Secrets of love and marriage, all within the covers!

Juhi Pande’s Things Your Mother Never Told You About Love [Random House India, Rs 199] is a handbook for love. The author has dedicated this book to the year 1997. So it’s not rude to say that most of us would have liked to read it 17 years ago. And if you are under 17, chances are that you might be able to finish the book.

Juhi Pande, who we know better as a VJ, has an easy style. The book is divided into 18 chapters, starting with Chaos and ending with Love. In the middle there are chapters dedicated to heartbreak, mathematics, travel, And all that jazz, sex and wedlock.

Juhi takes us on the roller coaster called love via her own growing-up years. Her experiments with Personi lipstick, her own bad boy crush (“just watching him play basketball was poetic”) to looking at distractions as a virtue, she also has pop quizzes here and there that help you take stock of your love situation. And making up a perfect Romeo in her head only till “oh my god that is so sexy I’m going to die” category reaches “oh my god I want to die right now”!

Some chapters are teen-specific and some find resonance well into your mid-life crisis, in particular chapter 9, titled Witch. We all have not too long ago silently cussed at “that girl who leans a little closer to your boyfriend while talking to him”. She talks about how she went from sulker to rare sulker and hence found happiness along the way, the transition from honeymoon phase to “normal” and birds ’’ bees.

I have a confession. I took more than a good look at why or why not you should get married. And the girl knows what she’s talking about. Definitely. Maybe.

How To Get Married In Nine Weeks (Westland Books, Rs 125) is IIT-ian Rajat Banerjee’s first self-help book.

Around 125 pages, the book is divided into two sections. A quick glance at the index indicates that the first section deals with the how-to-get-married situation, and the second predominantly talks about staying married.

Week One is about deciding what you want. Lo and behold in Week Nine, the author assures that 99.9 per cent of us can find our life partner. The title of Week Nine: Print the Cards and Send Me One.

Section One, Week One is dedicated to deciding what you want, aka The List. It doesn’t end at making the list. It also involves shortlisting the non-negotiable qualities and repeating it to yourself before you go to sleep and when you wake up in the morning. If you are the type of person who lives in the real world with real expectations, you already know that The List doesn’t work. And you are thinking ‘okay then’.

Week Two urges you to ‘make that move’. ‘Do impulsive things that make you happy but do not harm another person.’ His tips have range — do befriend your co-passenger on the flight, talk to a stranger in the lift. But do not abuse or make fun of someone. OMG.

Week Three is about trusting your instinct. And that’s when I trusted mine. And shut the book. It lasted all of nine minutes.