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4 Books by Gita Mehta that Give You a Glimpse of the Real India

Posted on by Penguin India

Writer Gita Mehta, born in Delhi but straddling her world between New York, London and the Indian capital writes four fascinating tales of India, going beyond the textbook definition of how we know it. Drawing largely from personal experiences and observations made not just from within the country, but as an outsider too, Mehta spins a masterful yarn of myths, legends, mysteries and shocking truths. Refreshingly irreverent, brilliantly candid, her four stories give a different slice each of the country we can only ever dream of knowing completely.

A River Sutra

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Denouncing a life of unimaginable riches, a retired bureaucrat settles on the banks of river Narmada in search of solitude and peace. But little did he know that the mysteries of a young lover, an ascetic and a lovelorn woman were about to rock his boat as they unravelled on the banks of the holy waters.

Raj

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Standing at the brink of a loveless marriage, motherhood and a freedom struggle that threatens her sovereignty, Raj is the journey of a royal Indian princess in the late nineteenth century – a journey taken through not only her soul, but also through her life’s biggest reality crumbling in front of her eyes.

Karma Cola

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The mystical east, at the heart of which lies India, is the land of tigers and snake charmers, mysteries and the divine. It is where the West descends in search of spiritual answers. Amidst this heady cocktail, Gita Mehta busts a myth or two in her novel Karma Cola. From The Beatles to the stars of Hollywood who came to India on their spiritual quests, the novel sets off on a trail of half magic, mortal gurus and some ugly and bitter truths.

Snakes and Ladders

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A land of paradoxes, India is a canvas of fascinating opposites that seamlessly blend to form the regular, the every day. From continuing to nurture the centuries-old caste system to fuelling the birth of the world’s largest cinema industry after Hollywood, Snakes and Ladders is an unapologetic zoom-in to an India at its most honest, most shocking.
Which story did you think comes closest to your idea of India?

5 Books To Gift Your Dad This Father’s Day

Posted on by Penguin India

Fathers have been our first superheroes, first teachers, and best friends.
So what do you say to a man who leaves you speechless with his actions and immense love? If you too find it difficult to articulate your feelings in words, here are five books that will do the job for you and will make for the perfect gift this Fathers’ Day:

The Digital Matrix

FDBooks 2.jpgVenkat Venkatraman simplifies industrial and digital companies. It is a management framework that will help you understand the forces that influence your business. If your father is also your best advisor, Digital Matrix will give you the opportunity to discuss the new coming of age business landscape with him and will make for a great gift!

Small-Town Sea

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Anees Salim’s book is a tale of a thirteen year old boy who is uprooted from a bustling city and is planted in his father’s home town. Small-Town Sea captures his adventures with a new friend, settling in a new life and once again being unsettled by his father’s death. The book is sharply hilarious and painfully sad, it is everything your father would love to read on a relaxed afternoon.

Dastan-e-Ghadar

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Zahir Dehlvi’s memoir chronicles the fading glory of the Mughal court and describes the horrifying account of the 1857 revolt. Dastan-e-Ghadar is a compelling read by the poet who lived through the revolt of 1857, known for changing the course of history. Translated in English for the first time, the book is gripping, moving and rich in insight. For a father who is a history buff!

Friend of My Youth

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A writer in the search of a city he grew up in, and barely knows. Friend of My Youth, is an observation on the power of memory, a brilliant writing expressing the interference of childhood with adult life.  Your first friend, your father will definitely appreciate this tale of friendship and life.

Marching With A Billion

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Do you also enjoy sitting down with your dad and discussing politics? Marching With A Billion, a book that analyses Modi Government’s three year in power is an interesting read about key areas of governance like infrastructure, power, and social sector. Uday Mahurkar gives answers to all such questions about Modi’s test of governance.
So, what is going to be your dad’s Fathers’ Day gift? Tell us.

5 Books You Should Be Reading This Monsoon

Posted on by Penguin India

Monsoon brings with it the perfect time to curl up with a hot cup of coffee and a great book. Here are five amazing books you should pick up this monsoon while enjoying the raindrops on your window pane.

