Posts from the literature category.
There is something almost absurd about a life being reduced to ten inches.Twenty-two years of pouring tea.Twenty-two years of remembering who wants extra ginger, who will pay tomorrow, who needs a cup on credit and who comes to the cart simply because there is nowhere else to go.Then someone draws a chalk line on the pavement.Ten inches.And suddenly those ten inches matter more than everything tha...
There is a particular kind of love that looks beautiful from a distance.Someone waits.Someone remembers.Someone notices everything.Someone keeps showing up.And because they ask for nothing, we assume their love must be deeper.The Unsaid made me question that assumption.Kartikeya Dhar places Kabir Sharma in Shimla in 2003, a schoolboy with an unusual ability to notice what others miss. He sees unha...
We call someone a stranger when we know nothing about them.But perhaps the more accurate definition is this:A stranger is someone whose story we haven’t heard yet.Jay Divyam’s None of Us Are Strangers begins with a little girl, an absent mother and a man who never intended to become responsible for either of them.Veer Mehra is at a Mumbai party when a woman asks him to look after her daughter, Aar...
“What’s your price?”It is an uncomfortable question because we are used to putting prices on almost everything. A house has a price. A car has a price. A company has a valuation. Even our time is increasingly measured in money.But what happens when the question is directed at a human being?That discomfort is precisely where Dr. Manjit Hans begins in What’s Your Price? Understanding Your Worth. The...
Nick Trenton’s I’m Anxious and Can’t Stop Overthinking made me look differently at the noise inside our headsThere is something strangely exhausting about an anxious mind.It can take one unanswered message and turn it into a story. One mistake can become evidence of incompetence. One uncertain tomorrow can occupy an entire afternoon. And sometimes, the more we try to solve the thought, the more th...
What happens when a place stops producing gold but refuses to stop carrying its history?That question stayed with me while reading Rabi Samuel’s Cold Mine.Set against the history of Kolar Gold Fields, the novel takes us into abandoned mine shafts, forgotten records, unfinished maps and old legends. But beneath the thriller machinery, Samuel is interested in something larger: what happens to people...
We thought we knew the result.The pollsters thought they knew.The television studios thought they knew.The political class thought they knew.Then the voters spoke.And suddenly, almost everyone had to explain why they had been wrong.That is where Rajdeep Sardesai’s 2024: The Election That Surprised India becomes fascinating.Because this isn’t merely a book about an election.It is a book about how n...
A crown is supposed to be a symbol of power.But what if it is actually a debt?That was the thought I kept returning to while reading Rajesh Mehta’s Bleeding Crown: Protector of Sivi.Set in 726 BC, long before the familiar chapters of Indian history that most of us encounter in school, the novel takes us into the kingdom of Sivi, where a young prince is expected to inherit not merely a throne, but ...
We often think we know a place because we know its address.We know the roads. We know the buildings. We know where to get tea. We know which corner is crowded in the evening. We know where people walk, where children play and where politicians once stood behind microphones.But knowing a place is not the same as knowing its memory.That distinction is at the heart of Shanta Gokhale’s Shivaji Park — ...
There are some books you finish.And there are some books you escape from.Not Without My Daughter belongs to the second category.Because while reading Betty Mahmoody’s account, I kept thinking about one frightening question:What happens when the person you trusted most becomes the person you have to protect your child from?Betty travels from America to Iran with her Iranian-American husband, Moody,...
