memory. But the person is gone. That is how most of us understand absence. Whisper in the Heart: The Ongoing Presence of Neem

We have become so accustomed to talking about startups through funding rounds, valuations, unicorns and rapid growth that entrepreneurship itself can sometimes begin to look like a financial event. A founder raises money. The valuation goes up. The company expands. The headlines arrive. But somewhere underneath all of this is a much simpler question. Is anyone actually willing to pay for what the business is offering? That question kept returning to me while reading Narasimha

A tree is one of the easiest things in the world to ignore. We pass hundreds of them without looking twice. They stand outside our homes, along roads, inside school grounds, beside temples and in the middle of cities. We use their shade, breathe the air around them and depend on the ecological systems they belong to. Yet most of the time, we simply call them part of nature and move on. That ordinary relationship with trees is what makes Boban Idiculla Oonni's TREE: The Sixth

Artificial intelligence is becoming very good at finding patterns. It can process enormous amounts of information, identify risks, forecast possible outcomes, compare scenarios and surface relationships that a human team might miss. For Project Management Offices, that creates an obvious opportunity. But Thinking With Machines: Building AI-Enabled PMOs for the Age of Intelligent Project Leadership by Danilo Arba made me think about a less obvious problem. When a machine becom

Aurora S.’s First You, Then the Rest asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when choosing yourself disappoints other people? The title makes a promise that is easy to agree with. Choose yourself. The difficult part begins when that choice has consequences. Saying no sounds liberating on a page. In real life, it can cost us approval, affection, friendships, family harmony, or the comfortable identity of being the person everyone can depend on. That tension sits at th

Most of us know what we should change. We should sleep better. Move more. Drink enough water. Spend less time scrolling. Protect our attention. Be grateful. Breathe. Make better choices. The strange thing is that knowing all of this does not necessarily make us do any of it. That gap between knowing and doing is where Theresa Cheung's Walk Your Talk begins. Her argument is simple: lasting personal change depends less on what we intend to do and more on what we repeatedly do.

What if the real problem with our economic debate is not that we have chosen the wrong system, but that we have become too comfortable believing there are only a few systems to choose from? That question stayed with me while reading A Republic Reimagined: A New Economic Model for a New Age by Joshua Schmude. Schmude challenges the familiar argument that economies must ultimately choose between capitalism and socialism. Instead, he explores a hybrid economic model in which pri

There is something almost absurd about a life being reduced to ten inches. Twenty-two years of pouring tea. Twenty-two years of knowing who wants extra ginger, who will pay tomorrow, who needs a cup on credit, who comes to the cart simply because there is nowhere else to go. Then someone draws a chalk line on the pavement and decides that those ten inches matter more. That is where Shekhar Nerala’s Ten Inches: A Novel of Bada Shehar begins to become interesting. When a Tea Ca

There is a particular kind of loss that comes with leaving home. You can leave a house. You can leave a city. You can even leave a country. But leaving the version of yourself that existed there is much harder. That is what stayed with me while reading Shiraz Nomad's A Place We Used to Call Home. On the surface, this is a memoir about growing up in post-revolution Iran, living through political upheaval, witnessing violence and repression, enduring imprisonment, and eventuall

Finish What You Start by Peter Hollins is a practical book about one of the most common problems in modern life: starting things with enthusiasm and then quietly abandoning them. We make plans. We set goals. We buy books. We begin projects. We promise ourselves that this time we will stay consistent. Then something happens. Life gets busy. Motivation disappears. A distraction looks more attractive. The task becomes repetitive. And the unfinished goal slowly moves into the bac

Some people fall in love by saying it. Some by showing it. And some spend years doing everything except saying the one thing that matters. That is where Kartikeya Dhar places Kabir Sharma in The Unsaid, a quiet contemporary Indian love story set in Shimla in 2003. Kabir is the kind of person who notices things other people miss. He sees unhappiness, hesitation, small lies and changes in behaviour. He observes the world around him with unusual sensitivity. Yet when it comes to

There is something very appealing about being told that we can change our lives. Change the way we think. Change what we do. Change where we eventually arrive. It gives us something we all like to have: a sense of agency. Brian Keane’s Rewire Your Mindset works from that belief. The book is built around personal responsibility, discipline, habits, confidence, resilience, goal setting and, most importantly, the gap between intending to do something and actually doing it. Much

We call someone a stranger when we know nothing about them. But perhaps the more accurate definition is this: A stranger is someone whose story we haven't heard yet. Jay Divyam's None of Us Are Strangers begins with a little girl, an absent mother and a man who never intended to become responsible for either of them. Veer Mehra is at a Mumbai party when a woman asks him to look after her daughter, Aaruhi, for a few minutes. She doesn't return. Those few minutes be

“What's your price?” It is an uncomfortable question because we are used to putting prices on almost everything. A house has a price. A car has a price. A company has a valuation. Even our time is increasingly measured in money. But what happens when the question is directed at a human being? That discomfort is precisely where Dr. Manjit Hans begins in What's Your Price? Understanding Your Worth. The title initially sounds transactional, almost provocative. Yet the book

Nick Trenton’s I’m Anxious and Can’t Stop Overthinking made me look differently at the noise inside our heads There is something strangely exhausting about an anxious mind. It can take one unanswered message and turn it into a story. One mistake can become evidence of incompetence. One uncertain tomorrow can occupy an entire afternoon. And sometimes, the more we try to solve the thought, the more thoughts we create. That is where Nick Trenton’s I’m Anxious and Can’t Sto