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5 Things You can do to Heal from Stress and Prevent it

Posted on by Penguin India

99 Not Out! by Sujata Kelkar Shetty PhD., is a beautifully researched guide to a happy and healthy existence. The book shares several principles that govern the health of our mind, body and spirit in an easily understandable yet interesting manner. 99 Not Out! shares how the readers can strengthen their mind, body and spirit so that they live the best version of their lives. Sujata Kelkar Shetty also explains exactly how long-term stress harms the mind body and spirit and what we can do to heal from its onslaught and prevent it in the first place.

The book shares behavioural practices from western medicine and Ayurveda that can slow down the ageing process while preventing illness, making it a truly wholesome read.

These five tips on how you can heal from stress and prevent it in the first place:

 

Your mindset matters

Cultivate a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. A growth mindset is one where you believe that you can learn from your mistakes and grow to become a better version of yourself in any field that you choose to. Because a growth mindset keeps the focus on process rather than product and because the mindset means internalizing the belief that you can improve and get better there is little stress. A fixed mindset on the other hand, because it means believing that our capabilities are fixed and unchangeable can cause a great deal of stress whenever the person is tested in anyway because you believe that you can’t learn from your mistakes. A fixed mindset puts a lot of pressure on us. On the other hand if we cultivate a growth mindset we are empowered to make changes in our life whether at work, at play and in our health behaviours so that we do what is best for us without getting stressed about it.

 

Become self-compassionate

Self-compassion includes the following three abilities, first being as kind to oneself as we would to our best friend. The second is cultivating mindfulness so that we are aware of what is going in and around us. And the third is knowing that we are all part of a universal human condition and we all have our triumphs and our tragedies. Cultivating self-compassion allows us to have calmer state of mind in the face of life events. Thus helping to reduce a our day-to-day anxiety level as well.

 

Laugh more

Laughter decreases the level salivary cortisol, a physiological and measurable marker of stress experienced in our bodies. Stress also impacts the memory, and cause memory loss in many cases. Therefore, it has been proved that laughter improves one’s memory. And laughter increases the level of endorphins in our blood stream making us feel better about everything. Laughter is indeed the best medicine!

 

Cultivate altruism

Being altruistic or helping others without expecting anything in return helps us forget our troubles and reduces our stress. It strengthens our mental and physical health thereby shielding us from the debilitating effects of stress in our lives. When we help others and project kindness towards them, it heightens our engagement with other people and makes us more social which is stress relieving too.

 

Be more positive

Cultivating positive emotions like joy and kindness helps us handle stressful life events better. When our mood lifts we no longer have a tunnel vision, our perspective broadens and we are able to see that there are choices in our life, we are not as disempowered as we think we are. We brood less on what is wrong and become more focused on what is possible.

Get your copy of 99 Not Out – Your Guide to a long and healthy life!

5 Things you learn about Hindu Nationalism from ‘Awakening Bharat Mata’

Posted on by Penguin India

The inspiration for the right in India has come from multiple and, often, contradictory sources. The proprietorship of Hindutva does not, for instance, belong to Veer Savarkar, although his contribution is seminal. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) too deserves serious attention, not merely for the influence it exercises on the BJP leadership, but for its approach to the larger question of national regeneration. Equally important is the influence of individuals such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, not to mention the Arya Samaj movement.

In Awakening Bharat Mata, Swapan Dasgupta, BJP Rajya Sabha MP, brings an erudite insider account of the phenomenon of Hindu nationalism. Here are some points he brings forth:

  1. So intense was Nehru’s distaste for what he used to call the ‘RSS mentality’ that he even subordinated the challenge posed by the communist parties to the more pressing battle against ‘Hindu right-wing communalism’

  2. During the Jayaprakash Narayan–led movement (1973–75) against Indira Gandhi’s government and the patchy struggle against the Emergency (1975–77), a host of non-Congress parties, including Lohia-ite socialists, Gandhians, free-market liberals, and even a section of the communist movement, were willing to rub shoulders with the ‘Hindu right’.

  3. Under the Modi dispensation, when the BJP commands an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha and controls more state governments than ever before, the attacks against right-wing subversion have become sharper and to the point where the term ‘fascism’ is bandied about continually.

  4. Vajpayee, writing in 1973, he described the Jana Sangh a ‘centrist party’ that ‘has been subjected to attacks from both the extreme right as well as the extreme Left.

