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| V V: The Great Depression, 1929, and us | 21-NOV-09 |
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| Because of the close parallels between the current global financial crisis and the Great Depression, 1929, it is no wonder that there is no end to books on what we need to do now — or what it really meant then and who was responsible for the meltdown. Liaquat Ahamed, a professional investment manager for 25 years who has also worked for the World Bank and now an adviser to several hedge fund groups in the US, has come with his own diagnosis of what happened to the West after World War I, of bubbles followed by busts and a cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression, in Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World (William Heinemann, Special Indian price, Rs 1,185). |
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| V V: Berlin Wall, 1989 and after | 14-NOV-09 |
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| All successful publishers and authors have an impeccable sense of timing and generate literature with an eye upon the calendar. So it isn’t surprising that we have a flood of books on the fall of the Berlin Wall that started the process of disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in Europe. But what we have is an embarrassment of riches which try to unravel why such an all-embracing system that Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as “all pervasive, paranoid, oppressive, incompetent, lethal” in the latest edition of The First Circle (Harper, $18), came to an unexpected end. Almost everyone had expected that it would have to be killed; instead it collapsed, as if a house had fallen in on itself. |
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| V V: The meanings of the Mahabharata | 07-NOV-09 |
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| There’s an old grandma’s superstition handed down over generations that you shouldn’t keep the whole text of the Mahabharata in your house because it will become the harbinger of some great quarrel in the family. |
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| V V: Seminar keeps good journalism alive | 31-OCT-09 |
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| Magazines in India are born quickly and die easily, sponged up and watered down by mass circulation glossies that provide a gossipy interest in politics or prurience at the lowest levels. For a journal like the Seminar to have survived for half a century (1959-2009) in the midst of growing lumpenisation of mass culture is a record of endurance and achievement, equivalent to a man passing the age of a hundred. Anyone who has undertaken the travails of editing a magazine with a wide cross-section of Indian interests, struggling to cope with deadlines and truculent writers would know that it is a record of sorts in Indian publishing. |
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| V V: JM Coetzee - The story of himself | 24-OCT-09 |
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| All fiction has its autobiographical roots, but Evelyn Waugh puts it as “experience totally transformed”. The autobiographical impulse is particularly strong in JM Coetzee, the South African Nobel Prize winner (2003), but his writings lie at the frontier between life and the freedoms of fiction. |
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| V V: The Terror Axis: Taliban, ISI & opium | 17-OCT-09 |
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| Gretchen Peters’ Seeds of Terror: The Taliban, the ISI and New Opium Wars (Thomas Dunne Books, Hachette India reprint, Rs 495) tells you why Afghanistan and Pakistan’s North West Frontier provinces will always be on the boil that will spread into the Punjab and increase in intensity, as recent events have shown. Aided and abetted by rampant corruption spread by poppy growers to the Taliban and other local powers, to drug lords and their allies in government, the influence of opium money pervades Afghan life. Afghanistan today provides 93 per cent of the world’s heroin, far exceeding the combined production of Colombia, north Myanmar, Thailand and other regions of the world. Peters examines the depth of the opium problem and describes how opium sales have ballooned since 2001 and continue to grow exponentially, earning more than half a billion dollars off the opium trade. Why and what could be the consequences for us is the central question asked in the book. |
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| V V: Friedrich Engels - Marx's alter ego | 10-OCT-09 |
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| “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with his sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeois over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish relations everywhere. |
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| V V: Keynes - The Master returns | 03-OCT-09 |
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| Unlike the Chicago economists under Milton Friedman who argued that the unrestricted operation of private enterprise—seen as the most efficient form of economic organisation—was essential for economic development and that prices should be determined purely by market forces and inflation controlled by means of controlling money supply, Keynes, the most influential macroeconomist of the 20th century, had argued in his classic work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, that there is uncertainty in the world—uncertainty that cannot be reduced to statistical probabilities and has come to be described as “unknown unknowns.” This irreducible uncertainty, he said, lay behind panics and bouts and the instability of market economics that we see around us today. |
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| V V: Getting rid of fat | 26-SEP-09 |
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| With the rise of creative writing schools that include the hugely popular mass communication courses, there is no end to the making of books, but of making them any better there is almost no means. Book publishing, editing and writing remain cottage industries in India in which apprenticeship in a publishing house is the only approximation to specialised training. |
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| V V: Destroyer of worlds | 19-SEP-09 |
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| Alongside Albert Einstein, it is J Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb”, who is best remembered by many of us as 20th century’s most famous physicist. Probably this is because he was also a Sanskrit scholar as when he saw the first mushroom cloud rise in its terrifying beauty above the test site in New Mexico, it was a line from the Bhagwad Gita that came into his head: “Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. |
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| V V: Gray's anatomy of the mind | 05-SEP-09 |
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| Essays come in all shapes and many sizes. Yet amid all their variety there is a central tradition of essay writing, distinguished by intimacy and informality. There are no preconceived notions of order and regularity in an essay that Dr Johnson described, two hundred years ago, as “a loose sally of the mind.” Put another way, it is the art of talking on paper—unconstrained, close to the weave and texture of personal experience. |
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| V V: History of the present | 29-AUG-09 |
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| When you read the endless debates over Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence you are reminded of Kurosawa’s classic film, Rashomon, where stories are told from every point of view. Is this because of the slippery nature of facts when they lie at the frontier between politics and the media? What are facts anyway? Is a fact, as one of the characters in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author said, “like a sack—it won’t stand up till you’ve put something in it?” But the trouble is that ‘something’ which is the historian’s selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts. |
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| V V: The search for an identity | 22-AUG-09 |
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| The Indian-Pakistani diaspora is a solid bloc of 2 million and more, but has it been able to forge an identity for itself in multicultural Britain? Or is it just lumped together as South Asians on the fringes of British society? Ziauddin Sardar, a columnist for the New Statesman who was earlier the Middle East correspondent for Nature and New Scientist, besides being an author of over 40 books, including the bestseller, Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim, has looked at the whole vexed question of identity in his memoir, Balti Britain (Granta Books, Special Indian Price: Rs 862). |
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| V V: Escape from the trap of 'real time' | 08-AUG-09 |
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| One way of judging a magazine is by what is called “shelf life”—a statistic that editors don’t enjoy very much because magazines are born quickly and die easily. For a literary journal like The Paris Review to have survived 50 and more years is something of a miracle, a triumph of the life principle equivalent to a man passing the age of a hundred, no matter how wrinkled and bent he may now be. The Review was born in the spring of 1953 by a group of expat American intellectuals, and featured fiction and poetry, rather than criticism, devoted to the craft of writing. In its half-century span, over 250 interviews were conducted with contemporary novelists and poets, referred to by admirers as the DNA of literature. This might be a slight exaggeration but all well-known writers from all over the world have been covered in the series, warts and all. |
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