The Indian parent spends more and more time racking his or her brain as to how the child’s grades can be improved. With marks getting impossibly high in the school system and so much riding on them, it is of course imperative that children be given some sort of brain headstart in the exams race. Aside from brain enhancers like almonds, there are always exercises that help enhance the mind and the memory through various time tested tricks. That’s where Dilip Mukerjea’s set of books come in, published at an invaluable time as far as the Indian school system is concerned.

Dilip Mukerjea

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Devdutt Patnaik has moved on from coaching management students and finding the links between management and mythology to mythology full time. This pair of books talks about the philosophies of the two most powerful gods in the Hindu pantheon, Vishnu and Shiva and the reasons why they are as they are in Hindu philosophy. Vishnu is referred to as the Preserver while Shiva is known as the Destroyer. Alternatively Vishnu is the householder, worshipped with sprigs of tulsi, a household plant, while Shiva is the hermit, worshipped with leaves of bilva, grown outside the house. Occasionally, however, they appear to change their roles – Vishnu in his Kalki avatar takes on the form of the destroyer, while Shiva, the most detached of gods is the only one with a wife and children.

Devdutt Patanaik

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Happiness has suddenly become an important factor in the welfare of countries. As far back as 1972, the King of Bhutan introduced a system for measuring Gross National Happiness in his country, rather than the conventional GDP mapping. This was followed by Thailand a while later, and UK and Australia, too are considering introducing a happiness measure related to economics.

Treatises have been written on how to achieve happiness and face life positively. In India, Dr Rekha Shetty says, ‘positive, radiant happiness is our birthright’ and the book outlines a programme on how to achieve it. She has the requisite experience to lay out the programme, since she is the creator of the Mindspower brand and the MD of Farstar Distribution Network limited, a consultancy that works on issues like work-life balance and innovation initiatives.

Rekha Shetty

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Pink Princesses and Pole Dancers

This book is a disturbing account of the ways in which girls and young women are being encouraged to see themselves. It also examines the way that men and boys are conditioned to view women. It includes topics such as pole dancing, prostitution, glamour modelling and lads’ mags, children’s toys and theories on differences between female and male children from a very young age. At times I found it very uncomfortable and depressing reading, but it is well worth reading for the important arguments made.

The book is divided into two halves: The New Sexism and The New Determinism

Natasha Walter

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Seldom can something so small and hidden have caused so much trouble. The thyroid is a small butterfly-shaped organ at the base of your neck, just below the Adam’s apple. Most people don’t know they’ve got one, have never given it any thought and most likely don’t have the slightest idea what it does. But for those people who are aware about their thyroid, it’s very likely that this little gland is causing them trouble – and in some cases, such as mine, it looked for a while like big scary trouble.

I was one of the many who didn’t know my thyroid from my thigh bone nine months ago and now, thanks to two operations, numerous blood tests, a dose of radioactive iodine and daily medication, my thyroid is a constant preoccupation even though I haven’t actually got one. Sounds weird? Try a diagnosis of follicular thyroid cancer – it’s a great way to turn you overnight from thyroid ignorant to thyroid expert.

Kenneth Ain, M. Sara Rosenthal

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Most of us face the same questions every day: What do I want? And how can I get it? How can I live more happily and work more efficiently?

A European bestseller, The Decision Book distils into a single volume the fifty best decision-making models used on MBA courses and elsewhere that will help you tackle these important questions – from the well known (the Eisenhower matrix for time management) to the less familiar but equally useful (the Swiss Cheese model). It will even show you how to remember everything you will have learned by the end of it.

We will be publishing series of decision making thought processes our koshkha was going through with the help of The Decision Book.

Today we start with very general thoughts on everyday decisions but be ready for more specific ones in the coming days…

Mikael Krogerus, Roman Tschappeler

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Here is a scary thought for you: the divorce rate for first time marriages in the UK is currently at 42%. It gets worse. If you are lucky enough to get married for a second time, you stand a 60% chance of ending up divorced. Try it for a third time and the rate climbs again to a massive 70%. To say that there are thus a large number of people fresh out of long-term relationships looking for love again is probably putting it mildly. Noticing this growing market, online dating service eHarmony (www.eharmony.com)  has brought out a book based on the principles of “relationship science” that they use for matchmaking called, “Dating The Second Time Around: Finding Love That Lasts”. Yes, I laughed a bit at the thought that people could be paired up successfully by something as unromantic as scientific analysis too, but they claim to be responsible for 542 people getting married every day in the US alone, so I guess there must be something in it.

Dr Gian Gonzaga

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We all lie and deceive on a daily basis. “Lovely to see you again”; “I’m not busy”; “I don’t mind”; “we will keep a copy of your CV on file”. Lying is something that comes all too easily to most of us. We tell white lies (and worse) casually and often think of such things as just a necessary lubricant to smooth social intercourse. Telling the truth can get us into trouble – indeed, truth is trouble. Although we are told repeatedly that honesty is the best policy when we are children and our childhood stories are full of morals of why those who are dishonest never prosper, this certainty seems to fade into adulthood – perhaps because we have learnt by then how to lie and get away with it.

“Why We Lie: The Source of Our Disasters” is a book, unsurprisingly, about lying.

Dorothy Rowe

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This is a book which comes complete with a note of appreciation from Kareena Kapoor, handwritten and scanned – if you have never read Rujuta Diwekar before and are a little wary of a book that calls itself Women and the Weight Loss Tamasha be prepared for a surprise – the book is entertaining and, if you’re thinking about losing weight, useful. Diwekar has a breezy style peppered with Hindi and Marathi from time to time, making sitting down with the book sound like having a conversation with a woman friend.

For someone who is quite obviously the force behind that famous Size Zero figure, Diwekar’s theory seems a stopper.

Rujuta Diwekar

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As a haematologist’s daughter, the terms ‘leukemia’ and ‘remission’ floated fairly frequently through the house. I didn’t quite understand them to begin with except that there were frequent phone calls, stories of children who had come to be examined at the Institute and the haunting tale of a patient who had been told by a psychic that everything would be all right who stopped all treatment despite protests from my father and who finally died, so presumably he was ‘all right’ in the sense that he was free from all physical ills. Later, without being asked, I heard stories about bone marrow transplants and spine taps and how painful it was for children. Leukemia, I gathered was an incurable ill that could only be fought with whatever tools there were at hand while researchers frantically sought to evolve a cure.

cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee

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Lorna Brunelle was just 33 when a routine medical exam alerted her to a problem in her neck which subsequent tests showed to be papillary thyroid cancer, the most common format of this relatively rare form of cancer. As a professional voice user (she’s a singer, acting coach and trainer) and a plus-sized model she was terrified that surgery on her neck might damage both her voice and her looks and hence her career. She kept records of her experience throughout her ‘journey’ with cancer and these were used to create her book ‘Dirty Bombshell – from Thyroid Cancer back to Fabulous’ which I have recently read on my Kindle after downloading a copy from Amazon for about £7.

cancer, Lorna J Brunelle

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