  5. Hindu nationalism was equated with fascism in Europe in the 1930s and a distinguished American professor of law, in an unexpected foray into Indian politics, described the BJP-led coalition government of Vajpayee as ‘increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu

Swapan Dasgupta’s Awakening Bharat Mata is a collection that attempts to showcase the phenomenon of Hindu nationalism in terms of how it perceives itself. AVAILABLE NOW.

Six Things You Didn’t know about Dawood’s Mentor, Khalid

Posted on by Penguin India

Tired of being bullied, a scrawny, impoverished Dawood Ibrahim is looking for a savior, Khalid Khan Bachcha, who would teach him the ropes of handling a bunch of hooligans. Instead, what he gets is a mentor who eventually transforms him into a cunning mafia boss.

In Dawood’s Mentor, Dawood meets Khalid and they eventually forge an unlikely friendship. Together they defeat, crush and neutralize every mafia gang in Mumbai. Khalid lays the foundation for the D-Gang as Dawood goes on to establish a crime syndicate like no other and becomes India’s most wanted criminal. Here are six things, we don’t think you would know about Dawood’s mentor, the man who made India’s biggest don.

  1. Khalid had managed to receive a unique title (Khalid Pehelwan ­– meaning ‘wrestler’). A pehelwan is not just a healthy man or a wrestler but a man with a massive physique. When his father stressed on wrestling and his mother emphasized on studies, Khalid secretly nursed the desire to become a police officer.

  2. Khalid was an economics graduate and he understood business economics and logistics. He possessed a sharp business acumen and began exploring permutations and combinations to take dealings further.

  3. Khalid was the first bona fide smuggler with properly monitored operations, which he supervised from coast to coast and vessel to vessel.

  4. Khalid’s childhood in Madhya Pradesh and the friendships he had forged during his college and wrestling days with Hindus had given him a progressive and secular outlook in life. It was an absolutely new and unheard-of philosophy in the Bombay mafia.

  5. Khalid never drank, even if there was intense pressure from his friends. While everyone around him got sozzled, he was seen sipping soft drinks.

Read the complete story about the mastermind’s journey in Dawood’s Mentor.

Introduce your Child to James Patterson with the ‘Middle School’ series!

Posted on by Penguin India

James Patterson is the world’s bestselling author, best known for his many enduring fictional characters and series, including Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Michael Bennett, Maximum Ride, Middle School, I Funny, and Jacky Ha-Ha.

Here is a list of some of his most popular books, the Middle School series:

Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life

Rafe Khatchadorian has enough problems at home without throwing his first year of middle school into the mix. Luckily, he’s got an ace plan for the best year ever, if he can pull it off.

 

Middle School: Big Fat Liar

Georgia Khatchadorian–the sister of the star of the first two Middle School books, Rafe Khatchadorian–plans to excel at Hills Village Middle School in all the places her troublemaking brother failed. Will she be able to overcome her fears and win her bet with Rafe?

 

Middle School: Get Me Out Of Here!

After sixth grade, the very worst year of his life, Rafe Khatchadorian thinks he has it made in seventh grade. It’s more competitive than Rafe ever expected, and to score big in class, he needs to find a way to turn his boring life into the inspiration for a work of art.

 

Middle School: Save Rafe!

Rafe and the rest of the pack of ‘delinquent’ trainees are forced to cooperate as they prepare for the final test: a solo excursion in the deep woods. Can Rafe come out of the experience in one piece? And if he does, will anyone recognise him as the kid they once knew?

 

Middle School: Ultimate Showdown: Superhero

The Khatchadorian kids are an opinionated duo and as readers of the Middle School stories know, they don’t exactly see eye to eye. But when wild-card Rafe and mostly-straight-laced Georgia go at it, the only thing more fun than their ranting is getting to join in!

 

Middle School: How I Survived Bullies, Broccoli and Snake Hill

Rafe Khatchadorian, the hero of the bestselling Middle School series, is ready for a fun summer at camp – until he finds out it’s a summer school camp!

 

Middle School: Dogs Best Friend

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and Rafe Khatchadorian is just trying to live in it. Life in middle school is finally starting to seem bearable – until Rafe spots his grandmother standing in the free-meal line at the local soup kitchen.

 

Middle School: Just My Rotten Luck

In this seventh Middle School episode, Rafe heads back to the place his misadventures began: the dreaded Hills Village Middle School, where he’s now being forced to take ‘special’ classes… He also finds himself joining the school’s football team – alongside his main tormenter, Miller the Killer!

 

Middle School: Born to Rock

When Georgia’s favourite rock band, Lulu and the handbags, advertise a major music competition where the winner gets to JAM with Lulu herself, Georgia will pull all the stops to make sure we Stink wins – even if it means asking her annoying older brother, Rafe, for help!

