Rohit Bhargava predicts 10 megatrends in new book

(New Delhi, Dec 17, 2020) A new book features 10 new megatrend predictions that can shape the world in the coming decade by transforming how people work, play and live.

For the past 10 years, innovation and marketing expert Rohit Bhargava has come out with annual Non-Obvious Trend Report for readers to discover more than 100 trends changing our culture.

Now for the first time, he and his team of Non-Obvious trend curators reveal these 10 new megatrends in a completely revised 10th anniversary edition of “Non-Obvious Megatrends”, published by Ideapress Publishing and distributed by Penguin India.

How might the evolution of gender fluid toys change our culture? What can the popularity of handmade umbrellas and board games teach us about the future of business? Why do robot therapists and holographic celebrities actually demonstrate the importance of humanity?

“The answers to these questions may not be all that obvious, and that’s exactly the point,” a statement by Penguin India said.

The new book also offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes at the author’s signature Haystack Method for identifying trends, and how one can learn to curate and predict trends for themselves.

Curating trends, according to the author, is certainly about seeing what others miss.

“But it’s also about developing a mindset of curiosity and thoughtfulness. It’s about moving from being a speed reader to being a ‘speed understander’, as Isaac Asimov wrote,” he says.

“The future will belong to these non-obvious thinkers who use their powers of observation to see connections between industries, ideas, and behaviours and curate them into a deeper understanding of the accelerating present.

“Can non-obvious thinking save us from an asteroid 867 years from now? I hope so. But more immediately, embracing this way of thinking can change the way we approach our lives and our businesses today. Preparing for the future starts with filtering out the noise and getting better at understanding the present – as it always has,” he writes.

One of the goals of this book, Bhargava says, is to challenge lazy or obvious ways of thinking that are, sadly, no more useful than these hyperbolic futuristic predictions.

“In fact, seeing the world in a narrow or one-dimensional way is even more damaging than a doomsday prophecy, because it often leads to people make flawed decisions today – not just spread empty dread for our distant future,” the book says.

“This book intentionally doesn’t offer geopolitical arguments for why Denmark is going to become the world’s next superpower by 2050 thanks to wind energy production, or sexy guesses about how self-driving, flying cars might enable virtual-reality tourism during daily commutes.

“These kinds of predictions are fun to write and read. Some might even come true. But most are cloaked in uncertainty. Predicting our future should involve far less guesswork,” it says.

“The benefits of learning to be a non-obvious thinker go far beyond just being able to identify trends. Seeing the non-obvious makes you more open minded to change and can help you disrupt instead of getting disrupted,” he says.

“Non-obvious thinking can make you the most creative person in any room, no matter what your business card says and help solve your biggest problems. Most importantly, non-obvious thinking can help you anticipate, predict and win the future,” he writes.

“Ultimately the biggest lesson may be that you don’t need to be a speed reader to win the future. Being a speed understander is a far worthier aspiration,” he suggests.

Big Little Book Award for Subhadra Sen Gupta, Rajiv Eipe

(New Delhi, Dec 15, 2020) Author Subhadra Sen Gupta and illustrator Rajiv Eipe have been named winners of the Big Little Book Award 2020 for their contribution to children’s literature.

Instituted by the Parag initiative of Tata Trusts, the chosen language of the fifth edition of the Big Little Book Award was English. In the previous years, the award considered children’s literature in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and Kannada.

Sen Gupta has authored books like “The Constitution of India for Children”, “The Secret Diary of the World’s Worst Cook”, “History Mystery Dal Biryani”, “Let’s Go Time Traveling” and “Girls of India: A Mauryan Adventure”.

Eipe’s illustrations have appeared in titles like “Dive”, “Pishi and Me”, “Ammachi’s Amazing Machines”, “Oh No! Not Again!” and “Dinosaur as Long as 127 Kids”.

The total number of nominations received this year was 318 and the winners were selected based on the quality of their body of work.

The jury for the author category comprised Anil Menon, Ravi Subramanian, Shailaja Menon, Sujata Noronha and Usha Mukunda. It termed Sen Gupta a prolific but a particular writer who takes a route that is not an easy one.

“We can count on her rigour and her background research to stand by her content and always find her positions are balanced and enable the reader to arrive at their own decisions,” it said.

The jury for the illustrator category had Aashti Mudnani, Proiti Roy, Rani Dharker, Sunandini Banerjee and Thejaswi Shivanand. Eipe, it said, is brilliant with his skills and his illustrations tell stories of their own.

