It was seven years ago that I discovered the writings of Karl Marx inside a muggy classroom. Owing to a largely useless school syllabus, my mind was more or less a blank slate to the literary world. Marx's works, though, were the most life-changing. As for the rest of the writers and thinkers who followed him, Marx changed the way I looked at the world. He had another distinction in my literary education - while I knew where William Shakespeare was born or how John Keats died, there was very little that was said about Marx's personal life at university. A greater focus on the individual as a state subject rather than one who is driven by his passions and personal history is also perhaps the reason I could never commit to Marxism fully.Rachel Holmes's biography of Eleanor Marx, the youngest Marx daughter, who was also her father's secretary and biographer, gave me an opportunity to correct this gap in my understanding of Marx. Through Tussy, as Eleanor was called and as Ms Holmes refers

Her father's daughter

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Why do pure mathematicians spend years contemplating intractable abstractions? This book offers a fascinating window into the thought processes of one mathematician, who is among the most unusual thinkers of our time.Cedric Villani, Directeur, Institut Henri Poincare, has won the Fermat Prize, the Poincare Prize and the Fields Medal, which is the most prestigious of awards for a pure mathematician. Birth of a Theorem is about the highs and heartbreaks experienced while writing and rewriting the theorem that led to the Fields.The theorem offers "proofs of nonlinear Landau damping and convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation". In brief, it describes entropy processes in plasmas and hot gases. Mr Villani co-authored this with his student Clement Mouhot between 2008 and 2009. He moved between Lyon, Princeton and Paris, as he worked on it. Mr Mouhot was elsewhere, so most of the work was done by email across time zones.One caveat: The paper, "On Landau Damping", is 180-odd page

Memoir of 'the Lady Gaga of maths'

Susan Southard's harrowing descriptions give us some idea of what it must have been like for people who were unlucky enough not to be killed instantly

The second Bomb

India became a vast military-industrial complex during the Second World War but the prosperity was thinly spread as inflation soared and labour rights were severely curtailed, writes historian Yasmin Khan in this excerpt from her latest book, The Raj At War: A People's History of India's Second World War

Money Coming! Money Coming!

In Manchuria becomes a study in transience, solitude and also of a family. Read it for an inroad into one of the many grey regions of history

China through a Wasteland

The political historiography of Partition has been a popular subject of research by Indian, Pakistani and Anglo-American scholars, not least because of the magnitude of the tragedy. This study by Anam Zakaria is of a very different nature. Instead of the standard political, cultural and diplomatic approach, this book focuses attention on the memories and experiences of partitioned families - Pakistani and Indian."Oral history" can be tricky and it is to Ms Zakaria's credit that she recognises its limitations. It is also true, however, that only oral history can capture the feelings of those who experienced Partition and its consequences first hand. Also, the technique fits the context for this book which seeks to situate the India-Pakistan relationship against the current animus in both countries and make the case that hardening attitudes are the artificial constructs of the political dispensations on both sides of the border.Ms Zakaria was in charge of Exchange-for-Change, an interact

The other legacy of Partition

Indira Gandhi was assassinated on the morning of 31 October 1984 by two Sikh bodyguards, purportedly in revenge for sending the army into the Golden Temple in Amritsar earlier that year to flush out Khalistani terrorists. Recalling the day in his essay "The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi", novelist Amitav Ghosh, who was then a lecturer at Delhi University, writes: "Certain loyalists in her party had begun inciting the crowds gathered there (AIIMS, where Indira Gandhi was rushed) to seek revenge." Even as the bus which he boarded at Connaught Place headed towards AIIMS, Mr Ghosh and his fellow travellers remained ignorant of the retribution that had begun: "violence had never been directed at the Sikhs in Delhi."Yet, over the next three days, 3,000 Sikhs were murdered in the national capital in one of the worst riots in independent India. Sanjay Suri, who was then a crime reporter with The Indian Express, recounts his experience of covering the orgy of violence in 1984: The Anti-Sikh Violence and

A reporter recalls 1984

From all appearances, Sam Wilkin's Wealth Secrets of the One Percent could not be more timely.The book, its jacket copy explains, arrives "when 1 percent of the world's population owns half of its wealth." Stipulated. "Sam Wilkin uncovers the economic principles that enable a fortunate few to get really rich." I'm game.Inside, we discover that Mr Wilkin, a senior adviser to Oxford Economics, a research consultancy, is a knowledgeable guide to the world's greatest fortunes, from those built during the Roman Empire through America's Gilded Age to the Internet boom. His ruminations on how these fortunes were made are offered in thoughtful, playful prose that, the marketing materials promise, are supposed to read like "Freakonomics meets Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century?"After I finished the book, however, one problem nagged at me:I do not understand what this book is supposed to be.Here's what I mean. Mr Wilkin takes almost 400 pages to identify the "wealth secrets" of

How the rich get rich

Two books provide insights into Gorkha martial traditions, but is it time for a new narrative

The gods of war

Perry Anderson, of the New Left Review, the New School, and the London Review of Books, is probably our greatest living political essayist. He has a rare gift: to be able to summarise a vast literature in a few pages, dismiss it as missing the point, and then in effect, in the subsequent few pages, replace that vast literature with his own theorising. His arguments are invariably bolstered by unfamiliar quotes from familiar names that cause you to question the received narratives about those people; and by reading that seems as wide as his arguments are pointed.Professor Anderson's books are always entertaining. They are frequently wrong - for example, The Indian Ideology, which I reviewed for this newspaper ("Why Perry Anderson is Wrong", November 1, 2012). In that book, Prof Anderson's contrarian instincts drove him to be soft towards Bose and Savarkar in a book that simultaneously attacked Nehru for being too much of a "hard state", nationalist. In the pursuit of his obsessions, Pro