 

Middle School: From Hero to Zero

After a mostly-successful stint at Hills Village Middle School, Rafe is excited to visit the incredible city of London with his class. Sightseeing around a foreign country sounds like a blast, until Rafe finds out his roommate will be none other than Miller the Killer, bully extraordinaire!

 

The Magic Weight Loss Pill – Here’s all you Need to Know About it

Posted on by Penguin India

The Magic Weight Loss Pill by Luke Coutinho and Anushka Shetty, is an exceptional guide to one’s healthier self. Talking about the reasons and ways to combat various diseases like diabetes, kidney and liver stones and the problem of excess weight, co-author Luke Coutinho states the advantages of maintaining a simple and healthy lifestyle. With the magic pill of a changed lifestyle, the authors give an easy hack to the secret of remaining fit, mentally and physically.

With sixty-two easy fixes to a happier and healthier body and life, the book makes for a great and an informative read. Here we tell you the wisdom of the magic weight loss pill as shared by Luke Coutinho:

 

Calorie-restriction diets are not as successful as they are made out to be. In most of these diets, there is too much emphasis on the intake and usage of calories without the knowledge of whether a person has the ability to burn fat or not. A smart food diet with a balanced nutritional value is thus, of utmost importance.
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Going back to one’s staple food is a great way to keep a balance of nutrients in the body. Especially including Indian staple foods have been proven to be better than the junk food endorsed these days. For example, pure jaggery is a healthier substitute to white sugar.
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Refrain from having fruit juice, as they lack most of the fruit’s fibre and nutrients. This further leads to heightened blood-sugar levels. A wiser option would be to have your fruits whole, and chew them well. The natural sweetness of fruits reduces the craving for other sweet foods too.
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Before getting yourself into fancier and more extravagant fitness programs, try doing basic exercises like – squats, lunges, full unsupported push-ups, plank, 5 km walk or 4 km run, pull-ups, jumping jacks. These exercises use all the vital muscles of the body that are required for everyday movement, posture, and body alignment.
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Sleep and the quality of one’s sleep is another reason which facilitates the burning of belly fat and losing weight. Getting the right amount of sleep is thus, quite significant.
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Bottling of one’s emotions and stress (mental and physical) directly affects the immunity of the body. Emotional detoxification is hence, vital in order to lose weight. This helps people to not compare their bodies with others and become more gentle with their self-imposed stress of becoming fit in a certain amount of time or like someone else.

The Magic Weight Loss Pill by Luke Coutinho and Anushka Shetty is filled with sixty-two astonishingly easy and extremely practicable changes that will have you feeling healthier and happier!

 

An Excerpt from ‘Unstoppable’

Posted on by Penguin India

How do you go from being a shopkeeper to multi-billionaire in forty years?

Kuldip Singh Dhingra, the patriarch of the Dhingra family and the man credited with building Berger Paints, has remained a mystery. He is low-profile, eschews media and continues to operate from a small office in Delhi. In this candid and captivating biography Kuldip reveals his story for the first time – Unstoppable by Sonu Bhasin narrates what a man can achieve if he pursues his dreams relentlessly.

Read an excerpt from the book below:

——————————————-

The collapse of the Soviet Union was the last thing on Kuldip’s mind when he sat down to have his coffee and opened the financial daily for his morning update one late January morning.

‘I saw the news about Vijay Mallya selling Berger and I knew immediately that I had to buy that company,’ said Kuldip. ‘We had oodles of money. How much of property could I buy? We had to buy a business,’ he continued. He had been speaking with Gurbachan over the last few months about their future. The Rajdoot business had grown during the last ten years, but it was still in the range of Rs 10–15 crore annually.

‘We had many small factories, all under Rs 1 crore to reap the benefit of small scale. But the name Rajdoot was not a premium brand,’ explained Gurbachan. The two brothers had been bouncing around ideas about buying a running paints business.

‘We had been in discussions with some other paint companies.I even went to London to discuss the matter with the foreign owners of a well-known paint company,’ said Gurbachan. UK Paints was not a known company, Rajdoot was a small brand, and the Dhingras were low-profile people. The foreign promoters had a large business worldwide and were selling only their Indian operations. They did not like the idea of selling out to what they thought was a smaller company run by someone who did not understand corporate culture and had been running a shop in Amritsar till a few years ago.

‘I got the feeling that he was not even happy talking to us about it,’ said Gurbachan without any self-pity. The foreign owners eventually sold their company to a better-known and a bigger industrial family of Delhi.

