In a world governed by caste and patriarchy, Shaili, an ambitious Dalit journalist, grapples with heartbreak, disquiet, and the pernicious constraints imposed upon her desires and agency. Apurva, in love with a Dalit man from a rival sub-caste, is forcibly married to a Marxist from her own community, unleashing turmoil that reshapes her life. Pragya and Samar, a Dalit couple united by a shared passion for political activism, find their marriage strained as the fires of the street no longer ignite intimacy at home. Ambar, a rising star in the corporate world, feels doubly alienated—from both her Dalit mother’s village and her own amorous desires in the city. Meanwhile, tormented and brutalized by upper-caste oppressors, Jamna seizes justice on her own terms—transforming revenge into fierce rebellion against decades of caste terror and humiliation. The unforgettable characters in these remarkable stories are ordinary Dalit women and men navigating passion, pleasure, power, and pain in the crucible of caste, gender, and sexuality in contemporary India. Radiantly and elegantly translated into English, and ethnographically assembled for the first time, Love in the Time of Caste is a groundbreaking anthology of Dalit-feminist creativity and repair that portrays love as a radical, anti-caste force, offering an unflinching portrait of modern India—as imagined and remade by Dalit-Bahujans—while boldly envisioning caste-annihilated futures.
Archives: Books
The Wealth Networks
We think we know India’s history. The names of kings. The rise and fall of dynasties. But what if this is only the surface of the story?
Have you ever wondered why places like Khajuraho and Ajanta were built far from today’s big cities? Why Chittor was attacked again and again? Where did the enormous wealth of temples like Somnath and Tirupati come from? Are we missing something?
The Wealth Networks looks at Indian history in a different way. It follows the movement of wealth across roads, rivers and seas, tracing the routes through which people, money and ideas travelled. Moving between cities, ports and pilgrimage towns, these routes formed patterns that continue to shape India today. This is not a conventional history. It offers a different way of seeing. Once you notice the patterns, the past and the present begin to look different.
The Girls Are Not Fine
Women are taught early that ‘fine’ is the only acceptable answer. Fine at work. Fine at home. Fine in
relationships. Fine in bodies that are always being watched and measured.
The Girls Are Not Fine is about what’s underneath all that fineness. The invisible labour, the emotional maths, the unassuming ways women shrink themselves to fit rooms that were never built for them.
This isn’t a self-help book. It’s a vocabulary. A transfer of language for the things women carry but rarely get to name: the performance of competence, the economics of being ‘low maintenance’, the exhaustion of being the family’s emotional infrastructure while also trying to build a career, a life, a self.
Part confession, part cultural critique, part practical toolkit, it moves through work, money, family, body, friendship and love, not to fix anything, but to finally call it what it is.
And that’s important because:
We’re here, and we’re not carrying it alone.
That’s not nothing. That might be everything.
India’s Most Dangerous Serial Killer
Shankariya Kanpatimar murdered nearly seventy people across Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana in eighteen months, and that makes him India’s first recorded serial killer. He was hanged in the Jaipur Central Jail on 15 May 1979. He committed crimes in the most ‘brutal and dastardly’ way— all for theft. He would enter his victim’s house naked, kill with whatever object lay at hand, eat, smoke bidis, take a bath and leave only with the cash he found. In one of the murders, he managed to find only two rupees in the house. He came to be known as ‘Kanpatimar’ for the striking similarity of his murders with all his victims being hit on their temples, or kanpati, in Hindi.
Drawn from police files, FIRs, contemporary reportage and interviews, India’s Most Dangerous Serial Killer reconstructs both the killings and the world that enabled them. Told in the most truthful and unsparing voice of Rakesh Goswami, Shankariya’s story of how a petty thief turned into a dangerous serial killer, reveals a deeper moral rot.
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB 3 BOOKS BOXSET: Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan and Antifragile – Risk, Uncertainty, Decision-Making and Economics
‘This essential 3-book box set by renowned thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb brings together three of the most influential works ever written on uncertainty, risk, and decision-making. Challenging conventional wisdom, these books question our assumptions about prediction, control, and success in a complex, unpredictable world.
Included Titles
• Fooled by Randomness
A sharp and often provocative examination of how chance, luck, and probability distort human judgment and perceptions of success.
• The Black Swan
A groundbreaking study of rare, high-impact events that reshape history, markets, and societies—often in ways we fail to anticipate.
• Antifragile A powerful argument for why certain systems, ideas, and individuals benefit from volatility, uncertainty, and disorder rather than being harmed by them.