“His work stands out in originality and his observations of the world around us are sensitive and full of humour. A book with Rajiv’s illustrations is visually attractive, informative with details that are delightfully quirky and takes a reader to a world of imagination and fantasy effortlessly,” the jury said.

“It’s a great feeling of validation of all your work. Most importantly, it is about children. For 30 years, I’ve been talking to children and somehow it has been worth it,” Sen Gupta said about her win.

“For years, not many people took children writing seriously. There were no awards and even commissions from publishers were difficult. I have gone through all that,” she added.

Eipe said there is “so much great work happening right now and in the past and it is good to see that kind of work encouraged and appreciated”. Previous winners (authors) are Madhuri Purandare (Marathi), Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Bengali), Nagesh Hegde (Kannada) and Prabhat (Hindi). Illustrators to win the award are Atanu Roy, Proiti Roy, Nina Sabnani and Priya Kuriyan.

Kamaladevi NIF Book Prize for Jairam Ramesh, Amit Ahuja

(Bengaluru, Dec 10, 2020) Former Union minister Jairam Ramesh and US-based academician Amit Ahuja were on Thursday named the joint winners of the 2020 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize.

Ramesh was selected for his book “A Chequered Brilliance: The Many Lives of VK Krishna Menon” and Ahuja for “Mobilizing the Marginalised: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements” from a diverse shortlist of six books covering a century of modern Indian history and encompassing several genres.

The Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize recognises and celebrates excellence in non-fiction writings on modern and contemporary India by writers from all nationalities.

Ramesh and Ahuja will share the prize money of Rs 15 lakh and each will receive a trophy.

The winners were selected by a six-member jury panel that was chaired by political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal (Jury Chair) and included historians Ramachandra Guha, Srinath Raghavan and Nayanjot Lahiri; entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani; and Manish Sabharwal, chairman of Teamlease Services.

The jury found “A Chequered Brilliance: The Many Lives of V.K. Krishna Menon”, published by Penguin Random House, an engaging biography of an important supporting player in Indian politics whose career spanned decades of political work, first in Britain and later in India.

“Ramesh has delved deep into new archival materials to produce a compelling portrait of a brilliant, complicated, and controversial man, whose public life came to a rather tragic end,” it said.

On “Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements”, published by Oxford University Press, the jury said through extensive field research in four states, Ahuja unravels an intriguing puzzle: why is it that Dalit ethnic parties perform poorly in states where their social mobilization has historically been strong, yet perform well in states where such mobilization has historically been weak?

“This is an elegantly written and accessible work of scholarship that richly illuminates the relationship between social movements and political parties in redeeming the promise of Indian democracy for marginalised groups,” the jury said.

The NIF Book Prize was established in 2018 and builds on the New India Foundation’s mission of sponsoring high-quality research and writing on all aspects of Independent India.

It celebrates non-fiction literature by emerging writers from all nationalities, published in the previous calendar year, and is named after Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the great patriot, and institution-builder who had contributed significantly to the freedom struggle, to the women’s movement, to refugee rehabilitation and to the renewal of handicrafts. In 2018, the prize was awarded to Milan Vaishnav for his debut book “When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics” while Ornit Shani won the prize in 2019 for “How India Became Democratic”.

When Yes Bank audit report carried only a brief obit of Ashok Kapur

(New Delhi, Dec 9, 2020) An obituary message for Yes Bank founder chairman Ashok Kapur, who fell to terrorists’ bullets in the 26/11 attacks, was carried in a “tiny blink-and-miss paragraph” in the company’s audit reports published five months later, claims a new book.

Kapur, who owned 12 per cent of the bank’s shares, was a regular at the Trident-Oberoi hotel in Mumbai, kept an office there and had come to dine with his wife at the Kandahar restaurant on November 26, 2008.

Caught at the wrong time at the wrong place, as the terrorists entered the hotel and moved around, he and his wife Madhu had got separated. That turned out to be a fatal mistake for him. While she was led out by security officers with a group of other guests, he got caught in the shootings, says the book Yes Man: The Untold Story of Rana Kapoor.

“Five months after Kapur died, Yes Bank would summarise its annual operations for the financial year and put together its annual report, as required by all listed companies, which consisted of a director’s report, balance sheet, financial statements, disclosures and more,” writes author Pavan C Lall.

“Buried on the bottom of page 25, in a tiny blink-and-miss paragraph under ‘Directors’, was a brief note,” he says.

“Your directors express profound grief on the sad demise of Mr Ashok Kapur, Non-Executive chairman of the Bank on 28 November 2008. Your directors place on record their immense appreciation for the outstanding services rendered and the significant contribution made by Mr Kapur through the board and corporate governance roles, in his capacity as the first Non-Executive chairman of Yes Bank,” the book quotes the note.

