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

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

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 evenings refuse to end when the sun goes down. They linger. In the silence after everyone has gone to bed. In an old photograph discovered by accident. In a familiar fragrance floating through an unfamiliar street. They arrive carrying memories we never invited—and perhaps never truly let go. That quiet emotional space is where Neelam Saxena Chandra's Seeli Shaamein begins. The title itself is evocative. Damp evenings. Moist with memory. Heavy with emotions that

Grief changes the way we look at the world. After losing someone we love, even the smallest things begin to feel different. A butterfly crossing our path. A feather lying on the pavement. A dream so vivid that we wake up convinced we were with them again. Most of us have experienced moments like these, even if we've never spoken about them. Beyond Goodbye by Tanishka Chugera grows from that very human space. The book begins with the sudden loss of the author's mother, b

Every long-running espionage series faces the same invisible enemy: familiarity. The missions become bigger. The explosions become louder. The body count rises. Yet the suspense quietly fades because readers begin believing the hero will always find a way out. A Hostile State, the fifth and final book in Adrian Magson's Lone Mercenary series, takes the opposite approach. Instead of making Marc Portman more powerful, Magson makes him more vulnerable. That single decisi

There is something deeply human about our fascination with parallel universes. We don't imagine them because we are obsessed with science or fantasy. We imagine them because every life leaves behind unanswered questions. What if we had accepted that job? What if we had stayed? What if we had walked away? Somewhere inside all of us lives a quiet curiosity about the roads we never took. Ssamridhi Gulati's The Shadow Weaver taps into that universal emotion and transforms it into

Every conversation about improving our lives usually begins in the wrong place. We talk about better habits, stronger discipline, improved productivity, or greater motivation. Rarely do we begin with the organ that makes every one of those things possible. The Brain Always Wins asks us to reverse that order. Before changing our behaviour, it argues, we should understand the brain that creates it. That premise gives the book its identity. John Sullivan and Chris Parker are

There is a familiar fantasy that action thrillers keep selling us: one highly trained individual can outthink governments, outrun armies, and reshape history through sheer competence. Most readers know it is improbable. Yet we return to these stories because they ask a more interesting question than whether the hero could survive. They ask whether individual conviction still has meaning in a world dominated by institutions, intelligence agencies, and political machinery. Hard

Not every rescue mission begins with a gunshot. Sometimes it begins with a betrayal nobody has noticed yet. That is the tension Adrian Magson builds into Close Quarters, the second novel in his Lone Mercenary series. On the surface, the premise feels comfortably familiar: Marc Portman—the elusive operative known as the Watchman—is sent into eastern Ukraine to extract a captured CIA negotiator. It sounds like the kind of mission thriller readers have encountered countless ti

There is a quiet irony at the heart of modern intelligence work. The people who receive medals are often those whose stories can be told. The ones who truly change the outcome of an operation usually disappear before anyone knows they were there. Adrian Magson builds The Watchman around that forgotten figure—the professional whose greatest success is remaining invisible. That decision alone distinguishes the novel from many contemporary espionage thrillers. Marc Portman i