Modern business has changed forever, becoming more customer-centric, and we need clear road-maps to navigate this world. Customer experience-or CX-is every interaction a customer has with your business. It’s neither the product nor the service-it’s a combination of both.
Murali Balaraman has over twenty-five years of experience in multiple roles, as a banker, as part of the IT industry
and as a management consultant and adviser, interacting with global leadership across five continents. Customer to
Human weaves together the learnings he has drawn from the industry, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to tiny neighbourhood businesses. In this anecdotal account of successes and failures in CX, it becomes clear that
customers are the most important part of any business structure.
With over 150 individual, easy-to-read and diverse case studies, it presents a revolutionary approach to CX and
the individual customer journey. The book provides a practitioner’s point of view, with actionable suggestions
and pragmatic concepts that will come in handy no matter what part of the business you work in.
What started as a love affair for Indian royalty is now the mainstay of Indian roads. Since Independence, the automobile has played an important role in India’s industrial growth, as well as been the hero in many Bollywood movies. It has changed our cities and the way our houses and apartment blocks are configured, as well as transformed the countryside, connecting the remotest corners of our vast nation and providing jobs to millions. It has also empowered women in many parts of the nation, enabling them to attend schools and universities and commute to work and the marketplace. For thousands of Indians, the automobile has been, and remains, an object of pleasure, pride, status, excitement, emotion and passion.
In The Automobile, Gautam Sen has not only traced the history of the automobile in India and the way it has shaped society for over a century but has also delved into the fascination Indians have for all matters automotive, such as motor racing, bikes, road movies and historical vehicle shows.
A riveting story told in the most fascinating anecdotal tone, this book is filled with well-researched facts and beautiful pictures for lovers of automobiles.
Offering a unique expression of thought reflecting feeling more than meaning, Grains of Stardust is a synesthetic stream of consciousness that does not distinguish between journey and destination, but meanders unchecked upon the river of human emotion.
‘Read my poetry out loud
Breathe it in
and taste the letters pour out.
A delicious sound.
Do you hear the colours take form?
Feel the pages move you
as you float in space
make some space
Open your mind
and get inside
and see all that
shimmering
marmalade liquid.
Grains of stardust‘
What if you ran away from your life today?
Twenty years later, three people are looking for you.
One is dying to meet you again.
The other wishes you had never met them.
The third wishes they could have met you at least once.
You are one person. Aren’t you? But you are not the same person to each of them.
Find the answers about your own life in this story about searching for love and discovering yourself. Join a broken but rising YouTube star Alara, a struggling but hopeful stand-up comedian Aarav, and a zany but zen beach shack owner Ricky. Together, take the journey to seek the truth behind the famous singer Elisha’s disappearance somewhere by the deep sea in Goa.
Will you be able to find Elisha? Or will you end up finding yourself?
As a person with mood disorders that sprung up in her late teens, Urvashi Bahuguna had to navigate being the first person in her Indian family to admit to and seek help for a mental illness. The changes and challenges which came with this admission and the actions that followed not only impacted who she became as a person but also everything around her-from her interpersonal relationships, both familial and romantic, to the way she walked among her friends and peers and the manner in which she connected with art, literature, popular culture, they all became new and unknown.
Through these deeply honest essays that move between personal narratives, anecdotes from conversations and research-driven storytelling, Bahuguna traverses the opportunities and roadblocks that come her way with the tools she has available to her. From a writer of astonishing talents, No Straight Thing Was Ever Made bravely discusses the many facets of living with mental illness.
‘ . . . a valuable contribution both to the world of scholarship and to the larger public discourse’ – JAIRAM RAMESH
Indus Basin Uninterrupted, with an easy narration and rich archival material, brings alive a meandering journey of peace, conflict and commerce on the Indus basin. The Indus system of rivers, as a powerful symbol of the passage of time, represents not only the interdependence and interpenetration of land and water, but equally the unfolding of political identities, social churning and economic returns. From Alexander’s campaign to Muhammad-bin-Qásim crossing the Indus and laying the foundation of Muslim rule in India; from the foreign invaders and their ‘loot and scoot’ to the Mughal rulers’ perspective on hydrology and water use; from the British ‘great game’ on the Indus basin to the bitter and bloody Partition; and finally, as a historical pause, the signing of the Indus Waters Treaty-this book is a spectrum of spectacular events, turning points, and of personalities and characters and their actions that were full of marvel.