Lall says that was it. “No memorial photograph, no retracing of his role in how he helped set up the bank or how he was the first promoter-chairman at Yes Bank. Only the bare minimum for the man who brought (Rana) Kapoor into Yes Bank and gave his career a new life when it had come to a grinding halt thanks to premature exits at his earlier jobs,” he writes.

According to Companies Act stipulations, a company is required to do the bare minimum by way of notification but there are no restrictions when it comes to paying tributes, honour or congratulations to senior management, the book says.

“In the same report, Yes Bank’s management could have given Kapur a befitting send-off but opted not to do any of that. When Yes Bank first made a public offering of its equity shares, its prospectus was approved by SEBI. In it the term ‘promoters’ included both Ashok Kapur and Rana Kapoor.

“But there was no mention of his co-brother-in-law in the CEO’s letter to stakeholders, which as always was accompanied by a full page self-portrait,” it says.

Yes Bank was born in 2004 and soon became the fourth-largest private bank in the country, with approved permissions to operate in Singapore, London and Dubai.

But years later, skeletons began tumbling out of the Yes Bank lockers. Stories of the bank’s reckless lending were going around, and allegations of bribery and corruption became rife.

Ultimately, in March 2020, the bank ran out of money, and customers were unable to get their own savings out of their accounts. The bank’s promoter Rana Kapoor was arrested, and multiple agencies began what is still an ongoing probe.

Yes Man is the story of Rana Kapoor, and his Icarus-like flight that eventually led to the Yes Bank crisis. From starting out as a junior employee at Bank of America to leading a bank worth billion, Kapoor’s rise and fall is a case study in ambition, greed and deceit, publishers HarperCollins India said.

Lall details not only Kapoor’s journey, but also raises questions about the banking system, its regulators and even the business environment that led to a point of no return for Yes Bank.

Krishan Chopra, publisher at HarperCollins India, says the story is about blind ambition but also frailty and tragedy. Yes Man is a case study for bankers, regulators and the savings account holders on what can go wrong when greed and blind ambition takeover banking, says senior commissioning editor Sachin Sharma.

William Dalrymple’s son to debut with book on Partition

(New Delhi, Dec 9, 2020) Historian William Dalrymple’s son Sam will come out with his debut book in 2022 which will look into five partitions in Asia and also offer a new assessment of Indian independence.

In a pre-emptive co-publication deal with HarperCollins India, William Collins publishing director Arabella Pike has bought world rights of the book by Sam Dalrymple from David Godwin.

Five Partitions: The Making of Modern Asia promises an important corrective to the history of Asia and the root causes of the tensions the region faces today, the publishers said.

Weaving original testimonies from survivors, Sam brings together into a single history the Partition of Burma, the Great Partition, the Partition of Princely India, the Partition of Arabia and the Partition of Pakistan.

“Sam Dalrymple brings a fresh perspective to the legacy of Britain’s imperial past across Asia,” Pike said.

According to Sam, growing up in Delhi and studying South Asian languages at Oxford, the spectre of Partition has been present in much of his life.

Co-founder of Project Dastaan, a South Asian peacebuilding organisation, Sam said in his work with this initiative, he realised that Partition’s tragic legacy looms over a much wider region than is generally understood.

“It’s an extraordinary story that explains so much about what is still unraveling today, from the insurgencies in Kashmir to the Rohingya crisis. Bizarrely it’s never before been told as a single tale,” he added.

Udayan Mitra, publisher (literary) at HarperCollins India, said Five Partitions: The Making of Modern Asia will prove to many readers to be a new way of looking at history, making connections that are not generally made.

India was the heart of Britain’s imperial project. During the 1930s, India stretched from the Red Sea off the coast of Africa to the borders of Thailand, unifying a quarter of the world’s population into a single colony governed from the Viceroy’s house in New Delhi.

The history of how this vast territory fought for independence has been dominated by the Partition of 1947, when millions of refugees were forced across hastily erected borders between India and Pakistan.

In just six months, 11 million people had been driven from their homes and two million killed. Some 83,000 women were abducted and raped. But, this book argues this was just one of five partitions.

As British rule disintegrated, ‘the Raj’ was partitioned five times between 1937 and 1971. These breakups and the manner in which they occurred are crucial to understanding the modern world, the book claims. Each left violent legacies, many of which plague Asia today – including civil wars in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, the ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan and Northeast India, the Iranian Revolution, the rise of the Taliban and the Rohingya genocide, it says.

