42 books like Hind Swaraj Or Indian Home Rule

I loved this book because we all want to achieve greatness, and it clearly identifies practices, strategies, and habits that can take a good team and make them great. It’s a reminder for me to be disciplined as a person, control myself with disciplined thoughts, and exhibit disciplined actions.

I like how Jim Collins emphasizes strategic focus, disciplined decision-making, and the importance of sustained excellence for long-term success. His "Hedgehog Concept" is a great reminder for me to reflect on what I’m deeply passionate about, what I can be the best at, and what drives my economic engine.

This book opened my eyes to see introversion as a strength rather than a weakness. But more so, it gave me the permission to question how things that we took as “just the way things are” might have been positioned incorrectly from the start.

If it wasn’t true that introversion is inherently worse than extroversion, what else might popular culture and mainstream workplace practices have gotten wrong? I felt seen by the book and hopeful of what more honest conversations about how people are wired might both reveal and help heal. 

I was skeptical when a former boss of mine recommended this book (sounded kind of woo-woo), but I was won over by Whyte’s perceptive, off-beat takes on great epic poems and their application to our quests in today’s corporate world. From Beowulf’s fight with Grendel to Dante’s journey through the Inferno, from Cassandra’s foretelling of the sack of Troy to Fionn’s eating of the Salmon of Knowledge, I was enthralled—and emboldened to explore the dark, creative, messy side of leadership in my own life.

I read this book while on a terrifyingly turbulent flight home from a business trip. Maybe that’s why it has stuck with me, but its memorability is also due to the assurance it offered that I, a fundamentally shy person who finds public speaking almost as terrifying as a bumpy plane ride, could not only speak to audiences but also connect with them in an authentic, passionate way. Leaders are frequently on stage; this book teaches us how to shine (softly) in the spotlight.

I greatly admire Mohandas Gandhi and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., so I was intrigued when I heard about this book that looked at the common threads between two amazing historical figures who shared a goal of social reform. Being South Asian, I am very familiar with Mohandas Gandhi, and after moving to the United States, I learned a lot about the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and this book revealed what led these two men down the path of peace. Even today, it saddens me that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. met their end to life by assassinations. I have only recently added this book to my classroom library, but anticipate it will be a popular choice among my students.

Anyone who follows India will be acquainted with the writing of Arundhati Roy. In this short and powerful book she focuses on two remarkable leaders of pre-independence India, Mahatma Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar; the two clashed over the place of the Caste system – and Hinduism itself – in the future Indian nation. Ambedkar, an “Untouchable” (Dalit), believed that ending colonialism was not enough and the Untouchables could never be free until the “annihilation” of the entire Caste system. Gandhi believed that in building a national community there had to be a compromise with people’s strong attachment to Caste. Roy’s book is simultaneously a rediscovery of Ambedkar, a reassessment of Gandhi, and an indictment of Caste-based oppression in India today.

We all know the Gandhi in sandals and white khadi robes, but how did Gandhi become Gandhi? Guha narrates the remarkable transformation of Gandhi from a timid, London-trained lawyer into a bold, inventive activist advocating for the rights of the Indian immigrant community in South Africa. This engaging, meticulously researched book describes the emergence of Gandhi’s intertwined philosophy and politics, which together reintroduced nonviolence as a potent force to the tumultuous twentieth century.

Markowitz starts with the iconic images of Gandhi – Father of the Indian Nation, the modern saint, the apostle of nonviolence, and so on – and unpicks them to show how selective they are. He examines with great insight the way that Gandhi’s image was created in the West from the 1920s onwards, with him often being compared to Christ. Attenborough’s influential film on Gandhi is reviewed in revealing ways. He also examines the many biographies of Gandhi, showing how they have tended to focus on aspects of his message and fail to bring out the huge complexities of the man. 

He shows how Gandhi’s reputation as a serious political and economic thinker was shaped in the West first by pacifists and alternative thinkers, and much later by academic social scientists. He also provides some excellent analysis of Gandhi’s career in South Africa and India. The book is full of… show more.

If I want to write novels that promote steps toward peaceful solutions to seemingly intractable global problems, I must invoke Mahatma Gandhi’s spirit. His practical application of nonviolence was pivotal to achieving India’s independence from England, and it is a model for us all. In Great Soul, Lelyveld depicts a man beset by doubt, who recognized his own fallibility, and yet he was able to change the world – without violence and without sacrificing his principles. I would hope that in reading this excellent biography, I have learned something about how to get things done peacefully in our complex world, and to imagine a better day.

Gandhi wrote this book, his autobiography, between 1925 and 1929, when he was in his late fifties. It focuses on his formative years, showing how he forged his distinctive style of activism in South Africa and India. It is remarkable for its honesty, even when Gandhi had shameful memories to relate, as when he struck his wife, Kasturba, in anger.  His aim is to show how he changed himself in ways that would make such violent behavior on his part impossible. His ‘truth’ is that of nonviolence and he describes the experiments that he undertook in establishing his nonviolence at both a personal and political level. It is a compelling read that brings out brilliantly Gandhi’s style of thinking and his personality. It is in my opinion a classic of twentieth-century literature.