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Hey Diddle Diddle (Hook Books)

A horse may be able to jump over the moon. Can a cow do it? Hey diddle diddle.

About the Hook Book Series

In a world where children’s books often feel cut from the same cloth, Hook Books stand out as a vibrant blend of imagination, humour, and heart. Crafted as a bridge between picture books and early chapter books, this series delivers stories that spark joy and wonder, while remaining rooted in age-appropriate learning.

Hook Books keep the fun going with:

  • Short, digestible bits of text (perfect for budding readers)
  • Bright colour illustrations that pull kids into the story
  • Themes that speak to the everyday lives of children—plus a sprinkle of whimsy!

From fantasy tales to those that touch on more advanced ideas, Hook Books ensure that young readers are always in for a treat, no matter their reading level. Even better, these books take children on journeys through different parts of India, giving them a taste of the rich diversity of our world through local flavours, landscapes, and cultures. Whether the story takes place in bustling cities or quiet villages, Hook Books make every setting feel like home.

The Piano

‘What I didn’t know was that just as I was searching for my friend, my friend was also searching for me. And that search had started a long time ago.’

This is the story of a friendship between a young girl and her piano.

The piano was made many decades before the girl was born. And it travelled from Leipzig, Germany, through war-torn France and England-to come to Calcutta during the independence struggle. Finally the girl and the piano found one another, until circumstances separated them . . .

This is a story of love and loss, of unexpected bonds and loneliness, and above all, it is a celebration of the power of music.

That Night

What happens when an innocent prank goes horribly wrong?

Natasha, Riya, Anjali and Katherine were best friends in college – each different from the other yet inseparable – until that night.

It was the night that began with a bottle of whisky and a game of Ouija but ended with the death of Sania, their unlikeable hostel mate. The friends vowed never to discuss that fateful night, a pact that had kept their friendship and guilt dormant for the last twenty years.

But now, someone has begun to mess with them, threatening to reveal the truth that only Sania knew. Is it a hacker playing on their guilt or has Sania’s ghost really returned to avenge her death?

As the faceless enemy closes in on them, the friends come together once again to recount what really happened that night. But when the story is retold by each of them, the pieces don’t fit. Because none of them is telling the whole truth . . .

That Night is a dark, twisted tale of friendship and betrayal that draws you in and confounds you at every turn.

Eeks! I Saw a Cockroach!

Whether cockroaches fill you with dread or wide-eyed wonder, there’s no denying the fact that they are some of the most amazing creatures of the insect universe. So, dash right into their wonderful world, find out everything about them and be prepared to be super surprised!

About the series
It’s time to enter the fascinating kingdom of insects with WWF India’s EEKS series! From bees to flies, from ants to wasps and from mosquitoes to cockroaches, the books in this unique series will introduce you to a vast variety of insects we share our planet with and help you discover some jaw-dropping facts about them. So, what are you waiting for? Bug out, have fun and be prepared to be amazed!

Winning in the Digital Age

The New Edition of Winning in the Digital Age builds on the original book with new chapters on India’s opportunity to emerge as a Digital Superpower, how most of the digital initiatives don’t deliver targeted results and enhancements in the chapter Future of Work with AI.

Winning in the Digital Age is the practical handbook for understanding and winning in the post-COVID digital age and becoming a 21st century leader. For every enterprise and its leaders, the digital age is a roller-coaster ride with more than its fair share of thrills and spills. It presents them with great opportunities to leapfrog and grow. However, success is not easy in the digital age. It requires a complete overhaul of the business model and organizational design, and the mind-sets of professionals. Such a large and complex change is not easy to manage, and enterprises often lose their way in their digital transformation attempts.

Nitin brings in this book his 25+ years of experience in leadership roles in world-class firms like McKinsey and Fidelity and Digital natives like Flipkart and Incedo. He presents compelling insights and practical examples and answers key questions on how enterprises can win in the digital age:

  • Why do firms fail at digital transformation?
  • How are the rules of business changing in the digital age?
  • What disruptive opportunities does digital present in various industries?
  • How to best leverage the potential of digital technologies like AI and the Cloud?
  • How do organizational capabilities and culture need to change?
  • What new skills do leaders and young professionals need to build?

The book is a practitioner’s guide for people across all age groups—students, young professionals, experienced professionals, and senior executives—on how they can realize the amazing opportunities the digital age offers them and achieve their true potential at work and in personal life.

COVID-19

In early 2020, our lives were upended by a new virus that caused the most severe pandemic in over a century. In the span of a few weeks, even visiting a grocery store became a task in risk assessment. Cities and countries across the world closed their borders for their own citizens, as well as foreigners. Newspapers carried alarming accounts of rapidly rising numbers of COVID-positive cases, patients dying and migrant labourers desperately trying to reach home. One was struck every single day with the realization that the pandemic was not just a biological phenomenon, but also a social one.