On 5 August 2019, Suhas Munshi was returning to Srinagar from a visit to legendary poet Habba Khatoon’s relic in Gurez, when an unprecedented curfew was imposed upon Jammu and Kashmir, and Article 370 was abrogated. Through his travels and conversations with people across the Valley, Munshi tries to give a sense of what that moment has meant to the common Kashmiri.
This insightful travelogue breaks away from the clichéd view of Kashmir, one that sees it either as an earthly paradise or a living hell. It takes you to unexpected places, into the homes of poets, playwrights and street performers; to a heartwarming Christmas service with the minuscule Christian community in Baramulla; and inside the barricaded city of Srinagar’s football stadium, which is a lively refuge for the elderly and their memories of a glorious past. Over three weeks, for fear of being abandoned in a harsh terrain, Munshi struggles to keep up with a group of Bakarwal nomadic shepherds as they make their way from Srinagar to Jammu over the mighty Pir Panjal mountains. And he finds a lone Pandit family living in a decrepit ghost colony in Shopian, the hub of militancy in Kashmir.
This World below Zero Fahrenheit presents a portrait of a people who’ve been overshadowed by the place they live in, even as it ruminates on the idea of home and exile.
‘The Shudras echoes Dr Ambedkar’s question in Who Were the Shudras? that he asked in 1946. More than 70 years later, Kancha Ilaiah and his team of authors revisit this issue to give Shudras a voice again’ -CHRISTOPHE JAFFRELOT
The Shudras: Vision for a New Path weaves together multiple dimensions of the predicament of India’s productive castes–in the spiritual, social, political, economic, philosophical and historical spheres. It reformulates their current position as well as future pathways. It strives to provoke Shudras-including regional political party leaders-all over India to realize their unique historical role in fighting unequal caste structures. And it gives a call to resist Hindutva, in which they have no liberated, equal space with the Dwija castes. At a juncture when the Shudra castes are regionalized and the Dwijas have become ‘national’, the fifth volume of the Rethinking India series, in collaboration with the Samruddha Bharat Foundation, seeks to bring home the real picture of their marginalized status in all key structures of the nation. It posits that the emancipation and progress of the Shudras are vital to sustain Ambedkar’s constitutional democracy and move towards socio-spiritual equality.
HEALTHY AND INFORMED COOKING FOR THE INDIAN KITCHEN
Preparing a meal for someone is an act of love, says Charmaine D’Souza, a nutritionist and a writer of many kitchen exploits. In her latest book, The Good Health Always Cookbook, D’Souza, along with her two daughters, Charlyene and Savlyene, offers the reader a peep into her childhood memories and her comfort food. With more than a
hundred recipes using easily available ingredients like jau, ragi and bajra, and local Indian fruits and vegetables, D’Souza gives you ample ideas for dishes that will not only tantalize your taste buds but also provide immense nutritional value. From healthy oatmeal bars to finger millet bread, from amaranth crepes to buckwheat molten cake, from hara channa chaat to spinach brownies, the book infuses a variety of ingredients to reinvent traditional recipes. Anecdotal, easy to follow and packed with useful tips, The Good Health Always Cookbook takes you on a delightful culinary journey.
By turns essay, memoir and cultural study, Finding the Raga is Amit Chaudhuri’s singular account of his discovery of, and enduring passion for, North Indian music: an ancient, evolving tradition whose principles and practices will alter the reader’s notion of what music might – and can – be. Tracing the music’s development, Finding the Raga dwells on its most distinctive and mysterious characteristics: its extraordinary approach to time, language and silence; its embrace of confoundment, and its ethos of evocation over representation. The result is a strange gift of a book, for musicians and music lovers, and for any creative mind in search of diverse and transforming inspiration.