‘But could you not use the money to focus on Rajdoot Paints which was your own company anyway?’ I asked Kuldip.

‘But Rajdoot would have to be managed by me if I wanted it to become even half as big as what Berger was then. And I simply did not have the time. Berger was a professionally managed company and had a good team—at least that is what I thought at that time. I believed that once we bought the company, apne aap chalti rahegi [it will run by itself],’ explained Kuldip.

Kuldip certainly did not have any time to manage any other business except his export business. The export business had given him ‘oodles of money’ as Kuldip put it, and it had also given Kuldip a world view of business. He was dealing with a cross section of professionals from around the world and he had become used to large businesses. Rajdoot, though one of the fastest-growing paint companies in India in the late 1980s, was at best a regional company. It was not a star or even an emerging star on the horizon. Kuldip, on the other hand, had become used to being a star! He was feted as an important businessman in the Soviet Union and was known as a big exporter in India. Should the export business wind down, he knew that he would continue to be very wealthy but he would feel stifled by the small, regional business of Rajdoot. He did not want to be clubbed in the ‘Others’ category in the domestic paints business. He realized he needed a larger canvas for his domestic business dreams.

‘I was doing business in hundreds of crores with the Soviet Union. And the total turnover of Rajdoot then was just Rs 10–15 crore,’ said Kuldip.

While he was exporting a variety of items to the Soviet Union, at heart he remained a paints-man. ‘There was only one business I understood well and that business was the paints business,’ said Kuldip. So when he saw the headlines about Berger Paints being sold, the instinct bulb in his head burnt bright.

Unstoppable narrates what a man can achieve if he pursues his dreams relentlessly.

What Kind of a Traveller are You?

Posted on by Penguin India

Don’t you agree that travellers are basically of a diverse breed?  For some, it can be the destination of self-discovery, while for others travelling to the same destination is like broadening their cultural horizons or going on a culinary quest.

Regardless of the type of traveller you are, journeying to any new destination is a form of rejuvenation and re-inventing in the times of rapid urbanisation, rising inflation, perpetually stress, that we all are sucked into.

From venturing into the deserts of Iran and Uzbekistan, to going up the Annapurna and the Pamirs, Sudha Mahalingam reveals what happens when you make a habit of encountering the unexpected in her book The Travel Gods Must be Crazy!

Below is a very accurate quiz of different traveller categories that we all fall into! Take this quiz to find out your tribe!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read The Travel Gods Must Be Crazy before planning your next trip!

5 tips to emerge as a winner using strategies from Chanakya’s Art of War

Posted on by Penguin India

We are constantly at war.

After a point, everyone realizes that they cannot walk away from such wars. Everyone has to fight—some win, some lose. This is where the difference in our attitude towards the war becomes known. We either accept defeat, or fight on to emerge a winner.

In Chanakya and the Art of War, Radhakrishnan Pillai takes us on a journey. The journey of Chanakya’s life experiences and challenges. We go back to his era and time. We draw inspiration and learn from his wisdom.

Here are five tips that you can follow to emerge as a winner:

Never fight a battle alone; take along a friend (mitra)

Chanakya’s solution for stress is as simple as talking to a friend. When we have a friend with whom we can share and express our problems, it makes a significant difference.

Listen to the wise (vriddha-sanyogah)

In the daily battles of life, senior citizens can be very helpful. The biggest advantage of senior citizens is that they have time and experience to offer. The younger generation has neither of the two. So, in reality, the two could fit together like a perfect jigsaw puzzle. It can be synergetic.

When dealing with the powerful, keep in touch with a higher power

Think through the situation and find out what makes the boss a boss after all.  The boss has more decision-making power than the employee. Now, what we need to remember is to learn how to crack the power of the boss.

Advisors can make you or break you

Gathering too much information is not good. We need to be selective in what we read and watch. We get into discussions that really do not matter to us. It’s ok to add our bit to some social updates happening around. But it is not worth thinking too much about such matters.

Know the strength and weakness of the opponent

Having a strategic mindset is an important skill one should be able to develop. A smart person is one who is able to accurately judge others. He is constantly studying and analysing, trying to understand what is going on in the mind of the person in front of him.

Chanakya and the Art of War draws upon lessons from the great teacher, philosopher and strategist Chanakya’s masterpiece, Arthashastra, which can help us overcome those speed breakers to become innovative and influential and realize our true potential.

Did It All Start With a Big Bang? ‘Origin Story’ States the Facts

Posted on by Penguin India

At the heart of the modern origin story is the idea of increasing complexity. How did our universe appear, and how did it generate the rich cavalcade of things, forces, and beings of which we are a part? We don’t really know what it came out of or if anything existed before the universe. But we do know that when our universe emerged from a vast foam of energy, it was extremely simple. And simplicity is still its default condition.

