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There are books you read, and there are books that read you. I didn’t expect that a quiet-looking hardcover with a nostalgic photograph of Mussoorie nestled on the cover would do that to me — but the moment I cracked open Mussoorie Montage: Tales from the Hills by Divyaroop Bhatnagar, I felt something shift. It was like stepping into a fog-thick morning on Camel’s Back Road where everything feels ...
There are books that quietly sit beside you on a long train journey, letting the landscape blur past while your thoughts stay undisturbed. And then there are books that jolt you out of your seat — books that make you forget your station is about to arrive. The Mussoorie Murders belongs entirely to the second kind. I opened it thinking it would be a light companion for the ride. Instead, I found my...
They say that if you grow up in Maharashtra, Shivaji Maharaj isn’t just a historical figure — he’s a presence. A pulse. A silhouette carved into your imagination long before you even learn to spell “history.” And over the years, we’ve all read countless books about him: some glorifying him into near-myth, some dissecting his tactics with academic precision, some reducing him to a chapter squeezed ...
Some books don’t begin when you open them — they begin somewhere inside you, years earlier, with a question you didn’t know you were carrying. For me, it was a dusty memory of a veteran I once met who said, in a voice that trembled just once, “War is a memory you spend your whole life negotiating with.”I never forgot that line.And the day I opened Kristin Hannah’s The Women, it returned to me, lik...
Some books don’t wait politely for your attention — they kick the door open and sweep you into another world before you even realize you’ve crossed a threshold. Circle of Days by Ken Follett did that to me. I wasn’t prepared. One moment I was sinking into my sofa after a long day, absently flipping pages just to unwind, and the next, I was standing barefoot on the Great Plain of prehistoric Britai...
What does it mean to race against time — not metaphorically, not poetically, but in the brutal, breath-snatching, pulse-in-your-throat way where every second could save a life or end one? I asked myself that question somewhere around 2 a.m., sitting alone with a cup of ginger tea gone cold, unable to put Jeffrey Archer’s End Game down. It’s funny how books sometimes choose their own reading condit...
There are books that arrive quietly, like soft rain tapping on a window. And then there are books like Wellness — that kick the door open, sit across from you in the dim light of a late-night café, and ask the kind of questions you’ve been trying very hard not to look at directly. The kind of questions that feel like staring into a mirror for too long.What if love isn’t something we fall into once...
Have you ever sat in a beautifully lit café, sipping a hot cappuccino, watching plates fly out of the kitchen, servers glide between tables, and thought — How hard can it really be to run a restaurant?I have. More times than I can count.And every time, I’ve wildly underestimated the answer.Because from the customer’s side of the counter, everything looks effortless — the clink of cutlery, the arom...
I didn’t pick up The Art of Focus on a calm morning with incense burning and soothing flute music in the background — although that might have made me look more aligned with the title. Instead, I opened it on a messy weekday evening, surrounded by half-finished tasks, buzzing phone notifications, and a mind that felt like 37 browser tabs open at once. Ironically, I reached for a book about focus w...
There are some books you don’t read — they read you. They peel you open like an orange, sting the soft inner parts you thought you’d hidden well, and leave you sitting in silence long after the final page has closed. The Bell Jar is that kind of book. I picked it up on a tired Tuesday night, expecting a literary classic with polite gloom, maybe a sprinkle of poetic sadness. Instead, it dragged me ...
