The Books from My Shelves – 6
By DR KRIPA NAUTIYAL
Some books sit on a shelf quietly for years, yet each time you return to them, they offer something new; a fresh insight, a sharper argument, or a memory of the moment you first read them. The following ten titles, drawn from my own shelves, span history, philosophy, statecraft, and biography. Together they trace how nations rise and falter, how individuals wrestle with power and conscience, and how ideas ancient and modern continue to shape the world we live in.
‘Himalayan Blunder: The Curtain-Raiser to the Sino-Indian War of 1962’, by Brigadier JP Dalvi (Thacker & Co., later Natraj Publishers), is a searing first-hand account of India’s 1962 defeat. As frontline Commander of the 7th Infantry Brigade, Dalvi witnessed the Battle of Namka Chu before being taken prisoner. His candid critique of political illusions, the flawed “Forward Policy”, and India’s logistical unreadiness remains a classic on defence planning and civil-military relations.
‘Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought’, by Michael I Handel (Routledge/Frank Cass), is a foundational work comparing Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Jomini alongside Machiavelli and Mao. Handel shows how these thinkers, across vastly different eras and cultures, converge on shared truths — the primacy of political objectives, the inevitability of friction, and the value of deception and intelligence. It bridges Eastern and Western strategic doctrine with rare clarity.
“The Degeneration of India”, by TN Seshan with Sanjoy Hazarika (Viking/Penguin India), is India’s former Chief Election Commissioner’s outspoken diagnosis of institutional decay across the executive, judiciary, bureaucracy, and political class. Drawing on decades of administrative experience, Seshan confronts corruption, inertia, and electoral malpractice, while passionately calling for reform, accountability, and moral regeneration to restore India’s democratic vitality.
‘Arthashastra’, authored by Kautilya (Chanakya), with its definitive English translation edited by LN Rangarajan (Penguin Classics), is a 4th-century-BCE masterwork on statecraft. It outlines the duties of an ideal ruler — governance, taxation, jurisprudence, and intelligence — alongside diplomacy and warfare through the Mandala theory. Rooted in pragmatism, it remains one of antiquity’s most sophisticated treatises on power and statesmanship.
‘The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream’, by Barack Obama (Crown Publishing), articulates his political philosophy during his Senate years. Blending personal reflection with policy analysis, Obama examines partisanship, opportunity, constitutional values, and diplomacy, advocating pragmatic consensus over ideological gridlock. It remains a blueprint of political optimism that anticipated his 2008 presidential campaign.
‘The Hindus of Hindustan: A Civilizational Journey’, by Dr Meenakshi Jain (Aryan Books International), argues that Hindu civilizational identity is an ancient, continuous reality, not a colonial construct. Using archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Jain traces unbroken religious iconography from the Palaeolithic era through the Indus Valley Civilization, and draws on Kautilya’s Arthashastra to show early ideals of political unity. She examines how groups like the Greeks, Sakas, and Kushans were assimilated, contrasting this with the 8th-century Arab incursions, which introduced forces resistant to absorption — and chronicles Hindu institutions’ resilience and revival through subsequent periods of iconoclasm.
‘Consolations of Philosophy’, by Alain de Botton (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin), draws on Boethius to turn classical philosophy into a practical guide for everyday struggles. De Botton pairs six thinkers with human afflictions — Socrates for unpopularity, Epicurus for financial anxiety, Seneca for anger, Montaigne for inadequacy, Schopenhauer for heartbreak, and Nietzsche for hardship — showing philosophy as a therapeutic tool for wiser living.
‘Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi’ by Katherine Frank (HarperCollins), offers an intimate, well-researched portrait balancing Indira Gandhi’s inner world with her political trajectory. Frank traces her lonely childhood, her marriage to Feroze Gandhi, her bond with Nehru, and her decisive leadership through the 1971 war and the Emergency, making it among the most balanced international studies of India’s most powerful female leader.
‘Snakes in the Ganga: Breaking India 2.0’, co-authored by Rajiv Malhotra and Vijaya Viswanathan (BluOne Ink), examines contemporary ideological challenges to India’s sovereignty and social fabric. The authors argue that frameworks like Critical Race Theory are inappropriately transplanted onto Indian structures such as caste, and through case studies of institutions and policy spheres, call for indigenous intellectual defence and civilizational vigilance.
‘A New Earth: Create a Better Life’ by Eckhart Tolle (Penguin Books) argues that human suffering stems from unconscious identification with the “ego” and the “pain-body”, a reservoir of old emotional pain that seeks renewal through negativity. Tolle shows how ego surfaces daily through competitiveness, validation-seeking, and attachment to roles and possessions, and presents present-moment awareness as the key to dissolving these patterns. Drawing on Buddhism, Christianity, and Taoism, he offers awakening not as abstract philosophy but as a practical, actionable path to inner peace.
Read together, these ten books form an unlikely conversation across centuries. Kautilya’s ancient statecraft echoes in Handel’s classical strategists and in Dalvi’s account of an army that failed to heed those very lessons. Seshan’s outrage at institutional decay meets Jain’s longer civilizational lens — one demands reform now, the other insists on remembering what endured before. Obama’s pragmatic optimism and Indira Gandhi’s steely resolve, as drawn by Frank, reveal two faces of democratic power. And where Malhotra warns of ideological threats from outside, Tolle and de Botton turn inward, asking what it takes to defend the self from its own restlessness. History, strategy, statecraft, and the search for peace of mind are not separate shelves after all, they are the same question, asked in different centuries: how should power, conscience, and society be ordered? It has no final answer, which is exactly why I keep returning to these books.
(The author is an anthropologist. He is a retired Additional Director General of the Indian Coast Guard and an alumnus of United States Naval War College, Rhode Island.)
