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  BOOK REVIEW Journeys to Nirvana: Travel Opens the Path to Liberation Vivek Bammi   Aleph Books New Delhi ‘Journeys to Nirvana: Travel Opens the Path to Liberation’ presents a captivating exploration of the world, featuring countries as diverse and far-flung as Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, India, China, Japan, Laos, Spain, the United States, Italy, Taiwan, France, Denmark, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, and Cambodia. In elegantly crafted prose accompanied by stunning photographs, traveler and educator Vivek Bammi discusses the impact of travel on the human spirit. The book takes us through the six stages of existence that travel enables: awe and humility, wonder and catharsis, endurance and efflorescence, solitude and resilience, fluidity and transience, and ultimately, emptiness and release. Each stage is influenced by the emotional and psychological impacts that travel has on a person, serving not merely as an escape but as a means of discovery and enlightenment. ...

  Exactly a year ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown to check the spread of Covid-19 in the country. That was the most severe and largest restrictions on the movement of people seen anywhere in the world. The lockdown confined over a billion people within their homes, shut down businesses and left lakhs of migrant workers stranded in cities with no means to return to their homes. Imposing lockdown resulted in a big humanitarian crisis as lakhs of migrant workers were left stranded in metro cities without food, money and shelter. A near-total ban on public transport forced these hapless migrants to take the road on foot. Streams of migrant workers poured out of cities desperate to reach their native villages. The government’s hasty implementation of the lockdown was severely criticized for its lack of planning and heavy handedness. Although many books have been written on the migrant crisis post-lockdown, this is by far the hard-hitting one. ...

What does it take to be a boss in India? Some years back, an ASSOCHAM Survey revealed sixty-two percent of Indian employees had abusive bosses. Bulk of the employees quit jobs because of bad bosses rather than to seek better employment opportunities. Employees were moving because of bad management, bad supervisors and bad work environment. It is difficult to say whether the situation has changed since that survey. But the fact remains that Indian bosses are a lot to be desired. In that   pitiful backdrop, here is an exciting book. ‘The Indian Boss At work–Thinking Global Acting Indian’ by Steve Correa (SAGE Publications India/ New Delhi) which is a journey into the kaleidoscope of Indian business. It explores the ‘context and forces’ besides documenting worldview of Indian leaders. It ‘unravels the secrets to building successful companies based on generational learnings, attitudes and capabilities.’ Correa has three decades of corporate experience in HR and has worked...

“When JBS Haldane died in 1964, in Bhubaneswar, he was an Indian scientist. He had a passport, but he also had a deep and abiding love for the country’, reads the blurb in this fascinating biography. Haldane’s move to India was an eventual act in his brisk life. A geneticist and firebrand, Haldane wrote his first scientific papers in the trenches of the First World War. A card-carrying member of the Communist Party, he went to Spain to fight the Fascists during the civil war. Haldane was under heavy suspicion of being a spy for the Soviets; courted trouble and ticked off the establishment repeatedly. All this and more have been put together in this sparkling life story.  ‘A Dominant Character – The Radical Science and Restless Politics of JBS Haldane" by Samanth Subramanian (Simon & Schuster, New Delhi) examines the radical research and writing of scientists and philosophers. Haldane’s immense contribution to genetics and Evolutional biology is legendary. He was t...

When the story of a fugitive diamantaire fills the pages of a book, it is bound to evince more than average interest. 'Flawed: The Rise and Fall of India's Diamond Mogul Nirav Modi'b (Hachette India/ New Delhi) does exactly that. The book written by journalist-author Pavan C Lall sheds light on one of the biggest financial scandals in India, and profiles the man allegedly behind it. Kolkata-born and Texas –raised Pavan C. Lall is an associate editor at the Business Standard, where he writes about the automotive sector, private equity, real estate, storied conglomerates and more. A winner of the Citi Journalistic Excellence Award 2016,  Pavan -  having a soft spot for  unraveling corporate conspiracies and industry scandals and laying them bare -  does that here  with  great aplomb. Says the blurb of the book, ‘in early 2018, the implosion of Nirav Modi's Firestar Diamond International, on its way to becoming India's first truly global luxury company, threw ...

  When a defense researcher and an aggressive reporter takes us into the White House Situation Room, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s “Tank” in the Pentagon, and the gigantic chambers of Strategic Command to bring the myriad stories of how America’s presidents and generals have thought about, threatened, broached, and just about avoided nuclear war, it is bound to be an exceptional book. Fred Kaplan is the national-security columnist for  Slate  and the author of five previous books,  Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War  (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestseller), 1959,  Daydream Believers, and The Wizards of Armageddon. In the present book  ‘The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War’ , Kaplan has come up with the story of the Bomb from the dawn of the atomic age until today. Based on exclusive...