HT Picks; New Reads

Keeping the body in balance

When hormonal highs, lows, twists, and turns feel overwhelming, Tasneem Bhatia offers a road map and a whole new perspective. As an MD with an East-meets-West approach to women’s health, Tasneem (known as Dr Taz) combines the wisdom of Eastern modalities like Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine with modern medical treatments for whole body wellness.

To Dr Taz, menopause is not an “ending”; a woman’s entire life is a spectrum of ever-shifting hormones, and menopause is just one point along that spectrum. And hormone levels are a fluid continuum that you have a lot of control over: through your diet, how you sleep, how you manage stress, and more.

In The Hormone Shift, Dr Taz breaks down exactly what is happening behind the scenes in a woman’s body throughout her life and how almost every aspect of health is connected to hormones – from metabolism to mental health. She explains how to prepare for whatever is coming next, and offers a customizable Thirty-Day Hormone Reset plan that uses a combination of Eastern and Western healing modalities to keep the body in balance and deliver a targeted strategy for minimizing unwanted symptoms at every stage.*

The women who lived to tell the tale

More than three decades after Operation Blue Star of June 1984 and the anti-Sikh violence later that year, a young man is given the task of researching the violence. What he finds devastates him. Among the many oral testimonies, one crucial constituency has remained silent. Hundreds of Sikh women witnessed hell coming to life that year. These included women who were stranded inside the Golden Temple, who stood by their militant men, and those who were, at one time in their lives, militants themselves. They are rape survivors. They are among the murdered. They are the forgotten.

Sanam Sutirath Wazir’s research has taken him across north India to meet the women who lived to tell the tale, many of whom are still fighting invisible battles for justice. Based on interviews and extensive historical research, in The Kaurs of 1984, Wazir weaves together scattered stories of grief, betrayal and loss that finally brings Sikh women out of the shadows of contemporary Indian history.*

The unfiltered reality of cross-cultural unions

‘You shouldn’t be with a Chinese girl…that should be my girl,’ a man in Singapore allegedly said this to a Chinese-Indian couple as he spat towards them. In a world brimming with such prejudice and cultural tensions, a remarkable phenomenon emerges: nearly one in five marriages in the USA and Singapore are now interracial. Rebels, Traitors, Peacemakers explores this phenomenon through real stories of Indian-Chinese relationships, delving into the love and turmoil in such lives, where cultural boundaries are shattered and hearts are forged against all odds.

Spanning across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, these heartfelt accounts transcend borders, age, and sexual orientation to illuminate the unfiltered reality of cross-cultural unions. Families disown their own flesh and blood, individuals get locked and beaten up, and online trolls attack relentlessly. Married life offers no respite – cultural expectations breed misunderstandings, life seems hopeless in front of the unfamiliar letters on the washing machine, and differing parenting styles fuel frequent arguments over raising kids. The couples often ask themselves – why did I make my life so complicated?

And yet, the featured stories reveal the couple’s deep admiration for each other and a steely commitment to sustain their syncretic relationship. The Chinese father-in-law now dances Indian style. Strict vegetarians start cooking meat. While their love first appeared as treacherous rebellion, its endurance transforms lives and communities, forging a path towards unity in our fragmented world.

Journey alongside these bold protagonists, who through their triumphs and struggles, illuminate the intricacies of human nature and our universal yearning for connection.*

*All copy from book flap.