Timelines give some fundamental dates for the modern origin story using both approximate absolute dates and recalculated dates, as if the universe had been created 13.8 years ago instead of 13.8 billion years ago. When divided as per the amalgamation of changes and developments that have made the earth what it is today, each big period can be grouped under a threshold. This makes it easier to get a sense of the chronological shape of the story of our origin and also helps us understand how we arrived at where we are today.

THRESHOLD 1: Big bang: origin of our universe

“The bootstrap for today’s most widely accepted account of ultimate origins is the idea of a big bang. This is one of the major paradigms of modern science, like natural selection in biology or plate tectonics in geology.”

THRESHOLD 2: The first stars begin to glow

“Free energy drove the emergence of the first large structures: galaxies and stars. The crucial source of free energy for this part of our origin story was gravity. …….Together, gravity and matter provided the Goldilocks conditions for the emergence of stars and galaxies.”

THRESHOLD 3: New elements forged in dying large stars

“Our third threshold of increasing complexity yielded new forms of matter: all the other elements of the periodic table. A universe with more than ninety distinct elements could do so much more than a universe with just hydrogen and helium.”

THRESHOLD 4: Our sun and solar system form

“Planetary bodies were chemically richer than stars, and much cooler, so they offered ideal Goldilocks environments for complex chemistry. And on at least one planet (our own), and probably on many more, that chemistry would eventually generate life.”

THRESHOLD 5: Earliest life on Earth

“Life as we know it arose from exotic chemistry in the element-rich environments of the young planet Earth almost four billion years ago. …….. life is built from billions of intricate molecular nanomachines.”

THRESHOLD 6: First evidence of our species, Homo sapiens

“The appearance of humans in our origin story is a big deal. We arrived just a few hundred thousand years ago, but today we are beginning to transform the biosphere.”

THRESHOLD 7: End of last ice age, beginning of Holocene, earliest signs of farming

“Our ancestors lived as foragers for the first two hundred thousand years or more of our history. ……. In the past ten thousand years, human lifeways were transformed by a cascade of innovations that we describe as farming or agriculture .”

THRESHOLD 8: Fossil fuels revolution begins

“In just a century or two….. we humans have stumbled into the role of planetary pilots without really knowing what instruments we should be looking at, what buttons we should be pressing, or where we are trying to land.”

THRESHOLD 9: A sustainable world order?

“If we successfully manage the transition to a more sustainable world, it will become apparent that human history really constitutes a single threshold of increasing complexity culminating in the conscious management of an entire biosphere.”

The sun dies

“After a long period as a red giant, it will eventually blow away its outer layers, turn into a white dwarf, migrate to the bottom of the Hertzsprung- Russell diagram, and then sit there, cooling, for hundreds of billions of years.”

The universe fades to darkness; entropy wins

“It will turn out that everything that seemed permanent in our universe was actually ephemeral. Maybe even space and time will turn out to be mere forms, mere wavelets in a larger multiverse. Entropy will have finally destroyed all structure and order. At least in one universe. But perhaps there are more to get working on.”

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything reveals what we learn about human existence when we consider it from a universal scale.

Beautiful Lines From Sudha Murty’s New Book for Children!

Posted on by Penguin India

“A long, long time ago, seawater was sweet and drinkable. How it became salty is a remarkable story.”

India’s favourite storyteller brings alive this timeless tale with her inimitable wit and simplicity. Dotted with charming illustrations, this gorgeous chapter book is the ideal introduction to the world of Sudha Murty.

Here are some quotes from the book:

‘But by then the sea was full of salt, which had all dissolved into water. And the sea remained salty for ever after that.’

*

‘The night passed – with the dwarves dancing and Sridhar feeding the fire with fresh wood when it looked like it was dying.‘

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‘He decided not to go to his brother’s house. Instead, he went to the beautiful town near the sea, and there, he built a house made money and never wanted for anything, thanks to the magic fan.‘

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‘Suddenly, storm clouds gathered and rain started pouring down. Sridhar spotted a flicker light in the distance and ran towards it.’

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‘The salt spilled into the sea. It rained salt sacks for many, many days, till the dwarves heard about it and used their magic to make the fan stop.’

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‘That night, when everyone was asleep, she made Keshav creep into the room where the fan was kept and steal it.’

How the Sea Became Salty  is the ideal introduction for beginners to the world of Sudha Murty.

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