Books and Authors

"The Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Srimad Bhagavatam, and the Buddhist epics like the Manimekalai all recognise that it's a random universe and that anything can go wrong at any time. What can a frail human being do but control their own response to what has happened? I was trying to collect a bandwidth of responses to the inevitability of the human condition - things fall apart, we suffer, we grieve. But then what do we do? How do we pick up ourselves and go on? That really was the spine of this book." - Renuka Narayanan, author, 'Learning from Loss' which includes retellings of stories from Hindu and Buddhist texts talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast.

"What stood out for me about Shivaji is that a man who was believed to have no hope at all emerged as a giant killer. There are numerous instances when previous biographies have got it all wrong simply because they have not accessed Marathi documents. Also, Shivaji was traditionally disregarded by people who wrote Indian history. My book is part of the attempt to restore the balance." - Vaibhav Purandare, author, 'Shivaji; India's Great Warrior King' talks to Manjula Narayan about Shivaji's long tussle with Aurangzeb, his rise from minor nobility to sovereign of the Maratha empire, his dream of building a navy, and the sack of Surat.

"The Sindhi language of the common people, which encompasses wonderful ways of thinking, is now lost. For Sindhis in India, the language is gone, the culture is gone, and the history is also gone. That's something that I realised only recently," says Saaz Aggarwal, author, 'Losing Home Finding Home', a collection of personal accounts of the Sindhi experience of Partition, life in the refugee camps, and the subsequent process of recovery and rebuilding.

"Since 2018, the Chinese have been preparing for an AI war. Today they are in the Tibet Autonomous Region and their robots also have real data sets which they have acquired from the operational area. They will leapfrog the US military, which is their peer competitor, by gaining first mover advantage in the new warfare." - Pravin Sawhney, author, The Last War; How AI Will Shape India's Final Showdown With China, talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast.

"Being female puts you at a much higher risk of depression. Typically, the challenges that women face in each decade are really different - from puberty to childbearing and menopause. Now, for men, testosterone itself is a very potent antidepressant. But even if they do suffer from depression, in the Indian scenario, it is tough for them to admit it because men are expected to be strong." - Dr Pallavi Joshi, author, 'Fast but Lost; Overcoming Depression in City Life' talks to Manjula Narayan about virtual fatigue, avoiding negativity, the growing incidence of depression in India and ways to cope with the stress that could lead to it on the Books & Authors podcast.

"Plotting is important in the murder mystery genre, but there have been times when my characters have done things I hadn't planned for them to do, and these have been the most rewarding moments in my writing" - Meeti Shroff-Shah, author, The Death of Kirti Kadakia.

"I felt I had the courage to own up to who I am and to my truest authentic self. And that is a superpower." - Kubbra Sait, actor and author, 'Open Book; Not Quite a Memoir', talks to Manjula Narayan about playing Cuckoo in Sacred Games, overcoming being abused as a teen, and keeping calm in the competitive Bollywood #BooksAndAuthors podcast.

Scars of 1947 is a book based on the real stories of India's Independence and everything it costed to the people of both the sides. The fears, the cries of help and a lot more that has affected the lives of many. In the stories collected by Rajeev Shukla for his book "Scars of 1947" you will get to know about the deep grief of people who were affected by the Partition of India and also some great inspiring tales of love & the perseverance of the human spirit.

Growing up in Amritsar in the 1960s, watching jets flying overhead during the 1965 war, being struck by Hindi film lyrics, domestic tragedies, the contrasting milieu at home and at school, fighting street sexual harassment, and memories of school friends... Actor Deepti Naval talks to Manjula Narayan about her memoir A Country Called Childhood, which recreates a vanished time in India's recent history.

"Construction workers are highly invisibilized. Their world is a small world within our world and at points, I thought of the construction site as a metaphor for a growing India with its linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity. You find Hindus, Muslims and Christians on the site sharing and collaborating to an extent but also segregated in other aspects of their lives." - Simon Lamouret, author, The Alcazar, a graphic novel based on the lives of workers on a building site in Bengaluru talks to @utterflea about his friendship with the workers, being inspired by Herge's drawing style, and about all the things this project made him think about.