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Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle

Dan Senor · ★★★★★ · 308 pages · 2009

An older book, but definitely an interesting perspective of the military industrial complex that is Israel. The military leads to technology which leads to industry. I sometimes wonder if this is the only way to bootstrap an economic engine is with a security angle.

RSS: Evolution from an Organization to a Movement

Ratan Sharda · ★★★★☆ · 391 pages · 2020

This is basically a hagiography of the RSS and its leaders. It was quite a good book to understand the impact each leader had with a changing India and how those leaders shaped the RSS during each inflection point.

Hindutva

V.D. Savarkar · ★★★★☆ · 141 pages · 2003

There is so much swirling around about what constitutes Hindutva so it was good to just go to the source. What is ironic is that people say Hindutva and Hinduism are not the same thing and Sarvarkar says the same thing. Hindutva according to Sarvarkar and as I understand it is the land that goes from the Sindhu river to the sea, populated by people whose ancestors were also from that land, and who treat that land as holy.

The Imitation of Christ

Thomas à Kempis · ★★★★★ · 242 pages · 1427

I am not a Christian and have read this because Swami Vivekananda was said to be fond of it. And I can understand why. The first three books basically feel and read like Vedantic philosophy. And these first three books were also my favorite parts. The last book was much more closer to Christian theology and felt a bit more alien to my understanding and I had a harder time understanding and reading this part of the text.

Vivekananda: A Biography

Nikhilananda · ★★★★★ · 216 pages · 1989

Vivekananda’s ideas have been with me throughout my adult life but I never read an actual biography of him. This was a wonderful exposition of a man who actually was soaking to Hindus most of his life to reform. With a lot of the changes that are happening in society in India the ideas he proposed and finally bursting out.

Kindle Life

Chinmayananda · ★★★★★ · 208 pages · 2008

If one is to study Vedanta start here. This book is a preparatory work for understanding Vedanta and putting the different Yogas (Bhakti, Karma, Raja and Jnana) into practice as preliminary exercises into the deeper understanding of Brahman. It is definitely a book to be reread as some points are dense and would do with rereading.

The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer

Jeffrey K. Liker · ★★★★☆ · 780 pages · 2003

The Toyota Method and Lean are grandparents of DevOps. In that regard reading this book was a way of understanding a lot of the ideas that emerged from manufacturing. The last part dragged a bit but the first 5 chapters were packed with information. Though the latter part was supposed to be the important sections having to deal with teaching the technique to employees.

The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary

Edwin F. Bryant · ★★★★☆ · 672 pages · 2009

Bryant had a hard task at hand. Merging the various traditional commentaries to make a new commentary while making it accessible to both laypeople while also making it academically rigorous. While he does do a good job of making it more academically inclined, I think he struggled a bit with making it easier to understand for laypeople. While I think this should be a secondary reading of the Yoga Sutras I do think there are other renditions and commentaries that are a bit more usefulness for the practitioner.

Fourteen Lessons on Raja Yoga

Sivananda Saraswati · ★★★★★ · 2008

This book is more a checklist than a book per se. Great for going through each of the 8 Limbs to see how to take action and verifying your own behavior.

Hedgewar (Founder of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh): A Definitive Biography

Sachin Nandha · ★★★★★ · 432 pages · 2025

It is ironic and embarrassing that while my undergraduate history degree thesis was on the revolutionary movement, it largely stopped with the Swadeshi movement in Bengal. I never connected how Sri Aurobindo Ghose who was a major player of that movement may have even influenced the founder of the RSS. To be frank I did not even know anything about the RSS except in passing in regards to the BJP.

Bhagavad Gita - Volume 1 (Bhagavad Gita Series)

Dayananda Saraswati · ★★★★★ · 290 pages · 2019

250+ pages to explain the first chapter and the amount I have learned already is amazing. While I have been reading the Gita standalone for years, I wanted to find a commentary that is relatively modern and this is definitely it. Yes the full 9 volumes is more than 3600 pages, but there is a world in each verse. This first chapter covered a lot of the background to the Mahabharata which one would miss.