The Colours Of My Heart – Faiz Ahmed Faiz

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Remembered for both revolutionary verses and soulful poems of love, Faiz Ahmed Faiz is one of the greatest Urdu poets of the twentieth century. The Colours of My Heart celebrates his greatest works, his most memorable poems and ghazals. A must read on a relaxed rainy evening.

A Handful Of Sunshine – Vikram Bhatt

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What can be a better time to read a love story than the season of love? This monsoon, pick up Vikram Bhatt’s A Handful of Sunshine and experience the joy of love all over again. A tale of love, hate, and fate, this book will keep your hooked till the end.

The Boy Who Loved – Durjoy Datta

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A boy, shying away from love and friendship cannot help but fall in love with a fascinating, quiet girl, so much like him yet different. Durjoy Datta’s The Boy Who Loved is a perfect choice to lose yourself in, this rainy season.

The Thirst – Jo Nesbo

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The Thirst is the latest addition to the Harry Hole series. In this edition, Harry Hole hunts down a serial killer who hunts his preys on Tinder. The chief of police knows there’s only one man for this case. But Harry Hole is no longer with the force. He promised the woman he loves, and himself, that he’d never go back: not after his last case, which put the people closest to him in grave danger. Now, despite his promises, Harry throws himself back into the hunt for a figure who haunts him, the monster who got away. With amazing twists and turns, The Thirst will keep you  hooked on a rainy night.

Everything Everything – Nicola Yoon

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Nicola Yoon’s debut novel is everything perfect you need this monsoon. A beautiful romance, this book is a tale of love that will make you laugh, cry, and weep with joy. Its appeal lies in the vignettes, diary entries, and illustrations that take you through the story.
The season of rains and romance is already here, have you chosen your monsoon read yet?

6 Times Erich Segal Made Us Fall In Love With His Words

Posted on by Penguin India

Professor, author, screenwriter, Erich Segal’s words were known for winning hearts. While he taught us about the beauty and magic of true love, he also articulated the pain of heartbreak and loss like no one else could. His books are time travelling machines, taking you on journeys into strangers’ lives, helping you figuring out your own.
On his birthday, here are six times he taught us about love, life and everything in between:
When he reminded us that true love cannot be lost.
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When he defined the complications of life so easily.
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The time we learnt that no one is perfect.
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When he taught us the simple trick of true love.
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When he perfectly captured the world around us in one simple sentence.
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When he dared to show us the sad reality.
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His words never fail to make us feel alive and fall in love, over and over again. If you haven’t yet read any of his books, just pick your favourite quote and start with that book! So, which magical world are you going to travel to today?

5 Things to be Hopeful for as an Indian

Posted on by Penguin India

Anirudh Krishna in The Broken Ladder reveals the untapped talent, which if honed, can propel India in the league of developed nations. Additionally, Krishna also highlights instances where India has shown significant improvement.
Here are five examples that make one hopeful that the day isn’t far when India will become a global superpower:
Share of women entrants in business schools is substantially larger than what it used to be a generation earlier.
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Glimmers of hope among the marginalized communities
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An attempt to bridge the gap in terms of educational institutions
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A commendable achievement for the nation since achieving independence
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An improvement in the participation of people in decision-making process
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Tell us the improvements you have seen in your part of the country in the last decade.
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6 Times Everything Everything Warmed Our Hearts

Posted on by Penguin India

Do you remember your first teenage love? Nicola Yoon’s debut novel Everything Everything is here to remind you of your first love, when anything seems possible and no problem is insurmountable. A gripping tale of love, relationships and world as we know it, Everything Everything has everything to make you laugh, cry and feel everything in between.
Here are six times the book warmed our hearts.
Oh! The feeling when your crush calls!
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When Maddy’s clay astronaut is at a dining centre but can’t eat!
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When mom cooks something you hate!
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The disease at least one teenage girl has every 30 seconds.
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The “Out of the World” feeling!
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The sickness we don’t mind!
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Taking you to the world of young innocent love that knows no bounds, Everything Everything will leave you with a warm, fuzzy feeling in your heart, wanting for more!
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Raj, an Extravagant Saga about the Maharani of Balmer, Jaya Singh

