World War

Raghu Karnad's beautifully written account of his family's experience in the Second World War reminds us to commune with all parts of our past - as a nation and as families

Book review: The Second World War through a family's story

Business Standard

Chris Woodford's Atoms Under the Floorboards explores the science of everyday life in an engaging new way

The cool stuff about atoms: Ask your questions

Christophe Jaffrelot's book is a useful and perceptive addition to recent literature analysing Pakistan and its political, social and economic dynamics

Pakistan's puzzling resilience

30 Women in Power: Their Voices, Their Stories, is a collection of personal stories told in the words of women who did rise to the top

Women & their power equations

Here is a story of a smart politician who agreed to be the foreign minister of the rival who beat her to the top post, her seasoned, now semi-retired politician spouse and their young daughter acting in unison to promote what they called humanitarian causes abroad. You are already sick and tired of the seemingly endless Lalitgatha exposes? But I am talking not of India's Swarajs, but the Clintons of the US of A!This reviewer would be allergic to works by someone of Peter Schweizer's credentials (a hagiography of Ronald Reagan, consultant speech-writer to George W Bush, foreign policy adviser to Sarah Palin). But he is also, as the blurb claims, a meticulous researcher who uses the very astute strategy of partnering with a respectable mainstream media to air his findings. CBS did two episodes of 60 Minutes based on his Throw Them All Out, exposing insider trading in the United States Congress. The New York Times and The Washington Post published lengthy articles on the Clintons based on

Tracking the Clintons

Scion of Ikshvaku

Amish's Scion of Ikshvaku is a fast read that floats interesting concepts but ends as a simplistic exposition of profound ideas

Arundhuti Dasgupta: Rippling muscles and lean frames

More than two centuries after the ratification of the Constitution, the historian Joseph J Ellis writes in his absorbing new book, The Quartet, "a mystic haze has formed" around that document. Much as he captured the human beings behind the marble masks of the founders in earlier books, so he examines here the contingent roles that fortune, visionary ideals and pragmatic politics all played in forging a framework for the fledgling nation, a set of ideas and institutions that would become a model of representative government.Although several delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia of 1787 would later recall that "the hand of Providence" was at work, Mr Ellis reports, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison "all left town thinking they had failed to transform a confederation" of 13 quarrelling colonies - which had come together to win independence from Britain - "into a full-blooded nation."This is well-trod ground, of course. It is territory reconnoite

The 'Gang of Four' that made America

As a child, I often heard stories of the exploits of Masterda Surya Sen and his merry band from my maternal grandmother. Her father was Sen's younger brother, and the tales of the Chittagong uprising were a part of family history. By the time my grandmother was born in 1937, the uprising was over and Sen had been hanged. As it often happens with martyrs in our country, Sen was thoroughly mythologised and made into a larger-than-life character in the tales that came down to me. But neither in my grandmother's tales, nor in the passing reference to the uprising in school history text books did I find any reference to Sen's comrades Kalpana Datta or Pritilata Waddedar. It was only on reading Manini Chatterjee's Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising, 1930-34 that I learnt of the women participants in the "armoury raid".Filmmaker and writer Sagari Chhabra's In Search of Freedom: Journeys through India and South Asia attempts, with a great degree of success, to correct this historic wrong of c

Archiving herstory in the freedom struggle

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office in May 2014 there has been a renewed emphasis on India's foreign policy. Starting with his visit to Bhutan within the first few weeks of taking charge, the prime minister has met several political and business leaders from across the globe. The discourse around the issue, however, has largely veered between excessive criticism and unabashed praise, all revolving around the prime minister's "foreign trips".Amidst the din, C Raja Mohan's book Modi's World: Expanding India's Sphere of Influence provides a nuanced perspective on the government's foreign policy initiatives under Mr Modi's stewardship. The book is structured around the author's columns for The Indian Express during 2014-15, barring the introduction and the concluding chapter. Each chapter examines a particular domain of policy as it unfolded during Mr Modi's first year in office, with a review of the context and a conclusion assessing the progress and, through these, the

Narendra Modi's world view

1400 Bananas, 76 Towns & 1 Million People is a record of a journey that Samir Nazareth - after resigning his job in a multinational non-governmental organisation (NGO) involved in protecting the environment - undertakes from Bhuj in Gujarat, down the west coast of India and up the east coast to Kolkata, and thence to Darjeeling and Nathula, on the border with Tibet. He starts in the first week of March and is back home (in Nagpur) by late September, though, oddly, we are left to guess the year. The manuscript was ready in 2007 and it took Mr Nazareth seven years to find a publisher; the frequent references to the tsunami that ravaged the coast of Tamil Nadu in December 2004 and conversations with survivors indicate that the journey must have been made in 2005 or 2006.The idea, the author says in the first chapter, was to visit the lesser-known towns of coastal India and explore the regional foods in all their variety. What drives him is the prospect of ending each day with "feasts

