All modern democracies can be placed somewhere within the three dimensions staked out by Britain, France and America. In varying degrees, they contain the universalist aspirations of France; the conservative, common-law and custom bedrock of Britain; or the multi-ethnic churning of the United States. India is more Anglo-American than most. But reading a history, any history, of modern France is a reminder of how much more French our state needs to be.Most histories of modern France focus on events and drama. In a history dotted with extraordinary personalities, from Napoleon to de Gaulle to Jean-Marie le Pen, it is an almost impossible temptation to resist. The instinct is to - once the Revolution has been dealt with - only deal with ideological disputation as it relates to the clashes of parties and people. After all, this is France; its evolution into the pillar of secularism and effective monoculturalism is almost pre-ordained. But the truth of the mother of republics is that, more

Of France, with hope

Business Standard

A former TV anchor explains his transition to politician

A journalist's discovery of politics

Anyone with a passing interest in World War II will be aware of the Raj's disproportionately high contribution in men, materiel and supplies in helping the Allied cause. Beyond that, the War is hazily remembered as a distant experience involving killing fields in alien lands intersecting occasionally with the Quit India movement, Subhas Bose and the Indian National Army and the fact that Japan's marauding early victories down south-east Asia precipitated the endgame of Empire.Consciousness that India was the locus of a seminal battle of the war as also one of the world's worst humanitarian crises has only recently filtered into detailed histories. Often overlooked, however, is that after the British unilaterally committed the country to the Allied cause, India was geared for total war, involving the entire population in a giant coercive system for six years. Then too, thousands of foreigners were stationed around the country for the duration - Americans, Chinese, Australians, New Zeala

India's Second World War

A new book accesses previously archives on Russia's role in the World War I

When Russia's empire crumbled

A study of a Pariah community in colonial times underlines the persistence of lower caste alienation in modern Indian society

Once a Pariah...

A drama-filled history of the world's best-known tea

Reading beyond the tea leaves

A zamindar's son recalls the end of an era that thrived on benevolent exploitation

Sunset of the zamindars

Padraig O'Malley's The Two-State  Delusion is an impressive and frustrating book. It's impressive because Mr O'Malley, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who has written  extensively on South Africa and Northern Ireland, has done a tremendous amount of research about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He's not only delved deeply into its literature; he's also interviewed dozens of participants on both sides. The result is a book so packed with information that it will reward even the reader so dedicated that she consumes the Israel-Palestine stories buried on Page A17 of The Times.Mr O'Malley, for instance, considers at length the potential economic viability of a Palestinian state, something often overlooked by American commentators. He notes that not only does public sector employment constitute more than 50 per cent of the Palestinian Authority's budget but also that "the tax base is small" and tax "collection practices are lax." He observes as well that a Pales

Can the Israeli & Palestinian states coexist?

Amartya Sen

An extract from the economist's speech at the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival in 2014, first published in his latest book, The Country of First Boys

Amartya Sen's seven wishes for India

One of the abiding mysteries of India's horrific 200-year colonial encounter with England is the near-total absence of rancour between the peoples of the two countries. It is as if the depredations by the British never happened. The British have forgotten all about it, as they well might; and the Indians have decided to let bygones be bygones. Indeed, there is fairly large body of opinion in India that believes that the colonial experience was actually a good thing for the natives, what with all the mod-cons that the British kindly left behind - railways, ports, army, schools, hospitals, the judiciary, police and administrative apparatus and so on.I have often sought an explanation for this and one of the best I ever heard came from a newspaper baron who said Indians and the British understand each other perfectly because both love to exclude people from social groups to which they belong. India, he said, had the caste system. The British had their own equivalent of it in England. And

'Dogs and Indians not allowed'

The corporate landscape is being redrawn at an unbelievably fast rate. In 1950, an average company on the Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 was likely to stay on the index for around 60 years. In 2011, this duration was down to 18 years. Dominance no longer lasts decades; by one reckoning, three-fourths of the incumbents currently on S&P's index are likely to be replaced by 2027.Start-ups challenging incumbents and disrupting the status quo is hardly new - the Schumpeterian notion of creative destruction is, in fact, an essential part of capitalism. But the rate of churn that is taking place now is truly staggering.Traditional markets are under siege with threats to businesses springing up in the most unexpected of forms. Newspapers are struggling to deal with Twitter. Record stores are losing business to iTunes. Uber has upended the traditional taxi market. Telecom major Airtel seems more perturbed by apps like Whatsapp and Viber than by long-standing rivals like Vodafone. 3D pr

The big churn and its challenges

When we started the Takshashila Institution with the mission to build the intellectual foundations of an India that has global interests, we were confronted with a hard challenge: there are very few good textbooks and case studies on public policy written for India. Fewer still are written from India for the world. Many "textbooks" in the market seem to be published for the sole purpose of preparing undergraduate students for their university examinations. Few of these are written by practitioners. When practitioners do write books, they are more in the nature of memoirs; accounts of events past than analyses that teach subsequent generations how to think about the issues they discuss.Which is why Kishan S Rana's The Contemporary Embassy: Paths to Diplomatic Excellence stands out. It is the one of the few books that institutions like Takshashila can immediately recommend to anyone interested in international relations, whether to analyse foreign policy or, indeed, to engage in it. It i

A diplomat's textbook

When you need something short and funny to read, it helps to have a few old journalistic favourites on standby. Mine include Dave Barry's seminal Miami Herald piece "Can New York Save Itself?" and a Guardian article from 2002 in which the writer, Tim Dowling, was forced by his editors to spend a night in a trench in his backyard.Last year I relaxed the rules and added a contemporary entry to my greatest hits list. Called "Pets Allowed," it featured Patricia Marx, a New Yorker staff writer, running around town with a variety of creatures - snake, alpaca, pig, turtle, turkey - that she claimed were emotional-service pets necessary to alleviate her anxiety and distress. (She had a doctor's note.) "No animals were harmed during the writing of this article," she wrote, "but one journalist did have to get down on her hands and knees to clean her carpet."Having read that sentence, or another one describing Ms Marx's TriBeCa outing with the fake-emotional-service snake - "As I walked down Woos

Book of forgetting

Valmik Thapar has been an influential and consistent advocate for saving the tiger and wildlife, but the prescriptions in his latest book are out of sync with the needs of India's deepening democracy

Valmik Thapar's new book is like pugmarks on a familiar trail

The Word at War is written with a light touch that masks the serious hard work that Philip Gooden and Peter Lewis have done to put it together

All about 'Word' War II

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

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

Book News: Check out for latest book news, reviews, book launches and more on Business Standard. Explore now for new books reviews along with books writers and novel reviews and more.

Books News: Latest Book, Book Reviews, Book Features, Book Launches | Business Standard

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