Posted on by Penguin India

The land of Jaya’s birth lay beyond the desert known as the Abode of Death.
Even that year, three years before the start of a new century, the small tribe of bards making its way to the kingdom of Balmer saw many auguries of death. Water holes and village wells were dry. The artificial lakes which watered the great desert kingdoms of Jodhpur, Bikaner, Jaisalmer were covered with green slime, their levels sunk so low the foundations of water palaces stood revealed, ringed by brown-scaled crocodiles dozing in shallow water.
There was little food to spare for the storytellers as they converged on village squares at nightfall to tell their tales for a place to rest, and yet they became a caravan. Throughout Rajputana it was known the Maharajah of Balmer awaited the birth of his first child. Families in search of a season’s work, other storytellers and tinkers and acrobats, called to the bards, ‘Do you go to Balmer for the birth?’ Learning it was so, they grabbed sleepy bullocks by their vermilion-painted horns and shouted ‘Hut! Hut!’ urging the animals onto the road.
Once a group of ash-covered sadhus lying naked in a broken pavilion built by a forgotten king waved their iron tridents and clambered into a crowded camel cart.
Sometimes the carts were pushed aside by the crested carriages of rajas who lived in the stone fortifications that outlined the treeless black hills. When the sun was at its height, the fortifications seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting in the haze as though the hills were massive, brooding lizards from the time of mythology and the motion of the stone battlements the sluggish shifting of their spines.
Sometimes the caravan attached itself to the procession of court ministers journeying to Balmer with secret messages from their maharajah to the ruler of Balmer, in defiance of the laws of Imperial Britain. Then an elephant led the way, flanked by cavalry units holding banners. When the processions moved on, a silver coin, embossed with a maharajah’s symbol on one side and the profile of the English Empress on the other, was gifted to each member of the caravan, even the children.
Scrub jungle gave way to sand dunes. At sunset, the sudden darkness brought a feverish chill to the empty landscape. The travellers willed their emaciated animals to reach the shelter of villages spaced farther and farther apart before the demon women who had died in childbirth came howling through the night in search of children to replace the stillborn infants they had never suckled.
Now the caravan was so large no village could contain it, and the travellers pitched their own camps.
While their children slept in the cloth cradles tied between the brass spokes of camel carts, the bards, the gypsy genealogists of royal India, talked through the night, exchanging news of the Rajput kingdoms.
‘Our rulers are preparing to travel to London for the Diamond Jubilee of the White Widow, the Empress Victoria.’
‘The retinues and gifts they must take to impress the British Empire will dangerously impoverish their treasuries.’
‘At least in London they can speak together. Here, Britain still fears conspiracy and will not allow the kings to meet except in the presence of Englishmen.’
‘But court astrologers are reminding their maharajahs that famine has come every twenty years since the rise of British power.’
‘And twenty years have passed since the last famine.’
The bards shook their heads, dismissing astrology for the reality they had witnessed on the road. They had seen the villagers praying for rain. The farmers knew already. Another famine had begun.
This is an excerpt from Gita Mehta’s Raj.
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Learning from Mistakes