India off the tourist track

IT is richest explanation to date about how the arrival of MP3 upended almost everything about how music is distributed, consumed and stored

How MP3 changed the music business

Coomi Kapoor presents a readable and thought-provoking personal account of the 21 months when Indira Gandhi suspended the institutions of democracy

Book review: Coomi Kapoor's latest book on Emergency really is a personal history

E L James's Grey is already the most preordered digital book of 2015

Fifty shades of fandom

Ticketless travel on buses and trains is pretty common in India. Since ticket collectors conduct random checks, many passengers choose to brave the fear of getting caught and having to pay a fine. But this is merely cheating; the ingenious thing to do is devise a strategy to minimise your losses if you are caught.One creative commuter on Mumbai's local trains devised an insurance policy to minimise the fine he and other ticketless travellers would have to incur if they got caught.The scheme was beautifully designed. Passengers would pay Rs 500 to join an organisation of ticketless travellers. If one got caught, the passenger would pay the fine and turn in his receipt to the organisation, which would refund the entire amount.Since ticket inspections are random, the chances of getting caught are low. But by lowering the penalty that "cheaters" would have to incur if they got caught, the scheme created an added incentive to travel ticketless. The inventiveness is truly remarkable and it i

Random variations on Freakonomics

The energy security debate in India is mostly centred on the county's import dependence on crude oil and other fuel, including, now, even coal, and on securing fuel sources by buying assets abroad and promoting investment in domestic production. This debate tends to overlook the challenge of providing affordable energy access to all, a topic that P C Maithani and Deepak Gupta effectively tackle in this book.The authors' experience in dealing with policy-making for renewable energy in the ministry of new and renewable energy is amply reflected in the book, which goes beyond the realm of green energy to tackle the issue of rural electrification through conventional generation as well. In the process, they highlight how misplaced definitions and targets under various government programmes have added to the problems.Maithani and Gupta rightly point out that energy access includes both electricity and cooking fuel. Globally, 1.4 billion people, over 20 per cent of the world's population, do

Renewing the energy debate

Between August 1946 and December 1947 at least one million - perhaps two - Indians killed each other. In the six years preceding, Adolf Hitler had killed off six million Jews in Europe. So the world didn't take much notice of India

India's holocaust

In November 1957, a Newsweek column called "Where Are They Now?" noted that William L Shirer, "made famous by his nightly radio reports from Berlin during the early years of the war and by his book 'Berlin Diary', has been off the air nearly 10 years and is now a writer and part-time lecturer".The item had the ring of a professional obituary. After reaching the height of celebrity, influence and wealth as a member of Edward R Murrow and CBS radio's lauded wartime broadcasting team in Europe, he was fired and later blacklisted during the Red Scare. He was so broke he could not afford to fix the furnace in his Connecticut farmhouse.Shirer spent his days tapping away on the typewriter he had set up on a table in one corner of his barn. He was hard at work on the book that would turn his reputation around for good, plunging once more into the Nazi era, many years of which he had witnessed first-hand in Berlin and Vienna: in the Austrian capital for the Anschluss, at Nuremberg for party ral

The rise, fall and rise of William Shirer

A meticulously researched biography shows that the brothers who designed and flew the world's first powered aircraft were complex individuals from an unusual family

A Wright turn for aviation

If one was looking for policy prescriptions, the book does not hold many. But if one is searching for a moral compass that should guide policy making towards a more just and equal society, then Looking Away is like a good cup of coffee one should drink to wake up

India's eyes are wide shut

Federalism is quite the flavour of the month in Indian policy circles. Partly through political action and partly thanks to the technocrats at the Fourteenth Finance Commission, the devolution of power and funds to the states has accelerated sharply in recent years. One of the purposes behind the replacement of the Planning Commission with the National Institution for Transforming India, or NITI, is purportedly a more collegial - rather than supervisory - role for the Centre.At this crucial moment arrives another in Oxford University Press' series on Indian economic policies. This volume - The Making of Miracles in Indian States: Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Gujarat - is edited by M Govinda Rao, a member of the Fourteenth Finance Commission, and Arvind Panagariya, the head of NITI. Both the subject and the editors thus must command our attention.The purpose of the three studies in the book, according to the editors, is to examine "the link between state-level policy reforms and the econom

Behind the 'miracles'

Unbound's writings tell me that there's someone, in some era, who may have thought and felt the way I do today. As Annie Zaidi's introduction eloquently puts it, 'We cannot know what to do next unless we know what we have already done, or what was done to us'

Women, in their own words

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

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

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