Why Collect This Box Set
• Presents Taleb’s core intellectual framework across three connected works
• Foundational reading on probability, risk, and complex systems
• Widely influential in economics, finance, investing, policy, and strategy
• Encourages clearer thinking and better decision-making under uncertainty
• Designed for serious readers seeking long-term insight and reference
This Nassim Nicholas Taleb box set offers a rigorous lens through which to understand—and navigate—the unpredictable forces shaping the modern world.
Chasing Like Dhoni
In recent decades, Indian cricket has become a powerful vehicle of aspiration, its promise embodied in the rise of Mahendra Singh Dhoni, which has inspired millions. In a society shaped by entrenched inequities, the sport has come to represent a level playing field, where talent seems capable of transcending inherited disadvantage.
That notwithstanding, the numbers tell a harsher story. In nearly a century, fewer than 600 men and women have represented India, while millions have played—and continue to play—the game with equal conviction.
When promised fame eludes cricketers in the country’s most competitive vocation, what sustains their pursuit, and how do they make sense of lives forged through struggle and sacrifice? This is the story of the great Indian cricketing dream.
Zubeen Garg
Zubeen Garg: The Voice That Bridged Worlds traces the extraordinary journey of a boy born in the hills of Tura who rose to become one of the most influential cultural figures of Northeast India.
Blending biography, cultural history, and personal reflection, this book explores Zubeen’s evolution from a mischievous child fascinated by music to the legendary artist whose songs crossed languages, borders, and generations. From his classical training and early struggles to his revolutionary impact on Assamese music and cinema, the narrative reveals how he revitalized traditional forms while embracing modern sounds.
Yet this is more than the story of fame. It is a portrait of a fearless artist who chose his homeland over glamour, who sang in dozens of languages yet remained deeply rooted in Assam, and whose voice united millions.
The life of Zubeen Garg was never going to be just the story of a singer; it is the story of a voice that carried the soul of an entire people. This biography encapsulates the legacy of a man whose music continues to reverberate long after his passing. It is passionate, personal, and profound.
The Skincare Guide That Will Change Your Life
In The Skincare Guide That Will Save Your Life, Dr Deepali Bhardwaj uses her extensive dermatological knowledge and expertise to answer the most pressing questions in skincare today.
In addition to analysing viral trends such as Korean beauty routines and the benefits of probiotics, Dr Bhardwaj breaks down the importance of sunscreen, the ideal age to start anti-ageing treatments and solutions for common issues like dark circles and inflammation. She explores the impact of diet, lifestyle and weight loss on your skin, offering practical tips and home remedies to help you put your best face forward.
Whether you want to enhance your skincare routine or understand the science behind healthy skin, The Skincare Guide That Will Save Your Life is your ultimate resource.
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Samuel P. Huntington, one of the world’s most influential thinkers, argues in this seminal book that conflicts between different cultural ‘civilizations’ are the greatest threat to world peace. He suggests that the world is comprised of not two opposite but eight diverse groups, based on religion, and how international cooperation between them is the best safeguard against war. Global events in the twenty-first century have proved his foresight and sagacity. Huntington’s provocative thesis that a struggle for supremacy among dominant cultures—like the Japanese, Chinese, Hindu and Islamic—is inevitable is turning into reality. In the end, people’s decision to coexist or to make war in a complex, multipolar, multi-civilizational world will determine the course of humanity.
Ashes to Light
What might it mean to live in a gender-attuned world? Not a perfectly gender-just one, but a world that is receptive—capable of noticing, listening and responding to the quiet ways in which gender shapes lives, choices, institutions and intimacies. This question animates Ashes to Light, an anthology that engages resistance to gender-based prejudice not through proclamation, but through attention to the subtle, everyday forms of violence that often go unnamed.
At a time when conversations on gender are increasingly polarized, Ashes to Light resists slogans and certainties. Instead, it dwells in lived experience—where gender is not always overtly oppressive, but persistently present, shaping exclusions through normalization, condescension, erasure and quiet endurance.
Bringing together reflective personal essays from culture, politics, bureaucracy, law, academia, sports, art, and media, the anthology features film-maker Deepa Mehta on gender and creative choice; social activist Laxmi on socially sanctioned ideals of beauty; actor Rahul Bose on the rise of the Indian women’s rugby team; food scholar Pushpesh Pant on women’s struggles within the Indian kitchen; producer and screenwriter Kiran Rao on marriage and personal history; and former Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud on the feminist origins of law within the Indian family, among others.
Ashes to Light does not shout; it nudges. As editor Priyadarshini Bhattacharya reflects, the anthology is anchored in hope—not as optimism, but as practice: a daily, conscious commitment to attentiveness, movement and imagining otherwise.