We have grown up with certain identities so familiar that we rarely stop to examine them. Parvati is Shiva’s wife.She is Ganesha’s mother.She is the embodiment of Shakti.She is Durga. She is Kali. We know these names. We know the stories. But do we know Parvati? That question stayed with me while reading Parvati by Samar. Because the interesting thing about this novel is not that it tells us another story about a familiar deity. Its real attempt is more ambitious: i

Why do organisations find it so easy to add something—and so difficult to remove it? A new process is introduced. A new layer of approval appears. Another product enters the portfolio. Another report is added to the calendar. A system that nobody particularly likes continues to exist because “this is how we have always done it.” And slowly, almost invisibly, complexity becomes normal. That was the thought I kept returning to while reading The Simplicity Trap by Rohit Ch

What would you be willing to give up if you genuinely believed that the one thing you were searching for could not be found in the life you were already living? That question stayed with me while reading If Truth Be Told: A Monk’s Memoir by Om Swami. Because the extraordinary thing about this memoir is not simply that a successful businessman became a monk. It is that the person who had seemingly acquired everything the world teaches us to desire eventually discovered t

When a Border Separates Two People, What Exactly Does It Fail to Separate? Some love stories are about two people trying to find each other. Dear Zahira, With Love by Sachin NG is about something more difficult: two people trying to remain connected when history has decided they belong on opposite sides of a border. That distinction stayed with me. Because we often talk about Partition through numbers—millions displaced, families separated, lives destroyed, borders re

We have spent years asking whether artificial intelligence will destroy humanity. Akshay Chopra's After Us asks a more unsettling question: What if it doesn't? What if the intelligence we create is benevolent? What if it solves problems we couldn't? What if it understands us better than we understand ourselves? What if it doesn't need to hate humanity to make humanity irrelevant? That possibility stayed with me long after I finished the book. After Us begins with id

The Practicing Mind — Are We Practising Patience, or Practising Impatience? We often say that we want to become better at something. A better writer. A better athlete. A better parent. A better professional. A better version of ourselves. But there is a part of the process we don't talk about enough. The part where we are still bad at it. The part where improvement is so slow that we begin wondering whether we are improving at all. The part where we have to do the

We have all been there. We know Ramayana. We know Mahabharata. We have heard the Gayatri Mantra. We have grown up hearing words like Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Smritis and Shastras. We visit temples, celebrate festivals, perform rituals and sometimes confidently discuss "our culture". Then someone asks a very simple question: "But where does all this come from?" And suddenly, the confidence disappears. We know the stories. We know the practices. We know the names. Bu

Imagine having the life that people spend years chasing. Two master’s degrees. A successful corporate career. A big house. A long marriage. Two children. Two dogs. Two cars. A beautiful yard. Parties. Comfort. Stability. From the outside, there is very little to complain about. Now imagine walking away from it. That is where Leena Palav’s UnMoored begins to become interesting. Because this is not really a story about leaving a job or travelling around the world. It is a

There is something deeply unsettling about a dead police officer hanging from a tree at a Delhi crossroads. Not just because it is murder, but because of who the victim is. A person who is supposed to represent the law has now become a message from someone who clearly has no respect for it. And then there is the symbol. The mark of Lady Justice on the dead officer’s neck. That is where Rihan Khalyani’s An Uncaught Criminal grabs your attention. Not with a long explanati

A child’s first experience of courage is rarely dramatic. It is usually something much smaller: climbing a little higher, walking a little farther, trying something after being told not to, or facing a fear when there is no adult around to make the decision. That is the space Armaan Farid explores in The Brave Little Dinosaur Achoo. Achoo is bright, curious and mischievous. He loves running around, exploring and climbing trees, even when his mother repeatedly worries abou

There are people who look lonely. And then there are people who have become so good at living alone that nobody thinks to ask if they are lonely. Meera is one of them. At fifty, she has a job. A routine. A home. A life that, from the outside, seems perfectly manageable. She wakes up. Goes to work. Comes back. Follows her routines. Nothing is falling apart. Except perhaps Meera herself. That is where Sindhura Chamala’s Parts of Living quietly gets under your skin

Sometimes the hardest goodbye is not the one we say to another person. It is the goodbye we keep postponing inside ourselves. That is where I Cannot Say Goodbye to You finds its emotional strength. At first glance, the title can make you expect a familiar romance—love, separation, heartbreak, and the difficult business of moving on. But Rithvik Singh’s first romance novel reaches somewhere more uncomfortable. It asks what happens when a person grows up believing that the

Sometimes love doesn't just change two people. Sometimes it changes the world they are standing in. That is the intriguing idea at the centre of Sean Walker's UNEETARIA, the first book in The Uneetaria Saga. Jalen and Amara begin with a connection. But theirs is not the kind of connection that ends with two people simply falling in love. Their bond opens a door. And behind that door is Uneetaria. A world of beauty, mystery and danger. Suddenly, what began as a

There are crimes so brutal that they refuse to remain inside police files. They become part of a city's memory. Parents whisper about them to protect their children. Entire neighbourhoods measure time by what happened before and after. The Shadow of Evil belongs to that unsettling category of true crime—not because it glorifies violence, but because it forces us to confront what happens when violence becomes ordinary. At first glance, this appears to be the story of one man

Every generation believes its struggles are unique. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren't. Anxiety has a different name today. Overthinking has become a personality trait. Career pressure begins before adulthood. Social media has turned comparison into a daily habit. We carry entire conversations inside our heads long after they have ended. That is exactly where The Gita for Gen Z by Rania Sen begins. Not on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. But on the battlefield insid

There is something wonderfully human about looking up at the night sky and asking questions no one can answer with complete certainty. Where did all this come from? Are we really alone? Could time ever flow backwards? And if the universe had a beginning, will it one day have an end? Most of us have wondered about these questions at some point. Few of us ever find explanations that don't leave us even more confused. That is where Mysteries of the Universe by Peter

There is something quietly revealing about the stories we choose to remember. History celebrates achievements, but the roads leading to those achievements are often far more meaningful than the destination itself. They are filled with rejection, loss, uncertainty, and moments when giving up would have been easier. She Rises: Unfinished Dreams by Hariharan Iyer chooses to tell those stories instead of simply celebrating success. Rather than presenting extraordinary women as

There is a strange comfort in detective fiction. A crime happens. Someone investigates. Truth emerges. Justice, more often than not, follows. The Menon Investigation reminded me that real life rarely offers that comfort. And perhaps that's exactly what Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari wanted me to realize. At first, I thought I was picking up another police procedural. An old murder. A senior police officer. A cold case waiting to be solved. The familiar ingredi

Some books arrive carrying more conversations than pages. Long before I knew what Fractured Communities was trying to say, I knew who had written it. That, perhaps, is the strange reality of our times. We often meet an author through headlines before we ever meet their ideas. Opinions are already formed. Sides are already chosen. It made me wonder how often we judge a book before opening it. Once I looked beyond the name on the cover, something else became clear. This w

Some books arrive with answers. Others arrive with a question that quietly follows you long after you've closed the final page. What if the greatest obstacle to your work isn't the world around you—but the distance between who you are and who you could become? That is the conversation Manoj Chenthamarakshan begins in Aligned Work: Let the Higher Self Express Through You! It is a remarkably slim book—barely twenty-eight pages—but its ambition is anything but small. Ins