Good morning, it’s 6 a.m. and I am wide awake because the man of the house has decided that he needs to perform a series of complex manoeuvres that involve him balancing on his left elbow. When I fell asleep last night, there was a baby lying next to me. Her smelly diaper is still wedged on my head but aside from this rather damp clue, I can’t seem to find her anywhere. I could ask my mother-in-law if she has seen the baby, but she may just tell me that I need to fast on alternate Mondays, and God will deliver the baby back to me . . .
Full of wit and delicious observations, Mrs Funnybones captures the life of the modern Indian woman-a woman who organizes dinner each evening, even as she goes to work all day, who runs her own life but has to listen to her Mummyji, who worries about her weight and the state of the country. Based on Twinkle Khanna’s super-hit column, Mrs Funnybones marks the debut of one of our funniest, most original voices.
What makes a company truly outstanding?
What is the secret sauce of delivering successful results year-on-year?
What is common to Asian Paints, HDFC Bank, Marico, Axis Bank and Berger Paints?
They are Unusual Companies, built by Unusual Billionaires. The Unusual Billionaires tells the story of seven, truly outstanding companies which delivered 10 per cent revenue growth over the last ten years and 15 per cent return on capital employed. In simple words, these companies defeated 5000 other public listed companies to deliver high growth while maintaining profitability year-on-year for the last decade.
How did these companies do it? Why couldn’t this be reciprocated by other companies? What are they doing differently?
Saurabh Mukherjea, bestselling author of Gurus of Chaos, delivers an outstanding book with lessons to learn from these seven businesses. Mukherjea tells you why focusing on the core business could save a company’s life or how giving control to top management could be a boon. Packed with these learnings are riveting corporate stories of how Hindustan Unilever made aggressive bids to buy Mariwala’s business, but had to sell it to the same company in a few years, or how Page Industries found an exciting way to stop unionization at their manufacturing units. It also includes the turnaround of Axis Bank and the boardroom coup that led to its chairman’s downfall, and how Vijay Mallya lost control of Asian Paints to the Dhingra Brothers.
These and many more makes this book a mandatory read for all corporate leaders to simulate and implement.
Most people invest in the usual assets: real estate, gold, mutual funds, fixed deposits and stock markets. It’s always the same four or five instruments. All they end up making is a measly 8 to 12 per cent per annum. Those who are exceptionally unfortunate get stuck in the middle of a crash and end up losing a lot of money.
What if there was another way? What if you could make not 10 not 15 but 20 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) on your investments? What if there was a way to grow your money four to five times whilst taking half the risk compared to the overall market?
Bestselling author of Gurus of Chaos and The Unusual Billionaires, Saurabh Mukherjea puts his money where his mouth is. Saurabh follows the Coffee Can approach to high-quality, low-risk investing. His firm, Ambit Capital, is one the largest wealth managers in India which invests with this approach and delivers stupendous returns. In Coffee Can Investing, Saurabh will show you how to go about low-risk investments that generate great returns.
The inside track to India’s most powerful tycoons The eight business maharajas profiled here are among Asia’s most powerful industrial tycoons, Their combined turnover runs into billions of rupees, and between them they employ some 650,000 people, while indirectly affecting the lives of millions more. Sip a cup of tea, drive to work, listen to music, build a house and the chances are that in these and a myriad other ways you are using products that they manufacture or market. By any yardstick, the achievements of these men would rank among the great business stories of our time. How did these men build their enormous empires? What are their management secrets? How did they thrive and prosper even as others failed? What is their vision for the future? Top business writer and industry insider Gita Piramal draws on exhaustive interviews and in-depth research to discover the answers to these and related questions in her profiles of the men who will lead the country’s push to become an industrial superpower in the 21st century.
Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata was born in 1839, and in his lifetime India remained firmly under British rule. Yet the projects he envisioned laid the foundation for the nation’s develoent once it became independent. More extraordinary still, these institutions continue to set the pace for others in their respective areas. For, among his many achievements are the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, which has groomed some of the country’s best scientists, the Tata Steel plant in Jamshedpur, which marked the country’s transition from trading to manufacturing, his pioneering hydro-electric project, and the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, one of the finest in the world. In these as in other projects he undertook, Jamsetji revealed the unerring instinct of a man who knew what it would take to restore the pride of a subjugated nation and help it prepare for a place among the leading nations of the world once it came into its own. The scale of the projects required abilities of a high order. In some cases it was sheer perseverance that paid off”as with finding a suitable site for the steel project. In others, such as the Indian Institute of Science, it was his exceptional persuasive skills and patience that finally got him the approval of a reluctant viceroy, Lord Curzon. In For the Love of India, R.M. Lala has drawn upon fresh material from the India Office Library in London and other archives, as also Jamsetji’s letters, to portray the man and his age. It is an absorbing account that makes clear how remarkable Jamsetji’s achievement truly was, and why, even now, one hundred years after his death, he seems like a man well ahead of the times.