Posted on by Penguin India

Jeff Bezos, the owner of mighty Amazon constantly features in one of the most successful entrepreneurs of modern time. The way he has steered Amazon through all these years, shows his dedication and skill to make things work against all odds. However, even he failed. A lot of articles have come up post this and many different perspectives have tried to solve this problem from a different angle. Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden’s book, Sense and Respond tries to look at such cases from a newer perspective:
‘Amazon’s 2014 Fire Phone disaster is a classic example and, oddly, one that comes from the very same company that developed and frequently uses many of the sense and respond techniques we’re discussing—a company we laud in chapter 1 for that reason.
Motivated by consumers’ increasing use of mobile devices, Amazon began the Fire Phone effort in 2010, just as the iPhone 4 was hitting the market. Mobile users were becoming a more important source of traffic to Amazon, and the company wanted more control of the mobile store than Apple would allow. Apple’s rules about what companies can and can’t do in iOS apps include strict rules about commerce, including one that stipulates that Apple gets a 30 percent share of each in- app sale. 2 (The reason you can’t buy a book on the iOS Kindle app is that Amazon doesn’t want to pay Apple 30 percent of each sale.) So Amazon created the Fire Phone initiative to solve a business problem: it wanted complete control over the store that its customers visited on their mobile devices.
But what would be the value to customers? They struggled to find it, in part because of a strict culture of secrecy around this product. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, had lots of ideas for cool features. But cool and valuable are not the same thing. Over time, Bezos exerted an increasingly heavier hand in the design and development of the Fire Phone and, according to published reports, ignored feedback from his team that questioned his approach. 3 There was no conversation with the market here, only Bezos talking. He insisted that the phone have a series of fl ashy features like Dynamic Perspective, a 3-D display that didn’t require special glasses and could be seen from all angles; but it delivered little consumer value. Bezos assumed that fl ashy hardware features would make the phone more desirable to consumers than an iPhone. Without a continuous two way conversation with his target audience to guide the development of these features, though, Bezos was making a huge guess.
He guessed wrong. Four years later, in July 2014, the Fire Phone went on sale in the United States. Within days it was clear that consumers were unimpressed— with the design, with the ecosystem, and with the gimmicky features Bezos had pushed for so hard. Priced at $199, the Fire Phone was intended to compete directly with Apple’s iPhone, but consumers didn’t see the value. Instead, they saw it for what it was—a way to easily get to Amazon’s store in a way that was better for Amazon but not significantly better for customers.
After a $170 million write- down of unsold inventory, the Fire Phone was available for 99 cents before finally being sunset in late 2015. The behind- the- scenes stories reveal the arrogance in the top down decision- making process that Bezos led. Although people on the team pushed back, they ended up deferring to the boss. After all, he’d been right many times before. Why wouldn’t he be right again this time?
It might have helped if Bezos had listened to the market. Had he approached some of these decisions as assumptions to be tested and questions to be answered, rather than hunches to be followed blindly, things might have been different.’
You can get your hands at the book here.
This is an excerpt from Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden’s Sense and Respond.
Credit: Abhishek Singh