Essays too small for their subject

Why did nobody notice it?It was a deceptively simple inquiry that Queen Elizabeth put to a gathering of economists at the London School of Economics and Political Science, questioning their collective failure to foresee the financial crisis of 2008.The answer, though, was far from satisfactory.Sure, there were Cassandras. Raghuram Rajan, the then chief economist of the IMF, and Nouriel Roubini, a professor at New York University's Stern Business School, both warned of impending risks to the system.But few heeded their warnings because, by then, the belief that financial innovation had greatly reduced risk and that the great moderation had finally solved the problem of booms and busts was deeply ingrained in the economic discourse. So much so that Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, boldly proclaimed the future to be one of non-inflationary continuous expansion.Since then, although much analytical work has tended to focus on what exactly caused the crisis, few have questioned

2008 and its aftershocks

For Christmas in 2013, President Vladimir V Putin sent three books to every regional governor and other senior officials in Russia. One of them was Our Tasks by Ivan Ilyin, an early-20th-century Russian philosopher who disdained Western-style democracy and argued for an authoritarian, though not totalitarian, state. In Ilyin's view, the government would not control all aspects of society, but in certain important areas would be "dictatorial in the scope of its powers."Mr Putin has developed something of a man crush on that exiled writer. This admiration contains clues to Mr Putin's own, somewhat enigmatic philosophy, the venerable historian Walter Laqueur writes in Putinism: Russia and Its Future With the West, an aptly timed and much needed look at the mercurial master of the Kremlin.With Russia grabbing territory and sponsoring a separatist war in Ukraine, putting it once again at odds with the West, efforts to peer inside Mr Putin's head have taken on profound significance. The Whit

Decoding Putinism

Ms Gokhale, it may not shock readers today but it will certainly burn through their skins by the time they are done reading the 299 pages of the book

A Dalit's story

"China has major incentives to avoid unnecessary conflict," writes author Thomas J Christensen

A China strategy for the US

Twenty lucidly argued essays emphasise that only a healthy culture of public discourse can counter the growing threats to India's pluralist democracy from the Hindu Right

Right turn for pluralism

The book aims to understand the evolution, and trace the possible future trajectories, of defence procurement and offset policies in India

Defence offsets and their contents

Shocked by the grimy and gritty nation he encounters at Madna, Agastya Sen - the protagonist of Upamanyu Chatterjee's English August - famously seeks distraction in marijuana, masturbation and the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Mr Chatterjee, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer himself, was possibly exercising the creative licence of a novelist and exaggerating the travails of city-bred bureaucrats posted in rural outposts for comic effect. In writing The View From Kollam, C Balagopal did not have a novelist's licence but the anecdotes he narrates are often as bizarre and comic as Agastya's experiences.Mr Balagopal's career in the IAS was short - from 1977 to 1983. He was first posted in Manipur - this inspired his acclaimed literary debut: On a Clear Day You Can See India (2013). His second posting was at Kollam in Kerala, inspiring this volume. In the Introduction, Mr Balagopal writes: "The anecdotes narrated in this collection dwell on the quotidian events that mark the

Kollam's raconteur

In March 2009, a Somali pirate named Abduwali Muse and his cohorts boarded the US-flagged Maersk Alabama, a 500-foot container ship headed from Djibouti to Kenya with a cargo of food aid. Captain Richard Phillips sent most of the crew to a secure room deep within the vessel, and when Muse got separated from the other brigands, the ship's first engineer captured him. Meanwhile, three US warships arrived on the scene in response to the Maersk Alabama's distress call and navy SEAL snipers who parachuted on to it killed all the pirates except their leader. Captain Phillips is back at sea, Muse is serving a 34-year prison term in the US, and the incident inspired the Hollywood movie Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks."It was one of the most publicised and dramatic ship rescues", writes John Boyle in Blood Ransom, a detailed, well-rounded and absorbing account of the scourge of piracy that has bedevilled shipping in the Indian Ocean over the past 10 years, and whose annual cost to the glob

How Somali piracy became big business

Deepak Bhojwani belongs to that small crop of recently retired Indian ambassadors that specialised in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region through a blend of chance and choice. India has gained from their hard-won domain knowledge as also their continuing commitment to that region, geographically the furthest from India. We have known too little of this vast region in the past; we can no longer afford such lack of insight. To paraphrase the author, LAC's appearance of homogeneity has lulled us into ignoring its political diversity. Worse, this lags much behind the manifest economic and political opportunity.The nine chapters of this book are divided into two clusters; the first four narrate the history of LAC and the next four devoted to connections with India. The final chapter, "The Challenge of Promise", looks to the future, of what is possible if only we can weave new connections across the distance. In this fashion the book pursues two parallel tasks; to familiarise an Ind

India's LAC of engagement

Growing up in 1980s India, I was, for a time, placed in an all-girls school where nuns in habits gave yoga lessons to which we wore stiff-collared white shirts tucked into navy blue bloomer-like shorts. I claimed the back row in the lotus position, arms outstretched and fingers curled into a gyan mudra. I never awakened a chakra, but sometimes I fell asleep.Two decades later I moved to San Francisco, where people wore yoga pants and wished each other "Namaste." Curiosity awakened, I put down $20 to attend a yoga session. When I heard the words "downward-facing dog," I was sure our teacher had mispronounced a shloka. Once more, I failed to take to yoga, but this time it wasn't inertia that held me back. What should have been familiar was inexplicably foreign - as all-American as everything else around me.A similar confusion around yoga's arrival and dramatic transformation on American shores led the journalist Michelle Goldberg to write The Goddess Pose, an elegant and richly drawn biog

America's first Yoga diva

Mosley's autobiography is as exciting as Formula 1 racing, the sport he put on the global map

Book review: Max Mosley's life in the fast lane

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