Blockers
Michael Lewis
Penguin Random House
Pp 256
When Elon Musk’s DOGE teams entered US agencies in 2025 with a mandate to overhaul the federal bureaucracy, they encountered an unexpected obstacle: career public servants who understood the systems they were trying to change. Musk called them ‘Blockers’. Lewis tells their stories, from officials protecting sensitive taxpayer information and enforcing institutional safeguards to people working on wildfire prevention and medical breakthroughs.
Arguments with Gandhi
Ramachandra Guha
HarperCollins
Pp 432, Rs 999
Ramachandra Guha uses the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi to present a moral and political history of the modern world. With Gandhi as its pivot, this book features an array of major historical figures who engaged with his ideas, among them BR Ambedkar, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr, Lenin, Nelson Mandela, Kamaladevi Chatto-padhyay and VD Savarkar. Arguments with Gandhi is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding Gandhi’s legacy in the context of the challenges the world faces today.
Digital Supermarketwala
Damodar Mall, Harsh Mall
Penguin Random House
Pp 152, Rs 299
More than a decade after the bestselling Supermarketwala, retail veteran Damodar Mall returns with Harsh Mall to decode the next chapter of India’s consumer revolution and explore how digital commerce, neighbourhood stores, supermarkets, social media and AI are converging to reshape consumer behaviour. The authors show what really influences buying decisions in one of the world’s most dynamic consumer markets.
Brief Case
Sanjay Arora
Penguin Random House
Pp 312, Rs 399
Why do we call every bottle of water ‘Bisleri’? How did removing an orange from a juice carton cost Tropicana millions? The world’s most powerful brands are not built by advertising alone. They are built by understanding what people desire, fear, remember and trust — often before consumers understand it themselves. Brief Case presents a sharp and entertaining collection of real brand stories that reveal why people buy what they buy.
The World Was Not Their Story
Saeed Naqvi
Speaking Tiger Books
Pp 568, Rs 999
The World Was Not Their Story is candid about the bargains and accidents of life in the news. Yet the book is more than a plaint against the narrow horizons of Indian journalism. It offers vivid glimpses of world history as old political orders collapsed and new ones took shape — history witnessed at close quarters by a pioneering Indian reporter determined to see the world for himself, and to free journalism from the biases of the West.