5 Times Anne Frank Showed Us How to Not Take Life for Granted

Posted on by Penguin India

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank is one of the most translated and read books across the world, and with good reason. 13-year-old Anne Frank witnessed holocaust first hand cooped up behind a book-shelf hiding a bunker, and still found hopeful words and the spirit to tell the tale.
Here are five times Anne Frank exemplified why we should strive to see the silver lining in the dark clouds.
“I’ve come to the shocking conclusion that I have only one long-sleeved dress and three cardigans to wear in the winter. Father’s given me permission to knit a white wool sweater; the yarn isn’t very pretty, but it’ll be warm, and that’s what counts. Some of our clothing was left with friends, but unfortunately we won’t be able to get to it until after the war. Provided it’s still there, of course.”
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“I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that I’m free, and yet I can’t let it show. Just imagine what would happen if all eight of us were to feel sorry for ourselves or walk around with the discontent clearly visible on our faces. Where would that get us?”
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“Have you ever heard the term “hostages”? That’s the latest punishment for saboteurs. It’s the most horrible thing you can imagine. Leading citizens—innocent people—are taken prisoner to await their execution. If the Gestapo can’t find the saboteur, they simply grab five hostages and line them up against the wall. You read the announcements of their death in the paper, where they’re referred to as “fatal accidents.””
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“Father, Mother and Margot still can’t get used to the chiming of the Westertoren clock, which tells us the time every quarter of an hour. Not me, I liked it from the start; it sounds so reassuring, especially at night. You no doubt want to hear what I think of being in hiding. Well, all I can say is that I don’t really know yet. I don’t think I’ll ever feel at home in this house, but that doesn’t mean I hate it. It’s more like being on vacation in some strange pension. Kind of an odd way to look at life in hiding, but that’s how things are.”
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“After May 1940 the good times were few and far between: first there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to use street-cars; Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own; Jews were required to do their shopping between 3 and 5 P.M.; Jews were required to frequent only Jewish-owned barbershops and beauty parlors; Jews were forbidden to be out on the streets between 8 P.M. and 6 A.M.; Jews were forbidden to attend theaters, movies or any other forms of entertainment; Jews were forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis courts, hockey fields or any other athletic fields; Jews were forbidden to go rowing; Jews were forbidden to take part in any athletic activity in public; Jews were forbidden to sit in their gardens or those of their friends after 8 P.M.; Jews were forbidden to visit Christians in their homes; Jews were required to attend Jewish schools, etc. “You couldn’t do this and you couldn’t do that, but life went on. Jacque always said to me, “I don’t dare do anything anymore, ‘cause I’m afraid it’s not allowed.””
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These heartrending words taken from the diary of 13-year-old Anne Frank was first published in the year 1947 as The Diary of a Young Girl. The first entry made by Anne Frank was on 12 June 1942 and the last words were written on 1 August 1944, a period of two-years when the Franks were in hiding in Amsterdam.
Anne was determined to tell her story after a member of the Dutch government in exile announced in a radio broadcast from London that once the war ended, he would look for eye-witness accounts of the Dutch people’s horrifying plight in the Nazi regime. He specifically mentioned diary entries and letters as examples. Anne not only wrote her diary but also edited it simultaneously, tuning it to perfection for her readers.
So, here’s wishing the world’s most fearless 13-year-old a very happy birthday. May your words never rest in peace, Anne.
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5 Reasons You Should Be Reading Jo Nesbo

Posted on by Penguin India

Reading crime novels comes with the suspense of not knowing what comes next. If you’re one of those who love the feeling of suspense and still haven’t got your hands on the books by Jo Nesbo, you are missing out big time. Jo Nesbo, a Norwegian crime novelist with more than 15 thriller novels to his name is a must read for every book lover.
So here are five reasons on why should you be reading Jo Nesbo:
His Harry Hole Series
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The series revolves around Detective Harry Hole, a classic anti-hero who has alcoholic tendencies and opposes any kind of authority.  The novels in this series, like all Nesbo novels, are complex and ambitious constructions combined with high-voltage suspense.. With twelve books in the series, Harry Hole has risen to become a cult figure among the lovers of the thriller genre.
His Novels have been Adapted to films
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His stand-alone novel Headhunters was adapted into a film in 2011. The film stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and was nominated for many awards, including the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film category. His other novels, The Son and The Snowman are also slated to be adapted into motion pictures.
He is an Award-Winning Author
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Nesbo has many accolades to his name. His debut novel The Bat won the Riverton Prize for Best Norwegian Crime Novel of the Year and the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel of the Year. His other works such as The Redbreast, Nemesis, The Snowman and The Devil’s Star have also been awarded by many prestigious platforms.
He is Multi-talented
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Nesbo is not just a crime novelist but also writes books for children. His Doctor Proctor series revolves around a eccentric professor who is waiting for the opportunity to make it big in the world. The series evokes the legacy of Roald Dahl’s books as it encourages the readers to believe in themselves. He also conceptualized the Norwegian political thriller TV series, Occupied.
His Latest Novel, Knife

In his new book , Knife, Harry Hole is about to face his darkest case yet. The first killer he put behind bars is out to get him. Harry is responsible for the many years Finne spent in prison but now he’s free and ready to pick up where he left off.
When Harry wakes up with blood on his hands, and no memory of what he did the night before, he knows everything is only going to get worse . . .
Ready to get your hands on Nesbo novels? Tell us which one you liked the most.

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