Where did this virus, first called the novel coronavirus and later SARS coronavirus-2, come from? Did we see it coming? If so, why weren’t we better prepared for it? How lethal is it really? How can we protect ourselves from it? How will the pandemic end? What will life be like once it is over?

In this meticulously researched book, Anirban Mahapatra demystifies the virus and offers us a historical perspective. He charts the scientific progress made in understanding how the virus infects us and how we fight back, and also looks at the social tensions it has uncovered. In doing so, he offers us a clarity that enables us not only to understand the virus but also live with it.

Her Right to Equality

“I echo [the authors’] siren call for urgent disruptive change that will shatter patriarchal norms”Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS
“…a valuable guide to achieving safety for women and gender equality at home and in social, political and economic life.”-Nitin Desai, former Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations
“A must-read for anyone who believes that women in India deserve better…”-Alankrita Shrivastava, film director, Lipstick Under My Burkha
“Harvesting existent knowledge as a way of shaping the future is a valuable idea… [This book] fulfills exactly this need…”-Devaki Jain, feminist economist and author of The Brass Notebook

The sixth volume in the Rethinking India series, in collaboration with the Samruddha Bharat Foundation, looks at the reality of gender equality in the country against the promises of justice and equality made in the Constitution of India. What it finds is that even today, India remains an unequal country and that women control, at best, about 10-15 per cent of economic and political resources. While there has been progress in some areas, in many other areas there has been very little and uneven change.
One of the main reasons for this slow progress is that social norms that assign particular roles and identities to men and women are ‘sticky’ and hard to change. In India, a highly patriarchal society, these norms give very little power to women and, consequently, they have little control or influence over decisions taken within their households, in markets or in political spaces.
Challenging the status quo can cause a backlash, leading to high levels of violence against women in the domestic sphere, the workplace and in public places. If we are to see a more safe, just and equal society by 2047, a hundred years after Independence, it cannot be business as usual. Her Right to Equality argues that what we require is disruptive change through individual and collective leadership and action.
Essays by Flavia Agnes, Rajini R. Menon, Amita Pitra, Sumitra Mishra, Shubhika Sachdeva, Poonam Muttreja, Sanghamitra Singh, Swarna Rajagopalan, Ashwini Deshpande, Archana Garodia Gupta, Sushmita Dev, Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, Tara Krishnaswamy, Bina Agarwal.

Life in the Uniform

Amit Lodha is a decorated IPS officer holding the rank of inspector general. But before he rose the ranks in the service, he was an IIT graduate who was struggling to find his true purpose. In this book, Lodha tells us how he turned his life around and studied for the UPSC exams. He also tells us how he trained to be an officer and had the most memorable beginning to his career, in Bihar.
Punctuated with his signature humour and adventure-packed stories on everything from solving a kidnapping to handling a mob, Life in the Uniform gives us a chance to experience an IPS officer’s life through his own eyes.

What’s a Lemon Squeezer Doing in My Vagina?

When you are denied something, its value is grossly overestimated in your mind.
I rejected all the gifts in our life and dwelled on its single deficiency.
Pregnancy was an exclusive club and I wanted to break in.

When Rohini married Ranjith and moved to the ‘big city’, they had already planned the next five years of their life: job, home, and then child. After three years of marriage and amidst increasing pressure from family, they decided to seek medical help to conceive. But they weren’t prepared for what came next-not only in terms of the invasive, gruelling and deeply uncomfortable nature of infertility treatment but also the financial and emotional strain it would put on their marriage, and the gnawing shame and feeling of inadequacy that she would experience as a woman unable to bear a child.
What’s a Lemon Squeezer Doing in My Vagina? is a witty, moving and intensely personal retelling of Rohini’s five-year-long battle with infertility, capturing the indignities of medical procedures, the sting of prying questions from friends and strangers, the disproportionate burden of treatment on the woman, the everyday anxieties about wayward hormones, follicles and embryos and the overarching anxiety about the outcome of the treatment. It offers a no-holds-barred view of her circuitous and highly bumpy road to motherhood.

Longform 2022

An eclectic anthology of comics.

From Noah Van Sciver, Tanitoc to Jerry Antony, Sudhanya Dasgupta and Monisha Naskar, Gayatri Menon, Debjyoti Saha, Alendev Vishnu, Anirban Ghosh, Solo and Ojo, Ekta Bharti and Pavan Rujurkar, among others, Longform 2022 presents stories that subvert conventional narratives. Through stories about ordinary people, autobiographies, travel tales and more, this volume establishes comics as a permanent feature on a reader’s shelf. The anthology takes us through around-the-corner dystopias, imaginary cities and kaleidoscopic dreamscapes.

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