Category: Reviews
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Book Review: Feasting, Healing – Reclaiming Your Life Through Cooking
It’s often said that cooking can be therapeutic. There’s something about getting inside a kitchen, putting together a bunch of ingredients, mixing and matching to get the proportions just right, and creating something that people will enjoy eating. And it doesn’t have to be highfalutin gourmet chef-style cooking – simple home-cooking works just as well…
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Book Review: The Fund
In India at least, Ray Dalio isn’t exactly a household name – unless you work in finance / investment banking, you might have no clue who he is. And yet, Dalio, Wall Street hedge-fund manager extraordinaire and billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates (the world’s biggest hedge-fund, which had US$168 billion under its management in 2022!),…
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Book Review: Breaking Twitter
Twitter and I have had a somewhat tumultuous relationship over the years. There have been times when I’ve been a committed Twit (Twitterer?) and have spent upwards of an hour on the platform every day. And there have been times when I’ve been off Twitter for months, repelled by barrage of bile – the unmitigated…
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Book Review: Doctor Steel
Jamshed Jiji Irani, who passed away at the age of 86 in October 2022, is well regarded for his work with Tata Steel and the contributions he made towards modernizing the company’s steel plant in Jamshedpur. Armed with a PhD in Metallurgy from the University of Sheffield, UK, Irani joined TISCO (later renamed Tata Steel)…
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Book Review: Namma Bangalore – The Soul of a Metropolis
With a population of more than eight million, Bangalore (or Bengaluru) is India’s third most populous city and also has the distinction of being the 27th largest city in the world. A fast-growing metropolis that’s home to many of the country’s biggest business houses, Bangalore is also known as the ‘Silicon Valley of India,’ owing…
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Book Review: Common Yet Uncommon
We rarely feature fiction here on BooksFirst but had to make an exception for Sudha Murty’s Common Yet Uncommon: 14 Memorable Stories from Daily Life. Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awardee, Murty needs no introduction. In addition to her work as chairperson of the Infosys Foundation, she is a prolific author and has written books…
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Book Review: Digesting India
I dislike the word ‘foodie,’ a vastly overused term that sounds affected and silly. But I do love food. Often, while having my breakfast, I ask the wife what we’re having for lunch, at lunch I ask about dinner and at dinner I ask about the following day’s breakfast. It’s exasperating for her but what…
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Book Review: Out of God’s Oven – Travels in a Fractured Land
Out of God’s Oven was first released way back in 2002, so why are we writing about this book now, in 2023? That’s because Speaking Tiger Books has released a revised and updated edition earlier this month; it’s a terrific piece of work and well worth revisiting. The book has been written by Dom Moraes…
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Book Review: My World Without Jehan
Death. Most of us aren’t very comfortable with even saying the word. Perhaps it’s the utter finality of it, the inescapability, that makes us uncomfortable when we try to confront our thoughts about death. What will happen when someone close, someone very dear to our heart, someone we love deeply – a friend, a sibling,…
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Book Review: Journeying with India
A well-written memoir can be a joy to read and Y N Varma’s Journeying with India: Memoirs of a Civil Servant is one such book. Varma, who joined the Provincial Civil Service in 1936, rose from modest beginnings in a village in the Faizabad district and went on to serve as a senior bureaucrat, handling…