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The Fight Against Alzheimer’s: An Excerpt
Alzheimer’s is a ruthless disease, one that ravages the brain and kills silently, unsparingly. It can start quietly, without too many apparent symptoms and often, by the time it is diagnosed, it’s already done significant harm. ‘How can one anticipate and prevent Alzheimer’s before it becomes a full-blown disease? Are there precautions to take? How…
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Traders and Tinkers: In Conversation with Maitrayee Deka
Some young shoppers – a generation of people brought up on a steady diet of Amazon, where just about anything and everything in the world can be ordered at the click of a button and delivered to your home the next day – might never have known the magic of trawling the narrow lanes of…
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Dream Super-Express: In Conversation with Jessamyn Abel
One of the most iconic cultural symbols of Japan – one that also underlines its prowess with advanced technologies and engineering expertise – is the Bullet Train, which has been ferrying people across Japan since the 1960s. In her book Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train, Professor Jessamyn Abel takes…
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Book Excerpt: Clash – Amazon vs Walmart
If studied closely, retail is fascinating phenomenon, especially the ways in which retail business has grown and evolved in the last few decades. Grand old-world bazaars, supermarkets, departmental stores, streetside weekend markets, swanky air-conditioned shopping malls and online shopping behemoths like Amazon – retail business has many avatars, each with its own set of strengths…
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Book Review: Becoming Goan – A Contemporary Coming-Home Story
Goa. For a lot of people, it’s their idea of paradise. White beaches. Blue water. Cocktails and a balmy sea breeze. Snoozy, lazy days. Parties in the night. A relaxed, chilled-out Goan lifestyle that’s a world away from the helter-skelter of a Delhi or a Mumbai. That’s the dream, right? Sure, and for a lucky…
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Maya Nagari Bombay-Mumbai – A City in Stories: An Excerpt
Maya Nagari Bombay-Mumbai is anthology of short stories about India’s maximum city. Edited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto, there are 21 stories in the book, from a list of authors that includes Baburao Bagul, Ismat Chughtai, Pu La Deshpande, Urmila Pawar, Mohan Rakesh, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ambai, Jayant Kaikini, Bhupen Khakhar, Cyrus Mistry, Vilas…
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Book Review: Fluke – Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
Think about this for a second. There are currently more than a billion websites in the world, about 200 million of which are active. Two hundred million active websites. And here you are, on BooksFirst, reading about Fluke. In the larger scheme of things, how random is that? What might have been the probability of…
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Book Review: Journeys Across India
Born in 1854 in the district of Nadia, in West Bengal, Durgacharan Rakshit was a scholar and a business owner who, in the late-1800s and early-1900s, set out to travel across India. This, he did on foot and by boat, train and horse-drawn carriage – practically whatever means of transport was available at any given…
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Book Review: Tightwads and Spendthrifts
What most of humanity can agree upon, without too much debate, is that most of us quite like having money. As much of it, in fact, as possible and then some more. But spending all that money can be the tricky part. The tightwads amongst us are inclined to be extra careful with handing out…
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Book Review: Never Out of Print – The Rupa Story
One of India’s oldest, most prominent publishing houses, Rupa was established in Calcutta back in 1936 by Daudayal Mehra, then a young man who saw an opportunity in the bookselling business. Today, even as all major, global publishers have entered the Indian market over the last few decades, Rupa continues to thrive as an independent…