What to Say and When to Shut Up is a useful and interactive book on persuasive communication for corporates, students, entrepreneurs, and anybody who is looking to make a lasting impression on their audience. Through a practical AEIOU Xtra E framework and examples from inspiring leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Malala Yousafzai, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, J.K. Rowling, among others, this book will help you become a persuasive communicator.
Rakesh Godhwani’s invaluable advice includes ways to:
Motivate audiences to action
Nail the interview for your dream job
Make impressive business presentations
Pitch to investors to raise money
Sell a product to a client
Negotiate a win-win
Network professionally and socially
Resolve conflicts
Since ancient times, the lure of spices has drawn seafarers and traders to Kerala. Saint Thomas also travelled this spice route, converting several Brahmin families who later intermarried with Syrians settled here. Thus was born the vibrant Syrian Christian community of Kerala. Today, Ayurveda massage resorts and backwater cruises make this scenic land a top tourist destination, and spices still draw both travellers and gourmands to this rich culinary heritage. It is this legacy that The Suriani Kitchen brings us, through 150 delectable recipes and the unforgettable stories that accompany them. Featured here are savoury delights such as Meen Vevichathu (fish curry cooked in a clay pot), Parippu (lentils with coconut milk) and Thiyal (shallots with tamarind and roasted coconut). Equally mouth-watering are a variety of rice preparations such as Puttu (steamed rice cake) and Paalappam (lace-rimmed pancakes), and tempting desserts like Karikku Pudding (tender coconut pudding). Authentic and easy to prepare, these recipes are accompanied by a guide to spices, herbs and equipment, as well as a glossary of food terms. Interwoven with these recipes, in the best tradition of a cookbook memoir, are tales of talking doves, toddy shops, travelling chefs and killer coconuts. Full of beautiful pictures, charming illustrations and lyrical memories of food and family, The Suriani Kitchen is a delicious, memorable read.
Businesses have to act in self interest but to what extent should they sacrifice ethical behaviour? The question has become increasingly relevant with the recent high profile corporate scandals such as Satyam and the 2G scam.
But can, and should, a business behave ethically at all? Is the corporate social responsibility of a company just to make profits as Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, once famously declared?
In this timely book, Professor Manikutty takes us through the minefield of business and ethics looking at the ways in which ethics enters work and the choices available to companies and to individuals. He argues that being ethical is not a simple question of doing the right thing vs the wrong thing; it is to find a balance between multiple right or wrong choices, arriving at not a solution but a compromise. Using a variety of examples and case studies from Indian businesses, Being Ethical is an indispensable book for any responsible manager.
A young man from Titilagarh, Orissa, buoyed by nothing but dreams, boards a boat to America in 1964. There, in the land of opportunity, Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda strikes gold in the burgeoning tech space to become the American millionaire Sam Pitroda. Armed with global patents and a vision supported by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, he vows to return home and fix India’s telephone troubles.
Sam Pitroda became synonymous with the bright-yellow PCO/STD booths that sprang up across the country, and was a dynamo in the Congress machinery in the 1980s. But his world came crashing down when he was dealt one blow after the other-a heart attack, false corruption charges and the assassination of his dear friend Rajiv Gandhi. To make matters worse, he realized that he had run out of money.
This is the astonishing and heart-warming story of how one man at the top hits rock bottom-only to rise again and make a bigger dent in the world.
The first of the three extraordinary plays written by Gurcharan Das in his twenties is Larins Sahib, a historical play set in the 1840s — a confused period after the death of Ranjit Singh when the British first arrived in the Punjab. The second play is Mira, which explores what it means for a human being to become a saint through the story of Mirabai, the sixteenth-century Rajput princess-poet. 9 Jakhoo Hill, the third play in this volume, is set in the autumn of 1962 in Simla. It examines a number of themes, including the changing social order with the rise of a new middle class (while the old class foolishly clings on to spent dreams), the hold of Indian mothers on their sons, and the eventual betrayal of sexual hurt. This trio of unusual plays will fascinate readers and theatre buffs alike.
In this highly accessible and comprehensive biography, Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh deftly mines the available sources to construct a vivid and complex account of Guru Nanak’s life and legacy, his personality and background, the pluralistic world he lived in, his teachings and philosophy, and even the manner in which he has been understood by believers and scholars over time. What emerges is a majestic and magisterial portrait of a great enlightener who not only founded one of the world’s major religions but whose singular message of unity and hope has endured centuries after he first walked the earth.
