REGRET

By: Ikramullah

Translated by Faruq Hassan and Muhammad Umar Memon

Deeply moving and elegantly wrought, these two novellas skillfully evoke the long shadow cast by the violence of Partition through poignant tales of families and friendships sundered by the carnage of 1947.

Ikramullah is a renowned Urdu novelist and short-story writer.

Faruq Hassan was an Urdu poet, critic and translator.

Muhammad Umar Memon is an eminent critic, short-story writer and translator.

An Unfinished Agenda

My Life in the Pharmaceutical Industry
By: K. Anji Reddy

An insider’s look at the burgeoning pharma industry in India

From his birth in a village in Andhra to his founding and running Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, now one of India’s largest pharmaceutical enterprises, Dr K. Anji Reddy’s journey makes for an inspiring story. 

That story is told rivetingly in his own words in his memoir, An Unfinished Agenda. This book also takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the science of medicine over the last hundred years and reminds us of the stark challenges that remain.

Dr K. Anji Reddy was one of the leading figures of India’s pharmaceutical industry. He passed away in 2013.

A Mirrored Life

Subtitle: The Rumi Novel

Author: RabisankarBal
Translator: Arunava Sinha

On his way from Tangiers to China, the medieval Moorish traveller Ibn Battuta arrives in Konya, Turkey where the legendary dervish Rumi had lived, danced and died. More than half a century may have passed since his death, but his poetry remains alive, inscribed in every stone and tree and pathway. Rumi’s followers entrust Ibn Battuta with a manuscript of his life stories to spread word of the mystic on his travels. As Battuta reads and recites these tales, his listeners discover their own lives reflected in these stories—fate has bound them, and perhaps you, to Rumi.

A Mirrored Life reaffirms the magical powers of storytelling, making us find Rumi in each of our hearts.

About the Author 

Rabisankar Bal is a Bangla novelist and short-story writer, and has published over fifteen novels, five short-story collections, one volume of poetry and one volume of literary essays. Born in 1962, he has been writing for thirty years. His novel Dozakhnama, acclaimed by the late doyen of Bengali literature Sunil Gangopadhyay as the finest novel of 2010, won the West Bengal government’s Bankimchandra Smriti Puraskar.

About the Translator 

Arunava Sinha translates contemporary and classic Bengali fiction into English. He has seventeen published translations to his name. 

Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy

                                                    By : Mihir S. Sharma

Good times have been promised to India – but we need to make bold changes first. Unless the change is real, enthusiasm about the economy will vanish.

In Restart, Mihir S. Sharma shows what can and must change in India’s policies, its administration and even its attitudes. The answers he provides are not obvious, and require courage. Nor are they all comforting or conventional. Yet they could, in less time than you can imagine, unleash the creativity of a billion hopeful Indians.

About the author:

Mihir S. Sharma was born in Delhi, and grew up in Chandigarh, in Mumbai, in Jamshedpur and in Kolkata. He was trained as an economist and a political scientist before dropping ignobly out of academia. Like many others unable to concentrate on any one thing long enough to write a dissertation, he drifted from one thing to another till he found the closest thing to paid unemployment in a capitalist society: journalism. He now writes and edits opinion for the Business Standard newspaper in New Delhi.

WHEN I WAS 25

 By : SHAILI CHOPRA

Prominent leaders from different spheres share secrets of what they did at 25 and how that transformed their leadership horizon

When I Was 25 is a book about leaders when they were 25. The youth will immediately be drawn to it as they’d relate to that period of life much better. It includes careers graphs and how these successful personalities reached their current success from when they were 25. The list of people who have been profiled include Adi Godrej, KP Singh, Rajdeep Sardesai, Dimple Kapadia,P Chidambaram, Shashi Tharoor,Indra Noori,Zia Mody to name a few.

 The book is different than others on profiles of prominent leaders as it addresses the youth directly and imparts valuable lessons on how to get to the top—as opposed to simply tell the stories of people already at the top.

 About the author

Shaili Chopra is one of India’s top television editor-presenters. She hosts her own video blog TheShailiChopraREPORT. She has been the Senior Editor and Lead Anchor at ET NOW, the Economic Times Business News Channel and earlier with NDTV.

Shaili anchored the 9 pm primetime slots and conducted the big exclusive interviews of people like Warren Buffett, George Soros, Finance Minister P Chidambaram, PepsiCo’s boss Indra Nooyi, Microsoft’s head Steve Ballmer and many more.

In 2012, Shaili received India’s biggest journalism honour The Ramnath Goenka Award for best in business journalism. She also won the News Television Award for the Best Reporter in India in 2007 and later in 2008, her business-golf show Business on Course, won the Best Show Award. She also won the Media Foundation Best Business Anchor Award for 2010 and in the same year the Federation of Indian Industry gave her the Young Women’s Achiever Award for contribution to media. 

She was awarded the Young Indian Leader fellowship by the Spanish Government in April 2013.

Shaili’s previous book THE BIG CONNECT published by Random House India earlier this year garnered rave reviews and coverage across media in the country. This is her second book with Random House India.

Before Time

                                                              By : Xunaira J

Part I of : The Time Trilogy

The story is based in Pakistan.

The story is about Onaiza - who wants to be an author. 
While her father supports her choice, her mother wishes to see her become a doctor one day.

She is pictured as someone who has very low self esteem & thinks of herself as a loser.

The story in mostly conversations between her & Impassioned aka Asher over Internet Relay Chat Network.

They share & discuss everything under the Sun, including their personal lives, happiness & despair alike. 

While both Onaiza & Asher carry the baggage of their past, Onaiza is ready to move on while Asher is reluctant to do so.

Onaiza eventually develops feelings for Asher, but will she be able to bring Asher back to present so they can have a future together? Maybe the next part of the book will answer this question. 

After reading the book, long conversations that Onaiza & Asher share between them, described in bold, gets monotonous & irritating to read. 
It seems like a private conversation screen shot put directly in the book. 
While it might be fun to read the same on a mobile phone, reading about it in a book feels odd.

We wish Xunaira best of luck, for her upcoming titles.

Undying Affinity

                                                                 By : Sara Naveed

Meaning of the word Affinity :
A natural liking for & understanding of someone or something

The story is majorly set in Pakistan.
It is basically about two individuals Ahmar & Zarish.
Ahmar is a professor at a Business Management University where Zarish is a student.

Both Ahmar & Zarish discover Love in each other, but due to old family enmity, they struggle to be together.

Haroon is a childhood friend of Zarish who falls in love with her, which makes Ahmar & Zarish' love story  complicated.
To add to it, Amber who happened to be Ahmar's love interest at one point in time, comes back into their lives which gives a new & unexpected twist to the story.

 It's a 400 pages book , which feels long b'cos the average size of a book these days in around 300 pages.

Also, part of the book feels like a scene from the movie "Jab We Met"

We found some typo's in the book, which we have brought to the notice of the Author.
This is her first book.

If you like romantic novels, then you should read this book & feel the joy + pain, that Ahmar & Zarish go through ..