The corporate world can be ruthless with its unwritten rules and hidden pitfalls. To succeed, it is crucial to learn the tricks of survival quickly. Make It or Break It is an indispensible guide to imbibing these skills early on in one’s career. Packed with important life lessons, it shows you how to get started on the right foot and emerge a winner.
Catagory: Reference
Way Beyond The Three Rs
The education of their children is of paramount importance to all Indian parents. They spend tens of thousands of crores each year to get their young educated. The country fetes its successful students : from class X to board toppers and those who ‘crack the IIT JEE’ to those who clear the civil- services examination.
Yet things on the ground are dire.
About 70 per cent of all students ( in villages, towns and cities) have to make do with inferior schooling. Metropolitan newspapers are full of the difficulty of getting a nursery seat in a good school. And while there is a seat crunch in the better colleges too, only 10 per cent of all students between the ages of 18 and 21 are enrolled in college. Crores of educated Indians discover too late that they do not have the skills to land a suitable job.
Y.S. Rajan examines the gamut of issues involved in India’s efforts to educate its young people and the work required to fix schools, vocational training centres, colleges and universities. He argues that Indian education needs reforms on a scale comparable to those which freed the economy of the shackles of the licence-permit raj almost twenty years ago.
Extraordinary
Extraordinary: 5 Steps to Achieve Success will help you realize your dream and be extraordinary! Are you leading an ordinary life? Many people go through life struggling with daily frustrations, making compromises all the time and feeling sorry for themselves. They never get to do what they really want. Soon, they begin to see themselves as failures. Is success just a matter of luck? Is the path of achievement open only to a few? Are most of us doomed to lead unfulfilled lives, without ever realizing our true potential? Certainly not, says Atul Magoon. Through inspiring real-life stories, this book shows you how success is simply a matter of putting in hard work, overcoming your fears and making full use of the opportunities before you.
Masala Lab
Ever wondered why your grandmother threw a teabag into the pressure cooker while boiling chickpeas, or why she measured using the knuckle of her index finger? Why does a counter-intuitive pinch of salt make your kheer more intensely flavourful? What is the Maillard reaction and what does it have to do with fenugreek? What does your high-school chemistry knowledge, or what you remember of it, have to do with perfectly browning your onions?
Masala Lab by Krish Ashok is a science nerd’s exploration of Indian cooking with the ultimate aim of making the reader a better cook and turning the kitchen into a joyful, creative playground for culinary experimentation. Just like memorizing an equation might have helped you pass an exam but not become a chemist, following a recipe without knowing its rationale can be a sub-optimal way of learning how to cook.
Exhaustively tested and researched, and with a curious and engaging approach to food, Krish Ashok puts together the one book the Indian kitchen definitely needs, proving along the way that your grandmother was right all along.
Alice In Corporateland
Alice teaches you to climb the corporate ladder
This is a lovely little book based on the Alice in Wonderland fairy tale with a twist. A nervous and confused young girl is trying to get a good night’s rest before her first day at work. Alice’s rabbit leads her on a magical journey where she meets Pinocchio, Rapunzel, Cinderella and the Seven Dwarfs who coach her by imparting important career lessons in their own inimitable style.
Tulika Tripathi has rapidly scaled the corporate ladder to become a leader at a global executive search firm. This, combined with a love for fairy tales, puts her in the unique position to distil and offer career wisdom to those who are beginning their journey.
Go Kiss the World
‘Go, kiss the world’ were Subroto Bagchi’s blind mother’s last words to him. These words became the guiding principle of his life. Bagchi grew up amidst what he calls the ‘material simplicity’ of rural and small-town Orissa, imbibing from his family a sense of contentment, constant wonder, connectedness to a larger whole and learning from unusual sources. From humble beginnings, he went on to achieve extraordinary professional success, eventually co-founding Mindtree, one of India’s most admired software services companies. Through personal anecdotes and simple words of wisdom, Bagchi brings to the young professionals lessons in working and living, energizing ordinary people to lead extraordinary lives. Go Kiss the World will be an inspiration to ‘young India’, and to those who come from small-town India, urging them to recognize and develop their inner strengths, thereby helping them realize their own potential.
Tharoorosaurus
Shashi Tharoor is the wizard of words. In Tharoorosaurus, he shares fifty-three examples from his vocabulary: unusual words from every letter of the alphabet. You don’t have to be a linguaphile to enjoy the fun facts and interesting anecdotes behind the words! Be ready to impress-and say goodbye to your hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia!
Supreme Whispers
In 1980, a brilliant young American scholar, George H. Gadbois, Jr., met five judges of the Supreme Court of India. The judges gave him astonishing details: about what they actually thought of their colleagues, about the inner workings and politics of the court, their interactions with the government and the judicial appointments process, among many other things. This was only the beginning. Over the course of that decade, Gadbois visited India on two more occasions and conducted over 116 interviews with more than sixty-six judges of the Supreme Court of India (nineteen of whom held the post of chief justice of India),
and others such as senior lawyers, politicians, relatives of deceased judges, and court staff. During each meeting, Gadbois diligently took down handwritten notes, which he later typed up on his typewriter, recording nearly every detail of what the judges had told him, sometimes to a fault.
Relying on these typewritten interviews, Abhinav Chandrachud sheds light on a decade of politics, decision-making and legal culture in the Supreme Court of India. This book yields a fascinating glimpse into the secluded world of the judges of the Supreme Court in the 1980s and earlier.
Seek
If I don’t crack this job, how will I repay my education loan?
If I join an IT company, will I be able to shift to banking after two years?
These questions seem very familiar, don’t they? Every student has similar concerns about which career path they should tread. Seek provides insights into the various fields and industries-Consulting, IT, Media, Oil and Gas, and others-by delving into stories of successful IIM-Bangalore alumni like Arun Balakrishnan, Malavika Harita, and Apurva Purohit who have made a dent in their respective professions and fields. Rakesh Godhwani offers smart, practical advice on following your passion and finding your dream job.
Not Just Grades
In the race to admit more and more children in privately run, English-medium schools and orient them to a world of cut-throat competition and grades-based performance, the quality of education is suffering. Children, teachers and, of course, educational institutions themselves are constantly struggling to survive in such an atmosphere.
However, while most schools play to the gallery, there are some that have attempted to swim against the current. They aim for the overall development of their students and try to establish a healthy learning environment.
Not Just Grades is about schools that have proved that it is possible to weave positive personal development together with academic excellence. Innovative and full of creative ideas, these schools have a made in difference in imparting education in the absence of extensive resources or capital.