BOOKS OF THE WEEK

American Veda

By : Philip Goldberg

About the book :

In February 1968 the Beatles went to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days in the wilderness. 

With these words, Philip Goldberg begins his monumental work, American Veda, a fascinating look at Indias remarkable impact on Western culture. This eye-opening popular history shows how the ancient philosophy of Vedanta and the mind-body methods of Yoga have profoundly affected the worldview of millions of Americans and radically altered the religious landscape. 

What exploded in the 1960s actually began more than two hundred years earlier, when the United States started importing knowledge as well as tangy spices and colorful fabrics from Asia. The first translations of Hindu texts found their way into the libraries of John Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. From there the ideas spread to Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and succeeding generations of receptive Americans, who absorbed Indias science of consciousness and wove it into the fabric of their lives. Charismatic teachers like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda came west in waves, prompting leading intellectuals, artists, and scientists such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Allen Ginsberg, J. D. Salinger, John Coltrane, Dean Ornish, and Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, to adapt and disseminate what they learned from them. The impact has been enormous, enlarging our current understanding of the mind and body and dramatically changing how we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos. 

Goldberg paints a compelling picture of this remarkable East-to-West transmission, showing how it accelerated through the decades and eventually moved from the counterculture into our laboratories, libraries, and living rooms. Now physicians and therapists routinely recommend meditation, words like karma and mantra are part of our everyday vocabulary, and Yoga studios are as ubiquitous as Starbuckses. The insights of Indias sages permeate so much of what we think, believe, and do that they have redefined the meaning of life for millions of Americansand continue to do so every day. 

Rich in detail and expansive in scope, American Veda shows how we have come to accept and live by the central teaching of Vedic wisdom: Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.

About the Author :

Philip Goldberg is the author or coauthor of nineteen books, including Roadsigns: On the Spiritual Path and The Intuitive Edge. Based in Los Angeles, he is an ordained interfaith minister, a public speaker and seminar leader, and the founder of Spiritual Wellness and Healing Associates. He is director of outreach for SpiritualCitizens.net and blogs regularly on religion for the Huffington Post.

 ISBN : 9780804139434                                                                                Price : Rs. 599.00 

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The Elephant Catchers

 By - Subroto Bagchi

About the Book :
'Unlike an operation to catch rabbits, trapping an elephant calls for expertise over enthusiasm. Those who hunt rabbits are rarely able to rope in elephants.' Many organizations, even those that may have a brilliant start, falter in their attempts to achieve transformational growth in their later phases. In The Elephant Catchers, Subroto Bagchi distils his years of on-the-ground learning to explore why this happens, and what such organizations and their people must do to climb to the next level and beyond. Through a combination of engaging anecdotes from his experiences as co-founder, and subsequently Chairman, of Mindtree Ltd, and insightful stories from our everyday world, Bagchi demonstrates a crucial point: Organizations with real ambition to get to the top need to embrace the idea of scale and then ensure that it systematically pervades every aspect of its functioning. In doing this, he leads you to evaluate:

• Is your organization's infrastructure designed to evolve and ultimately mimic the simultaneity of a living organism?
• Are you constantly nurturing and renewing your brand identity or letting it stagnate and decay?
• Does your sales force have as many hunters as it has farmers? Or is it dominated by a grizzly who just waits for the salmon to land in its mouth?
• In a fiercely competitive environment, are you really stepping 'out of the box' and learning from unusual sources?
• Are leaders in your organization truly building capacity or merely solving problems?

Practical advice on real issues, from how to deal with consultants to the question of succession, words of caution on strategy traps and M&As, and invaluable insights into a whole range of growth-related issues -The Elephant Catchers has it all. Engaging, wise and thoroughly accessible, this book is a must-read for everyone in every organization seeking breakout success.

About the author :

Subroto Bagchi is Chairman, Mindtree Ltd, which he co-founded in 1999. Author of the bestsellers The High-Performance Entrepreneur, Go Kiss the World, The Professional, MBA at 16 and The Professional Companion, Bagchi was acclaimed as India's No.1 bestselling business books author. His works have been translated into several languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Korean and Chinese. He is married to writer Susmita Bagchi, and they have two daughters, Neha and Niti.

 ISBN : 9789350095836                                                                  PRICE : Rs. 499.00