The Queen of the Comeback: Book Review
Posted on: January 14, 2018
Failures are a reality of life; from the same perspective, comebacks are also a reality as most people bounce-back from their small and large setbacks. If you look at the probability of permanent failures (with no comeback possible), they are pretty rare.
But somehow, humans register ‘failure’ as a stronger emotion than ‘comeback’. So, when they face failure (or even possible failure) in a new initiative, it doesn’t occur to them (at least, not in the beginning) that maybe it is only a temporary setback.
Thankfully, most of them have a friend or a wellwisher who reminds them of this simple fact. ‘Things will be better next time, why don’t you make the required changes and try again?’
But, is this advice true? or just given for the sake of comforting the individual? What is the assurance that things will be better?
That’s when we look at the use cases around us: successful people’s stories to see if they really succeed in the first attempt or faced failures before. If they saw failures in their earlier attempts, what did they do differently to succeed the next time?
Nidhika Bahl’s “The Queen of the Comeback” focuses on this theme. She talks about her own life, the kind of failures she faced and what it took for her to come out of those and see a remarkable comeback. In addition, she has given seven short profiles of famous personalities, from Dr A. Velumani to Surendran Jeyasekar, with analysis on how their comebacks happened.
The book is well-illustrated with interesting stories, themes, links (to read further), quotes and tidbits. You can read it fast, but make sure you collect the notes and customize them to your needs!
(The Queen of the Comeback: Nidhika Bahl: Blackcard Books: $27)
Naga Chokkanathan 
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