Books on Hero, Flipkart, HDFC in race for Gaja Capital Prize

(New Delhi, Dec 9, 2020) Books on HDFC Bank’s digital revolution and the journeys of Flipkart, BigBasket and Hero are among the six works shortlisted for the Gaja Capital Business Book Prize 2020.

Instituted by equity firm Gaja Capital last year, the Rs 15-lakh prize is awarded annually to celebrate the best non-fiction books on contemporary Indian business.

The shortlisted books are HDFC Bank 2.0 by Tamal Bandopadhyay; Big Billion Startup: The Untold Flipkart Story by Mihir Dalal; Katherine Eban’s Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma; The Making of Hero: Four Brothers, Two Wheels, and a Revolution that Shaped India by Sunil Munjal; T N Hari and M S Subramanian’s Saying No to Jugaad: The Making of BigBasket and The Moonshot Game: Adventures of an Indian Venture Capitalist by Rahul Chandra.

The shortlisted books

“The last two decades demonstrate that Indian business is telling new stories and finding new paths. The chroniclers of Indian business stories endure painstaking efforts to capture the romance, struggle and joys of entrepreneurship. The Gaja Capital Business Book Prize is created to honour these travellers, their journeys and their chroniclers,” the presenters said.

According to jury chairman Manish Sabharwal, “The felt the shortlist this year has multiple stories of triumph and tragedy yet mostly reflects a new breed of confident, ambitious and rising corporate India.”

The winner will be announced in January. The jury comprised investors, entrepreneurs, CEOs and policy makers.

The inaugural prize was won in 2019 by Girish Kuber for his book The Tatas: How a Family Built a Business and a Nation.

Gopal Jain, managing partner at Gaja Capital, said business bookshelves are dominated by western stories of business and entrepreneurship.

“As the Indian economy scales and the Indian entrepreneurial and investor ecosystem matures, we will have many more stories and lessons for the world, from India. As investors and entrepreneurs in the Indian market, we have witnessed several such journeys first-hand,” he said. “We would like to make a small contribution in encouraging Indian writers, journalists and entrepreneurs to tell our stories and tell them well, for the world,” he added.

Humour is a superpower at work, in life: Book

(New Delhi, Dec 3, 2020) A new book shows how to use humour to enhance creativity and problem-solving, influence and motivate others, build bonds and defuse tension within teams, and create a culture where colleagues feel safe and joyful.

Humour is regarded as one of the most powerful tools for accomplishing serious work. Studies claim that humour makes people appear more competent and confident, strengthens relationships, unlocks creativity, and boosts their resilience during difficult times.

Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas teach a course titled Humour: Serious Business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where they help some of the world’s most hard-driving business minds build levity into their organisations and lives.

In their book Humour, Seriously, Aaker and Bagdonas draw on findings by behavioural scientists, popular comedians, and inspiring business leaders to reveal how humour works and how one can begin his or her ascent back up the humour cliff.

They unpack the theory and application of humour: what makes something funny, how to mine one’s life for material, and how to use more of it in one’s life and work. They show how to use humour to make a strong first impression, deliver difficult feedback, persuade and motivate others, and foster cultures where levity and creativity can thrive.

The authors say that from a research perspective, humour is serious business and it’s vastly underleveraged in most workplaces today.

“We wrote this book to set the record straight, to unpack the benefits of humour for our careers, our businesses, and our lives using the sexiest means known to academics: behavioural science. In it, you’ll learn why humour is so powerful, why it’s underutilised, and – most important – how you can use more of it, better,” they write.

They debunk four of the most common myths about humour at work – believing that humour simply has no place amid serious work; a deep, paralysing fear that their humour will fail; one has to be funny; and humour is an innate ability, not a skill one can learn.

Aaker and Bagdonas also explore four distinct styles of humour – stand-up, sweetheart, magnet, and sniper.

While stand-ups are natural entertainers who aren’t afraid to ruffle a few feathers to get a laugh, sweethearts often fly under the radar and prefer their humour planned and understated.

Magnets keep things positive, warm, and uplifting, avoiding controversial or upsetting humour while radiating charisma; and snipers are edgy, sarcastic, and nuanced, unafraid to cross lines in pursuit of a laugh.

“Most of us have some sense of which humour style comes most naturally, but these labels are by no means absolute. Our style can vary depending on our mood, the situation, and the audience,” the book, published by Penguin Business, says.

“Some of us might love being the centre of attention and telling loud, offensive jokes when out with a few close friends but are more likely to share a small, ironic observation in a crowd. Or we might be biting and sarcastic (in a loving way) at home with our partner but keep our humour light and positive with our team at work,” it says.