The First Sikh unites rigorous scholarship with a deep love for the subject, offering fascinating insights into Guru Nanak’s life and times even as it explores key facets of Sikhism. Moreover, it shows us how Guru Nanak continues to remain relevant in a twenty-first-century reality.
Wearer of many hats-philanthropist, entrepreneur, computer scientist, engineer, teacher-Sudha Murty has above all always been a storyteller extraordinaire. Winner of the R.K. Narayan Award for Literature, the Padma Shri, the Attimabbe Award from the government of Karnataka for excellence in Kannada literature, and the Raymond Crossword Lifetime Achievement Award, her repertoire includes adult non-fiction, adult fiction, children’s books, travelogues and technical books. Here, There and Everywhere is a celebration of her literary journey and is her 200th title across genres and languages. Bringing together her best-loved stories from various collections alongside some new ones and a thoughtful introduction, here is a book that is, in every sense, as multifaceted as its author.
Shehnaz was a beautiful, erudite woman from the royal family of Bhopal, who was almost cast to play Anarkali in K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam. Her daughter Sophia Naz tells her story as she heard it from her-about her childhood as part of the royal household in Bhopal, where she led a revolt among the women for their right to be educated before being married, her glamorous life in Mumbai that hid the reality of an abusive first marriage that left her emotionally and physically traumatized, her divorce during which she lost custody of both her children to her husband, her second marriage to an army doctor in Pakistan, and her life thereafter.
As a child, the author accompanied her mother every year to Mumbai, where she would try to find some trace of her children in vain. Though remarried and with a new family, Shehnaz pined for her older children all her life, the pain lending a near-permanent patina of grief to her life. She finally met her children after twenty-one years, in the US. Her son refused to recognize her, saying he had no memory of her. Her daughter did remember her, though their reunion was brief, with the father exerting his will and threatening to disown the children if they had anything to do with their mother. When Shehnaz passed away, it was with her older daughter’s name on her lips.
‘City of Gold’, ‘Urbs Prima in Indis’, ‘Maximum City’: no Indian metropolis has captivated the public imagination quite like Mumbai. The past decade has seen an explosion of historical writing on the city that was once Bombay. This book, featuring new essays by its finest historians, presents a rich sample of Bombay’s palimpsestic pasts. It considers the making of urban communities and spaces, the workings of power and the nationalist makeover of the colonial city. In addressing these themes, the contributors to this volume engage critically with the scholarship of a distinguished historian of this frenetic metropolis. For over five decades, Jim Masselos has brought to life with skill and empathy Bombay’s hidden histories. His books and essays have traversed an extraordinarily diverse range of subjects, from the doings of the city’s elites to the struggles of its most humble denizens. His pioneering research has opened up new perspectives and inspired those who have followed in his wake. Bombay Before Mumbai is a fitting tribute to Masselos’ enduring contribution to South Asian urban history.
Named among “The Best Books of 2020” by Bloomberg
Shortlisted for New India Foundation’s Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize 2020
Every Prime Minister of Independent India has guided, if not personally overseen, one prized portfolio: technology. If, in the early years, Nehru and his scientist-advisors retained an iron grip on it, subsequent governments created a bureaucracy that managed everything from the country’s crown jewels – its nuclear and space programmes – to solar stoves and mechanized bullock carts.
But a lesser-known political project began on 15 August 1947: the Indian state’s undertaking to influence what the citizens thought about technology and its place in society. Beneath its soaring rhetoric on the virtues or vices of technology, the state buried a grim reality: India’s inability to develop it at home. The political class sent contradictory signals to the general public. On the one hand, they were asked to develop a scientific temper, on the other, to be wary of becoming enslaved to technology; to be thrilled by the spectacle of a space launch while embracing jugaad, frugal innovation, and the art of ‘thinking small’. To mask its failure at building computers, the Indian state decried them in the seventies as expensive, job-guzzling machines. When it urged citizens to welcome them the next decade, the government was, unsurprisingly, met with fierce resistance. From Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi, India’s political leadership has tried its best to modernize the nation through technology, but on its own terms and with little success.
In this engaging and panoramic history spanning the arc of modern India from the post-War years to present day, Arun Mohan Sukumar gives us the long view with a reasoned, occasionally provocative standpoint, using a lens that’s wide enough for the frame it encompasses. With compelling arguments drawn from archival public records and open-source reportage, he unearths the reasons why India embraced or rejected new technologies, giving us a new way to understand and appreciate the individual moments that brought the country into the twenty-first century.
