I have a confession. I like books that make me stop reading. Not because they are boring. Quite the opposite. Because sometimes I am reading a page and suddenly I have to look up and say, “Wait. What?” That happened quite a few times with What the What?! And, honestly, that is probably the best possible reaction to this book. I came to it expecting a book of strange facts, trivia and questions. I got that. But somewhere between one bizarre fact and another

Some books announce themselves loudly. This one arrived like a coded message slipped across a café table—quiet, dangerous, and impossible to ignore once you realised what it carried. I read The Silk Route Spy not in its original English, but in its Marathi translation, and that detail matters. Because this is a story about crossing borders—political, moral, emotional—and reading it in a language that lives closer to the soil made those crossings feel even more intimate. Dr.

Death is one of those subjects we instinctively tiptoe around. We talk about it in hushed tones, if at all. Yet in India, where faiths,...