Wise and Otherwise – A Salute to life

Sudha Murty gathers fifty short vignettes about people from across the country, showing human nature at its most generous and at its meanest. In one, a man leaves his aged father at an old-age home after declaring him a homeless stranger. In another, a tribal chief in the Sahyadri hills shows Murty that receiving, too, can be humble, and in a third, a sick woman remembers to thank the person who helped her even as she is dying. Murty records kindness and cruelty alike, with wry humor and a plain directness. Its English edition has passed 30,000 copies sold, translations exist in every major Indian language, and it appears in a revised edition.

A reader of The CEO Library named it, through an anonymous form, as one of the three best books they read in 2019.