Author: Sunita Pant Bansal
Illustrator: Shubham Lakhera
Publisher: Talking Cub (an imprint of Speaking Tiger)
Pages: 256 pages
Type: Paperback
Age: 10 years+
Format: Collection of stories of courage and compassion
You know that feeling when you open your phone for “just five minutes” and end up doomscrolling through a comment section that’s basically a war zone? Random trolls, people fighting over nothing, everyone just… mean, for sport? Yeah. After a while you start thinking maybe kindness died somewhere around 2015.
This book set me straight.
Quick reality check on what it actually is, though, because that’s half the magic: A Heart Full of Kindness isn’t one story, it’s a collection.
It is a collection of real, half-legendary, and totally legendary moments of kindness, none of them connected by plot, just by theme. You don’t need to read it front to back, feel free to drop into whichever story catches your eye, like a playlist instead of an album. And it doesn’t stay in one lane geographically or religiously, which is honestly the part that hit me hardest. It is like the affirmation books you open to a page on a day you need it, believe me you will be revisiting this book when going gets tough. Pick any story, any one and you will find something new every time you read it.
Little Prince Siddhartha stopping to save a swan instead of just walking past. Kabir jumping in to save a goat. Krishna not ghosting his broke childhood friend Sudama when he became a big deal. Guru Nanak using money meant for “profit” to cook food for hungry strangers instead. And then the book just keeps going, way past India. Baha’u’llah, sitting all the way in Tehran, takes in a stranded wanderer who has nowhere else to go. The book also folds in stories where the kindness came first and the legend came after, tracking how some of these kids grew up to become the Buddha, Guru Nanak, the Dalai Lama, Zarathustra, Mahavira, and the Prophet Yusuf. And for the names history forgot but the stories didn’t, it makes room for the Good Samaritan and the witty Tenali Rama, kindness that survived as legend even after the real names got lost.
No clout, no thread, no main-character energy, just people choosing kindness when no one was watching. And the book is chill about mixing Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Zoroastrian, and Jain stories side by side, like it already knows kindness never checked anyone’s passport before showing up. Loved that about this book.
Reading it felt like a reset button for my brain after too much internet.
Turns out kindness isn’t some rare main quest item. It’s free, it’s everywhere, it’s apparently been running the world this whole time across every continent and every century, and it’s sad that we just stopped noticing.
10/10, would recommend anytime for 10 years+.
But real talk: this isn’t just a feel-good read, it’s an important one. In a world that runs on likes, views, and comment-section chaos, a book that quietly proves kindness has been holding everything together for centuries, and everywhere, not just in one corner of the map, hits different. This deserves a permanent spot on every school library shelf, not as some “moral science” punishment book, but as the one read most of us would actually want to pick up. Because kindness isn’t an extra point. It’s the whole point. I wish kindness were contagious.
If you enjoyed this review and kindness is your mantra, you might want to buy the book from Amazon (kbc affiliate link),
CLICK & BUY NOW!Disclaimer: Deeksha is a part of the #kbcReviewerSquad and received this book as a review copy from the publisher via kbc.
