There’s a particular sound that echoes through Indian homes—a sharp intake of breath followed by a whispered, scandalised question: Aiyyo… what will the neighbours say? It’s not just a sentence. It’s a mood. A warning. Sometimes even a full-blown philosophy of life. I smiled the moment I opened Aruna Nambiar’s Aiyyo, What Will the Neighbours Say? because I knew, instinctively, that this book understood that sound better than most people ever will.   Reading these thirteen sto

I didn’t plan to read Never Say Die slowly. It just happened that way. A few pages at a time. Then a pause. Then a longer pause. Not because the book drags, but because it keeps nudging something personal. The kind of nudge that makes you put the book face down, stare into nothing for a moment, and think, Alright… I need to sit with this.   Most business memoirs arrive dressed for applause. They sparkle with certainty. They reassure you that every fall was strategic and every

I remember closing this book one evening and realising the room around me felt louder than before. The fan hummed. A dog barked somewhere far away. And yet, after Desiccated Land, silence carried weight. This is not the silence of peace. It is the kind that lingers after you’ve heard too much truth at once and don’t know where to place it.   David Lepeska comes to Kashmir not as a saviour, not as an expert parachuted in with opinions ready-made, but as a young American journa

There’s something about prisons that unsettles me — not the concrete, the locks, or the barbed wire, but the silence. That heavy, echoing silence that follows you like a shadow, whispering stories you’re not supposed to hear. When I picked up Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer by Sunil Gupta and Sunetra Choudhury, I thought I was signing up for a cold, procedural memoir — a peek behind the bars of India’s most infamous jail. Instead, I found a mirror — cracked, smok

I’ll tell you where I was when I opened Sach Kahun Toh. Midnight. Rain outside. My bedside lamp spilling that warm amber glow across the...