Books and Authors

"In India when someone does a menial job, he isn't respected. But I'm so inspired by Jodie Underhill who founded Waste Warriors in Himachal Pradesh and is cleaning the mountains. We have to kill the ego to do such things. In all kinds of menial jobs, the caste system figures. I have always been fascinated by Varanasi but I have also always been afraid of dead bodies. It's almost impossible fora sa...

"India's southern states have diverged to an impossible extent compared to the rest of the country. The problem in health, for example, is that the union government wants to centralise much of its policy but it has within its borders one state which is like sub-Saharan Africa - MP's Infant mortality rate is comparable to Afghanistan's; and another that's like the United States - Kerala's IMR is co...

"When the British decided to try the INA (Subhash Chandra Bose's Indian National Army) soldiers at Lal Qila, it was the last nail in the coffin. Intelligence reports of the time are very clear that the Indian soldiers could not be relied on any more if there was a widespread insurrection. Then, the whole focus from February 1946 onwards after the Naval mutiny was how to ensure the safety of Europe...

"Most people who use fountain pens today use foreign ones because they are not even aware that Indian fountain pens are made. We have a serious marketing and distribution problem," says Bibek Debroy, author, 'Inked in India', which looks at the long history of the fountain pen in the country, points the reader to the best inks, and talks about the remarkable Dr Radhika Nath Saha, who obtained 14 p...

"Gardening is not about spending lots of money. You can basically start from your kitchen, and that's what I've tried to convey in this book. And don't be scared. Even if you fail, it's ok; you can try again." - Dr Ekta Chaudhary, author, Garden Up, talks to Manjula Narayan about her handy guide to growing plants at home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"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 gr...

"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 Pu...

"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...

"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 Showdo...

"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 Pal...

"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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adc...

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...

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 his...

"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, autho...

"For women to stay the course, you need to have better infrastructure and better support systems because, really, that is the reason most women seem to not be able to manage. We need creches, homes for the elderly... Typically, it is (the absence of) these things that hold women back." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Myth is not fictitious. It is actually truer than real life because it talks about an internal deep reality, which is truer than truth." - Meena Arora Nayak, author, Adbhut, Marvellous Creatures of Indian Myth and Folklore talks to Manjula Narayan about myth and meaning in the Books and Authors podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Antibiotics don't work on Drug-Resistant TB, which should worry all of us. The post-antibiotic era is dawning on us." - Vidya Krishnan, author of Phantom Plague; How Tuberculosis Shaped History talks to Manjula Narayan on this week's Books & Authors podcast about the persistence of TB that has evolved with humanity, about the abuse of antibiotics that has made it more virulent, and about the scie...

"Manto is not just a witness to history in his stories; he is an active agent of history. He is the subject of history. It is very compelling" - Nasreen Rehman, the translator, of The Collected Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, talks to @utterflea about Manto's deep feelings for Bombay, his iconoclasm that made the Progressive Writers Group wary of him, and why his stories continue to move South Asia...

"The personal is being made political in a very perverse way. My existence itself is anathema to a rising, sizeable force in Indian politics and that upsets me." - Seema Chishti, author of 'Sumitra and Anees' talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast about her mother's recipes, her parents' inter religious marriage, and about all that India was and can be. Learn more about your ad ch...

"Partition is such a perplexing event that 75 years on, you cannot assign blame to one community because there are equally heinous acts on both sides and equal misfortunes as well. So maybe everyone is to blame at some point, and no one is to blame too." - Aanchal Malhotra, author, of 'In the Language of Remembering' talks to Manjula Narayan about the inheritance of Partition on the Books & Author...

"Technology has made it possible for us to be inclusive irrespective of who we are," says Vijay Mahajan, author, 'Digital Leapfrogs' as he talks to Manjula Narayan about how technology is reshaping consumer markets in India and the social and material changes being brought about by everything from Uber to Paytm and Phonepe and streaming services like Netflix Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

"Indian anthologists have made it a practice to exclude young poets. This is a disservice not only to young poets but actually to the older poets. I wanted to be as inclusive as possible; I was guided by the poems and not by the poets." - Jeet Thayil, editor, The Penguin Book of Indian Poets talks to @utterflea about the definitive anthology on the Books & Authors podcast. Learn more about your ad...

"Even in his life time, not everyone had a favourable view of Akbar. Many thought he was a heretic, and he was aware of this," says Parvati Sharma, author, Akbar of Hindustan. She talks to Manjula Narayan about writing an accessible popular history of the Mughal emperor that recreates family dramas, power struggles and great battles and also shines a light on a colourful supporting cast of charact...

I had spent a lot of time being critical of Eurocentrism when I realised that one has to move beyond this space of postcolonial critique. Ultimately, we have to take the responsibility of writing history from the global South. That's when a real dialogue can happen on equal terms." - Parul Dave Mukherji, co-editor of the mammoth '20th Century Indian Art', which looks at everything from the work of...