The authors also discuss how brains are hardwired to respond to humour and laughter, and how humour has been proven in behavioural research to increase perceptions of status, quicken the path to meaningful connection, unlock creativity and innovation, and boost resilience. Delving into the world of comedy, they try to understand what makes something funny, training our brains to look at the world through a different lens, and crafting humour using the techniques of professional comedians.

Great Indian joint family theme of IAS officer’s novel

(New Delhi, Dec 3, 2020) IAS officer Shubha Sarma looks at the great Indian joint family in her new novel The Awasthis of Aamnagri which is full of eccentric characters and loaded with drama and ample doses of humour.

It is set in the city of Aamnagri, known for its luscious mangoes and where the “unsullied waters of the Ganga and Yamuna mingle”.

The story revolves around the residents of ‘Paradise’, also known as Pandit ji’s Haveli. Pandit Dinanath Awasthi is a prominent lawyer of Aamnagri. He lives with his wife, known as Mata ji, and their four sons, four daughters-in-law, and six grandchildren. Their daughters are married.

The outer world of courtroom battles (for the Awasthis are a family of lawyers) is reflected in their daily lives. Courtroom scenes unfold in the book inside the haveli over missing pieces of buttered toasts.

It is, however, not a fun ride all the way through. As the decades pass, the sons move out of the ancestral home with their families to find freedom and identity. Mata ji finds the nest empty and hollow. Desperately lonely, she makes one last ditch attempt to bring the family together.

There are laugh-out-loud moments as well as intriguing, suspenseful ones. The author weaves lessons into the narrative about kindness, fairness, family values, and the importance of sticking together through thick and thin, albeit through humorous incidents and over games of bridge.

The picture that emerges from the colourful, messy scenes is one filled with desi flavour, just like the sweet mangoes of Aamnagri. The novel, published by Niyogi Books, reminds one of the good old days when summer vacations were spent at grandparents’ houses, and when families lived under one roof “fighting, bickering and in the process, rediscovering their affection for each other”.

Book seeks to answer life’s 50 toughest questions

(New Delhi, Dec 3, 2020) What is your life lesson? On a scale of 1 to 10, how much have you loved people and yourself? Does the world offend you or amaze you?

These are among the 50 questions posed by UNESCO Kindness Ambassador Deepak Ramola in his new book along with their answers.

50 Toughest Questions of Life, published by Penguin Random House India imprint Ebury Press, is inspired by the lesson of a young girl Ramola met who told him, “Life is not about giving easy answers, but answering tough questions”.

The author, a UN Action Plan Executor, a TED Talk speaker and founder of Project Fuel, asks thought-provoking as well as funny questions in the book which aims at making readers have a conversation with themselves about themselves.

Over the years, Ramola amassed life lessons from inspirational sources across the world: from the women of the Maasai tribe to young girls in Afghanistan and sex workers in Kamathipura; from the lessons of earthquake survivors in Nepal to Syrian refugees in Europe, among many more.

These 50 questions made him “pause, along with a bouquet of answers, anecdotes, stories and notes from his journey of teaching human wisdom for a decade”.

“As I stood by the self-help section of a quaint, street-side bookstore in San Francisco, my mind swam through books and books of a condensed understanding of life by the renowned philosophers and thought leaders of our times,” he says.

“Laced with poignant metaphors, moving imagery and stimulating quotes, for the first time, I was a bit lost and confused. I found myself enclosed in the safe barricades of answers upon answers,” he adds.

Each book he picked up had many more answers and his mind raced to think that if these are the answers then what are the questions?

“The seed of this book was sown exactly there – as I stood in the third row from the left, at the first corner of the self-help section in the San Francisco bookstore.

This wasn’t the first time I had an epiphany about this, but I felt convinced and finally compelled to write this book and add meaning to our lives,” Ramola writes.

After condensing nearly 3,000 questions into a list of the top 50, he designed this as an exercise and a game to play with diverse shades of people over the past five years.

The remark from the young girl from Afghanistan prompted him to “begin my quest to discover, curate and create life’s toughest questions”.

With each question in the book, Ramola says, he has “made an effort to pack some reflections, anecdotes, experiences and personal notes to help you along your crusade”.

“Take your time with each question. Return to the ones that resonate, and ruminate over the ones which you don’t yet have an answer for,” he suggests.

So what answer does Ramola provide to the question: What is your life lesson? “Your life lesson can come to you in one sudden experience, or gradually with introspection, or in hindsight, over months and years. But the fact remains that you learn it all by yourself,” he says.