Combat Chuckles with Ratna Manucha

Ratna Manucha is a prolific Indian author and educationist with over 30 published books to her credit, primarily in children’s literature, English grammar, and humour. Based in Dehradun, she is the founder and principal of the Little Flower School and has over 25 years of experience in teaching and writing. She joins us for a lovely conversation at our Book Cafe.

Key themes discussed:

• Humour in High-Pressure Environments: Ratna Manucha explains that humour is essential in the armed forces. It serves as a way to cope with the stress of service, wars, and deployments. These stories, often humorous only in hindsight, form a part of the cultural fabric of military life.

• The Process of Gathering Stories: The collection contains 21 stories and three poems. Manucha describes the collaborative, “Chinese Whispers” process of reaching out to retired officers from all three services to compile these authentic experiences.

• Humour as a Serious Medium: Manucha argues that humour is often underestimated in literature. She highlights the importance of self-deprecatory humour, which she feels is lacking in Indian culture, and emphasises that taking life lightly is a vital life skill.

• Intended Audience and Impact: The book is written for everyone, but Manucha especially hopes it reaches young adults deciding on their career paths. By showcasing the “behind-the-scenes” lightness of the services, she aims to provide a more humanised perspective of military life beyond the common focus on rigour and discipline.

• Discipline and Strength: Throughout the project, Manucha maintained strict discipline, crediting her background in the armed forces and education for her professional approach to meeting deadlines while working with her contributors.

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

Captain Mani's War 

by PRS Mani and 

Inderjeet Mani 

ABOUT THE BOOK

In March 1944, the Japanese invaded northeast India. There followed some of the fiercest battles of World War II, with as many as 60,000 Japanese and more than 17,000 Allied soldiers killed. The battles of Imphal and Kohima marked Japan’s greatest land defeat of the War, shattering their ambitions to invade India and turning the tide in the Burma campaign.

While the Allied 14th Army was staffed with British soldiers as well as many trained soldiers from the traditional Indian fighting clans, it was the first time recruits from all over India were tested. They more than proved their mettle. Documenting the War was an extraordinary Indian journalist called PRS Mani, who had left his AIR broadcasting job to become a public relations officer for the 14th Army and subsequently the Southeast Asian Command.

Throughout this period, he lived closely with the soldiers on the front, risking his life as they did, facing danger, hunger, exhaustion, fear, homesickness, and also found solace in friendships and camaraderie. His vivid dispatches, distributed by the Army’s public relations department and relayed also in the Indian and British media, are the only eyewitness accounts of these battles written by an embedded Indian war correspondent.

Superbly written, these dispatches remain one of the great works of war writing by an Indian and one of the few eyewitness accounts of India’s war in the Northeast against Japan. This is the first time his dispatches have been published in book form.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRS Mani (1915–2011) was born in Chittoor, Madras Presidency, into a middle-class Tamil family. In 1942, he moved to the capital to work on All India Radio’s wartime programmes and, two years later, joined the British Army to become a public relations officer with the rank of Captain with the 14th Army. He subsequently travelled with the Southeast Asian Command in Java.Post his return to New Delhi, there followed a number of IFS career postings to Manila, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Goa, Bonn, Kathmandu, Colombo, and Mauritius. PRS Mani died in 2011.

Dr Prof. (Retd.) Inderjeet Mani is an awardwinning author of two novels, numerous short stories and translations of Indian poetry. His acclaimed thriller Toxic Spirits and novel The Conquest of Kailash reflect his deep engagement with culture, philosophy, and global politics. A scholar of linguistics and AI, he has authored nearly 100 scientific papers and the book Narrative and Generative AI. He has held positions at Georgetown, Yahoo, Cambridge, MIT, and IISc, and now divides his time between Thailand, India, and the US.

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Book Recommendations by Shelf-mates

A bookstore is, at first glance, a place of abundance. 

Shelves stretch endlessly, filled with possibilities, stories waiting to be picked, opened, and, often, forgotten. But behind this quiet abundance stands the people who work among these books.

They are not just surrounded by choice, they are defined by it.

Every day, they handle dozens of titles. They know what sells, what lingers, what gets recommended too often, and what quietly slips past unnoticed. And yet, when asked to choose a single book—one that, in their view, must be read at least once—their answers are not shaped by popularity, but by something far more enduring: personal conviction.

It is this act of choosing, out of excess, that makes their recommendations worth pausing for.

For Santosh, the choice rests with Twelfth Fail.

It is telling that this is not a book he has read once, but twice. In a space where new books are constantly within reach, returning to the same text suggests something deeper than casual appreciation.

Twelfth Fail does not rely on embellishment. It does not dramatise the struggle for effect. Instead, it presents an unvarnished narrative, almost austere in its honesty. Perhaps this is why the book endures for him, because it reflects persistence.

If some choices emerge from recognition, others arise from a sense of expansion.

For Shankar, that choice is The Alchemist.

He describes it not through analysis, but through effect: it offers another world, one that invites exploration. The Alchemist operates less as a story to be consumed and more as a space to think within. It gestures toward ideas of purpose, coincidence, and the pursuit of something intangible without insisting on a singular interpretation.

In this sense, its value lies not in what it says, but in what it allows the reader to consider. Then some choices return us, not outward, but inward toward familiarity, language, and lived reality.

Javed’s recommendation, the Hindi translation of Heart Lamp, is significant for this very reason.

To read a text in translation is always to encounter it differently, but to read it in a language that feels closer to one’s own is to experience a shift in intimacy. The stories in Heart Lamp do not depend on scale or spectacle. They move through quieter spaces like domestic, social, and deeply human. 

What unites these selections is not genre, theme, or style. It is the fact that, in a place defined by endless options, these books were not just noticed but chosen.

To choose, in such a context, is an act of filtration. It requires setting aside the noise of trends, the pull of novelty, and the weight of expectation. What remains is something quieter, but far more deliberate.

These are not books that demand to be read. They are books that have, in some way, already proven themselves to the individual who returns to them, reflects on them, and offers them to someone else.

And perhaps that is reason enough to read them. Copies of these books are available at the Book Cafe and The English Book Depot.

- Sneha