How marriages work and why they fail… Marriage is an adventure, says Shobhaa Dé, celebrity writer, devoted wife and mother of six. It’s about trust, companionship, affection and sharing. It’s also about learning to cope with your partner’s moods and eccentricities. Not to mention the delicate balancing act between parents, children, friends and a career, and the sometimes overpowering need to get away from it all. In this delightful book on society’s most debated institution, Shobhaa Dé writes about how and why marriages work, or don’t. With her usual disregard for rules, she reinvents tradition and challenges old stereotypes, addressing all the issues that are central to most Indian marriages: the saas-bahu conundrum (how to escape the role-trap and enjoy each other), the need for honesty (aren’t some secrets better left secret?), the importance of romance (no, expressions of love are not unmanly!), and not any less important, how to recognize the warning signs in a hopeless relationship and run before it’s too late. Fun, savvy and, above all, pragmatic, this is the ultimate relationship book for all those who want to make the adventure of marriage last a lifetime.
1500 top-drawer questions from Asia’s best-known quizmaster
Derek O’Brien is identified with top-class quizzing in India, for schoolchildren, professionals and quiz aficionados alike. From his vast range of questions that range from the informative and educational to curious facts and trivia, he has culled 1500 of his favorites, divided into seventy-five sets, for this very special book.
The questions range from subjects as diverse as the Boston Tea Party, the Chinese New Year, Cleopatra and C.V. Raman to the Grammy Awards, Gujarat, Vasco da Gama and the Wright brothers. There are whole sets of questions also on famous personalities like Arundhati Roy, Asha Bhonsle, Charles Lindbergh, George Harrison, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther King Jr., Pablo Picasso and Winnie the Pooh. Each set contains twenty questions that will test both the depth and breadth of the readers’ knowledge on the subject.
Among the questions readers will find answers to in this book are:
• By what name is Agra mentioned in the Mahabharata?
• Who is the author of a famous article titled ‘The Great Indian Rape Trick’?
•Which famous classical musician ran away from home after being denied a second serving of ghee?
• Who coined the term ‘information superhighway’?
•Which Indian prime minister accepted a spinning wheel as dowry?
• What did Phoolan Devi say she wanted to be reborn as?
• Which city did Jawaharlal Nehru describe as the ‘Oxford and Cambridge of India’?
•What was Queen Victoria’s first name?
Whether you are a school student, a college-goer, a teacher, a young professional, an ardent quizzer, a casual reader, or just someone who enjoys watching quiz programmes on television, this is a book that is sure to keep you engaged and entertained for days.
The perfect blend of entertainment and education . . . Commemorating sixty years of India’s independence and reflecting India’s many facets, this definitive volume packs in 3000 questions in sixty chapters, testing the answering skills of any quiz-lover. Each chapter contains fifty questions on a range of subjects from ancient, medieval and modern India to alternative medicine, and fairs and festivals, Indian cricket, Indian diaspora, Hindi and regional films to science, traditional sport and youth affairs, travel, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Put your knowledge of India to the ultimate test with this valuable volume for facts, figures, events, history, literature, politics, and much more.
Taking cues from economics, demography, history, culture, philosophy and good old common sense, Rama Bijapurkar makes sense of the complex and inscrutable Indian market-the many consumer Indias, their diverse and schizophrenic behaviour and the way to make your company’s fortune in this billion-plus market. Irreverent and insightful, this book answers the questions to twelve key facets of consumer India. Bijapurkar explains why the Indian consumer market is ‘like that only’, why it will not change in a hurry, and what it takes to develop a winning ‘made for India’ business strategy. C.K. Prahalad, author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, writes in the foreword to the book: ‘Rama has developed a very strong case for learning about India on its own terms before investing. This book is a critical read for anyone considering building a large presence for themselves in India.’
‘Economics is the science of the possible made to look like the art of the impossible’ is a definition that would strike a chord with any finance minister of India who, every year, has to perform the great Indian hope trick. Otherwise known as the Budget-a careful balancing act between revenue and expenditure, tax rates and tax sops, growth and equity, reforms and the status quo. Within these constraints, however, there is much that a finance minister can actually accomplish, as P. Chidambaram, one of India’s most accomplished economists and commentators, shows in A View from the Outside, a collection of columns that assesses the promises and performance of the NDA government in the period 2002-04.The columns, originally published in the Indian Express and Financial Express, reflect the views of Chidambaram, finance minister between 1996 and 1998 and again 2004 onwards, on a range of issues that remain important regardless of the government in power. They also provide snapshots of the Indian economy in good times and bad. This collection covers subjects such as agriculture, reforms, budgets, forex reserves, economic growth and tax policies. It also offers perceptive political analyses and some telling comments on social issues. Far more than mere reactions to developments during that period, Chidambaram provides the reader with an extraordinarily clear understanding of the problems underlying the Indian economy-and its politics-and ways of solving them.
