Gurpreet Singh Sandhu impressed with the sandstone city of Petra; footballer also learnt drift racing in Jordan

Mayank Jalan
CMD, Keventer Agro Ltd

Book: Simon Sinek’s Start with Why is a book I keep going back to. It’s a brilliant book. It’s something that every entrepreneur should read, not just once but multiple times in your life. It’s inspiring because sometimes in the daily run of life, we forget to look at the larger picture and how to run things.”

Song: Metallica’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’. It’s a favourite. And the other song that I love is U2’s ‘With or Without You’.

Podcast: I don’t listen to many podcasts; I prefer books. Everybody has their own guilty pleasure — mine is reading.

Maninder Gulati
Chief Strategy Officer (Global), OYO

Book: I don’t read a lot. I watch documentaries instead. That’s how I balance between reading and watching. One of the documentaries I keep going back to is a Bloomberg documentary on Elon Musk. He’s a hero of mine.

He’s not just passionate about business, he’s emotional about it as well. It resonates with my personality.

Podcast: I love what Naval Ravikant does.

He once said ‘You’re not gonna get wealthy by renting out your life. You’ve got to own a piece of the business and you’ve got to be entrepreneurial enough to own equity in a business to gain your financial freedom’. He’s created several podcasts on ego dissolution and not letting your success and ambition ride you too much down the road. I listen to every podcast that Naval does. Song: I do play a lot of songs on repeat but there are two songs that bring out a different side of me — U2’s ‘With or Without You’ and ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay. I think I’ve heard them at least 10,000 times.”

Amita Gupta Katragadda
Partner, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas

Book: Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening Your Life’s Purpose. Every time you read it, you’ll get something different [from it] because it’s very context driven.

Song: ‘Nila Kaigirathu’ by Karthik Iyer [violinist] is a song I play on repeat. It’s a Tamil song that means ‘The moon is shining’. It was composed by AR Rahman for the movie Indira. Podcast: A lot of TED talks. Any time I need a little bit of inspiration, there’s something on TED.

Shreevar Kheruka
CEO, Borosil Glass Works Ltd

Book: What I read depends on my mood. If I want brainless stuff, I’ll read fiction. If I’m in a serious mood, then I read nonfiction. I am in the middle of a book called Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. His name is a bit of tongue twister. Song: I’m into rock bands like Oasis, U2, Green Day… just proper rock. I love rock.

Show: I used to watch a lot of TV before, but not that much anymore. The last show I watched was Suits. I’m a tennis buff, so any kind of live sport is something I’m drawn to. My favourite tennis player is Roger Federer.

Shantanu Rastogi
MD, General Atlantic

Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

Song: Bob Dylan is my favourite — that’s what I usually have on repeat most of the time. He is a behavioural economist who has great thoughts about how we all make bad choices in life. When it comes to work, one way to minimise bad decisions is to rely on data, and making sure you look through stuff that is beyond the obvious.

Podcast: Audible is my preferred mode of consuming content.

Vinati Saraf Mutreja
CEO, Vinati Organics

Book: I just finished reading this book called 'Bottle of Lies: 'Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma' [by Dinesh Thakur and Katherine Eban]. I am also reading 'Lean In' by Sheryl Sandberg.

Song: I mostly listen to old Bollywood songs and ghazals.

Podcast: I don’t listen to podcasts.