Sunil Mohan’s complex and moving memoir is more than just a story of transition. It’s a story that describes a deeply felt yearning, a certainty of knowledge about who you wish to be, and constant, fundamental and self-reflective questioning about what it means to be born into one body and inhabit an identity that is defined by a different body and a different set of ascribed and acceptable behaviour. As he makes the transition from ‘female’ to ‘male’, Sunil asks why he cannot choose to define his gender in his own way, why being ‘man’ should mean adopting a given, socially acceptable model of masculinity. ‘I was always uncomfortable,’ he says, ‘with “masculinity” even when I deeply felt I was a “man”….I was hesitant to identify with something I had critiqued so fundamentally.’ Honest, open, self-questioning and filled with courage and compassion, Sunil Mohan chooses to move away from the traditional and often linear trajectory of a life narrative. Instead, he turns the lens on the queer, trans, anti-caste, feminist and people’s movements of which he has long been a part. In doing so, he resolutely refuses to identify as a victim and thinks through and reflects on the politics of resistance, marking the learning that comes from friendships forged in struggle and commonality of identity, reflecting on the meanings of silence and offering thoughts on strategies for healing and reconciliation.
Archives: Books
The Fire of Defiance
Even as the movement for Indian independence gathered momentum at the national level in the 1930s and ‘40s, a different kind of mobilization and struggle was unfolding in the Telangana region. Led by the Communist Party, the Telangana armed struggle swept through the Nizam’s dominions, targeting the exploitative practices of the doras, or landlords. Hundreds of men and women, from a wide spectrum of social locations, participated in the movement, and pictures of women wielding rifles have today become iconic.
Among the many women in the movement was Mallu Swarajyam, who joined the armed squads of the movement and also became a cultural activist. Her extraordinary story, as told to three women, is captured here. In her words: “I also worked in the Kothagudem coal mines. Our informants were tribal women who went into the forest to gather mahuva flowers. On one occasion, we received information that the police were travelling in a bus along the route. I stormed onto the road, stopped the bus and punctured its tyres with my pistol.”
Gurudev: On the Plateau of the Peak
It was an era when the wisdom of yoga had been buried under years of ritual practices, when religion outweighed human values, when games were becoming wars and wars were being played like games. It was at such a time that, in a quaint village in south India, a young boy was found in deep meditation. He would say, ‘I have family everywhere. People are waiting for me.’
Nobody believed him then.
Time revealed the destiny of the millions who came to him to discover themselves. Over the years, his sublime presence and pragmatic teachings, would foster the values of joy, peace and love across the world. His transformative art of breathing, the Sudarshan Kriya, became a household practice, an alternative way of life that inspired people to seek self-realization. He became the guru who made the ethereal tangible, who brought about a profound shift in every sphere of human endeavour-from art to architecture, health care to rehabilitation, inner peace to outer dynamism.
From a carefree child to a teenager often found in the company of saints, from a young meditation teacher to a revered spiritual Master, this book is an intimate and affectionate account of the life of Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar by his sister Bhanumathi Narasimhan, who witnessed his mystical life unfold up-close.
Gurudev: On the Plateau of the Peak is an attempt to fit the ocean in a teacup, offering readers a sip of infinity.
Beneath Magnolia Skies: Writings from Sikkim and Darjeeling Hills
A glimpse into the lives of women from Sikkim and Darjeeling Hills, this anthology brings together homemakers, teachers, students, professionals, cultural practitioners, researchers and artists, each offering a unique lens into everyday life in the region. Geographically connected, yet with distinct political and economic trajectories, women have very different lived experiences in both Sikkim and Darjeeling. But, like the magnolia—a shared symbol rooted in memory, culture and landscape—their lives are shaped by common cultural norms, expectations and institutions that transcend borders.
Beneath Magnolia Skies traces journeys through time, space and place, capturing moments of solace, strength, reconciliation and redemption. More than just personal reflection, this anthology is also an act of resistance, a way of claiming how the writers wish to be seen, heard and understood in their own words.
Love in the Time of Caste: A Dalit-feminist anthology of love stories
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.
The Wealth Networks
The Wealth Network: Trade, Terrain, and the Making of India, explores the intricate web of geography, trade, and culture that wove the fabric of India’s story. For too long, history has focused on kings and politicians. The book shifts our lens to India’s trading communities—those who braved mountains, rivers, and oceans to create the economic foundation of India. It traces patterns through networks and nodes—routes and cities where people, goods, money, and ideas flowed. Within these networks are 108 stories, each one helping you to look a little deeper into India’s past. They are about trade and travel, faith and power, migration and ambition—but most importantly, they are about how wealth moved, and how that movement shaped Indian history.
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.
Indians in the Ocean
Long before European ships dominated the Indian Ocean, traders and travellers from the Indian subcontinent were already navigating its vast waters. In search of profit, adventure, and knowledge, their journeys shaped how Indians evolved as a society, what they consumed in their material lives, and how and why they produced and circulated oceanic knowledge.
Indians in the Ocean explores the ocean’s role in shaping the economic and cultural histories of the subcontinent between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Drawing on a rich array of historical sources in many languages, it reconstructs the experiences of people from the region who travelled, traded, and participated in the global economy at a time when the oceans formed the principal highways linking countries and communities across continents.