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 open The Life That’s Waiting expecting to be moved. I opened it the way you open a window at dawn—carefully, unsure whether the air outside will soothe you or make the ache more obvious. Brianna Wiest has a way of meeting readers exactly there, in that fragile moment when holding it all together starts to feel heavier than falling apart. This book didn’t rush me forward. It sat beside me. Quietly. Patiently. Almost insistently.   Wiest has always occupied a curious l

I opened Stories of Courage on a day when nothing dramatic was happening in my life—and that’s exactly why it unsettled me. No crisis. No breaking news. Just an ordinary day. Yet within a few pages, the ground under that ordinariness began to shift. Not violently. Gently. The way perspective changes when you overhear someone else’s truth on a bus or at a café table. You keep reading, but part of you has already gone inward, recalibrating what you complain about, what you fear

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

We talk a lot about heartbreak. This book is about the decisions that come before it—the calculated exits, the postponed conversations, the confidence that silence is harmless. It explores how leaving doesn’t always require walking away. Sometimes it just requires not staying. Debasish Talukdar’s The Silence I Left Her In does not announce itself as a love story, nor does it pretend to be a redemption arc. It arrives more like a folded letter you find years later in an old dr

The night I began Operation SINDOOR, the house was quiet in that fragile way silence gets after the news has exhausted itself. The phone lay face down. Outside, a distant train horn stitched the darkness together. I didn’t open the book expecting drama. I opened it expecting clarity. What I didn’t expect was to feel as if I’d stepped into a low-lit operations room where time moves in half-seconds and every choice leaves a residue.   Lt Gen K.J.S. Dhillon doesn’t write like so

Some books don’t take you back to school. They take you back to a feeling. A tightness in the chest. A silence you learned to live with. IX B: The Fragile Heart of an Achiever did that to me—not by reminding me of my own classroom, but by pulling me into a memory I hadn’t connected to school life until now.   I grew up in a co-ed environment. Boys, girls, shared benches, shared laughter, shared awkwardness. So, when people talk about the “only boys’ school experience,” I usua

There’s a particular kind of silence that settles in after you close a soft romance—the kind that doesn’t rush you back into the world, but asks you to sit still for a moment. Finding Our Forever left me in that silence. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just quietly present, like a cup of tea gone lukewarm because you forgot to drink it while lost in thought.   I went into this book the way I often do: with my expectations tucked neatly away. No hype, no pressure, no assumptions about

I finished Uneasy Spaces on an evening that promised nothing memorable. The room was familiar, the day had been uneventful, and my mind was already drifting toward routine thoughts. Yet when I closed the book, something inside me refused to move on. I wasn’t overwhelmed or shaken in any obvious way. I was simply… altered. As if I had spent time listening to people speak softly about their lives, and their voices had followed me into the silence afterward. That, I think, is th

There are some characters we inherit, not choose.   Their meanings are handed to us early, wrapped in certainty, repeated until curiosity feels unnecessary. Ravan arrived in my life that way — already concluded, already named, already sealed. Evil was not something to be examined; it was something to be defeated. The story had taught me where to stand long before I knew how to ask why.   So when I picked up this book, I didn’t do so with reverence or rebellion. I came carryin

Some books don’t begin when you open them. They begin much earlier—in the life you are already living.   Small Actions, Big Results: 31 Habits for a Supercharged Life began for me somewhere between an early-morning routine I try hard not to skip, a basketball court that still teaches me discipline at forty-plus, a reading habit that once turned into a world record, and the quiet inheritance of values my father left behind—without ever calling them habits.   I rarely pick up s

I launched my first book at 44 My daughter launched hers at 11 — published by Pais Friends Library, Dombivli. And somewhere between those two milestones, I discovered that sometimes children don’t just follow our footsteps… they show us new paths.   That revelation came to me through The Day I Stopped Watching Reels, the debut story by my daughter, Vira Gudhate. When she handed me the manuscript, I expected innocence. But what I found inside those pages was something far more