"Worlds may freeze and suns may perish, but there stirs something within us now that can never die again. ... A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars."The year was 1902 and the speaker was H G Wells, triumphantly concluding a presentation to the Royal Institution of Great Britain. On the heels of his popular work of futurism, Anticipations, the institution's fellows had invited Wells to talk about what awaited the world in the new century. He chose to look much further and prophesied that our descendants would someday abandon our planet for the depths of space.It's easy to see why Wells was so optimistic and why the fellows were so enthralled. Science and engineering were rapidly transforming the world before their eyes. It was being mechanised, electrified and globalised

Because man's reach should exceed his grasp

India and China, the two "super economies" in the making, are the subjects of a new book by Raghav Bahl. In this excerpt, he explains how the Indian diaspora scores over the Chinese in integrating with other communities in the US

The adaptable Indian

Business Standard

Chile is perhaps the only place in the world where "September 11" does not evoke images of people jumping out of flaming towers. Instead, Chileans remember jets bombing the presidential palace, and they recall civilians being herded into sports stadiums and shot.That "other 9/11" was in 1973. The government of Salvador Allende was wiped out in a violent coup (Golpe). Thousands died. General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte took over. This book, which consciously channels Gabriel Garcia Marquez (not just in the title), describes the coup, the events leading up to it and the aftermath.The coup was backed by the CIA. A host of multinational corporations sighed with collective relief when it succeeded. Allende had vowed not to be taken alive. Pinochet had said if Allende was captured, the junta would fly him out on a plane which would "fall in mid-flight".  While the palace was under attack, Allende committed suicide, shooting himself with an AK-47 gifted by Fidel Castro. (A 2009 autopsy confirmed

The other September 11

A man who has walked around for months wearing a "uterus" filled with goat's blood to test his sanitary napkin prototype on himself...A phone-in news service which is transforming how news is communicated across remote rural areas...A group of students from an elite Delhi University college, who are helping Delhi's manual scavengers earn an alternate livelihood by manufacturing and selling detergent… Recasting India, the new book from Hindol Sengupta - an "editor-at-large" with Fortune magazine - tells the stories of 10 such people. It builds the thesis that crazy individuals and unconventional business plans are slowly but surely transforming remote parts of India by providing reasons for hope, in a way that socialism has failed to do in all these years. Based on his concept of "Per Capita Hope", which he believes often gets obscured by a "narrow focus on GDP" - Mr Sengupta makes the interesting assertion that the transformation of India is taking place not in the steel and glass ci

Too much per capita hype

When Kabir, one of Varanasi's most famous and accomplished residents, died, his followers bickered over his body; or so goes the local lore. The Hindus claimed him as one of their own, and wanted to cremate him while Muslims wanted him buried. A heated quarrel ensued.  But when each group eager to perform the last rites as they thought fit, lifted his shroud, they found no body, only a heap of flowers. The story, its authenticity now buried in layers of time, is symbolic not only of the syncretic culture that has flourished here, for centuries, but also the ubiquity of death in Varanasi. Kaleidoscope City captures this and more, eloquently and with a great deal of understanding.Death is everywhere in Varanasi and it can be an unnerving experience for any visitor to the city, especially when one encounters the burning ghats for the first time. But the author, who by his own admission was once was shocked by the ghat fires that never went out, manages to make sense out of the celebratory

Fire & ash

Clinton Cash is proving the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle still in its infancy

Cheques for the Clintons

In a retelling of Julius Caesar's assassination, a leading expert on ancient military history seduces readers with a wealth of detail

A tangled skein from ancient Rome

What happens to Mugil? I wanted to call Rohini Mohan and ask her urgently after I had turned the last page of her book The Seasons of Trouble. That is how engrossed I had become in the lives of Mugil, Sarva and his mother, Indra, the three people through whom Ms Mohan tells us the stark reality of living through the 26-year civil war that tore Sri Lanka apart, and the long shadows of its aftermath. Released late last year, the book is a remarkable work of narrative non-fiction born of five years of reportage by a political journalist. Through the experience of the three lead characters, she skilfully draws us into a world of uncertainty, violence and trauma and the scars it leaves on each.Ms Mohan, however, chooses to be an invisible presence and lets her three protagonists build the narrative.  Through Mugil, whom she first met in a refugee camp in 2009, we get a glimpse into the life of a dedicated member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Mugil was 13 when she joined th

Living through civil war

Front page headlines of jaw-dropping venture capital investments are common in the business press these days. This was not the case 25 years ago, when the term venture capital itself would invite quizzical looks.To Venture & To Build by T Thomas, former chairman of Hindustan Unilever in India (then Hindustan Lever), is the story of Indus Venture Funds, perhaps the first venture fund to start in the early days of post-liberalisation India.The businesses then were mostly old economy and small in scale. They ranged from "recovery of lube oil base stock from waste oil to integrated processing of cotton knitted fabric". There were a few information technology companies too but generations away from the giants we know today.Many of the businesses skidded because of policy and tariff shifts and, indeed, there were many those days. Added to this were high capital costs, challenging infrastructure and a generally tough, unfriendly environment for setting up or running a business.Mr Thomas'

Lessons from an early venture capitalist

For college students or those in senior school - and for many like me who want to refresh their memories - this potted account of India's recent political history is a must read. It is tailor-made for the time-challenged younger generation: lucidly written, almost like a racy novel, and its 137 pages in large print require just about two hours to read. Yet the reader is guaranteed to emerge the richer for it since the book captures a critical era of Indian politics from the 1970s to Narendra Modi's election.The book began life as a television serial on Indian politics that the author, Vir Sanghvi, was anchoring on the 9X channel. Watching the entire serial requires seven hours, but Mr Sanghvi realised that it contained enough material - plus his own three decades of writing and interviewing as a journalist - that could not necessarily be used in the TV show to produce a book on the subject.Mr Sanghvi makes it clear that this is no profound academic tome; instead, he offers a journalist

How India's democracy came of age

"Soon enough," Alice Dreger writes at the beginning of her romp of a book, "I will get to the death threats, the sex charges, the alleged genocides, the epidemics, the alien abductees, the anti-lesbian drug, the unethical ethicists, the fight with Martina Navratilova and, of course, Galileo's middle finger. But first I have to tell you a little bit about how I got into this mess."As is so often the case, what got Ms Dreger into trouble was sex. A historian of science and medicine, she criticised a group of transgender activists who had attacked a sex researcher for his findings on why some people want to change gender. Having hounded the researcher mercilessly, the activists attacked Ms Dreger, too. The bad news is that this was hard on Ms Dreger. (More on that momentarily. For now, I'll just note they called her son a "womb turd".) The good news is that from this mess emerged not only a sharp, disruptive scholar but this smart, delightful book.Galileo's Middle Finger is many things: a

Facts are sacred

Flood of Fire

Amrita Shah

Unbound

Harper Lee

On the Move

Midnight's Furies

A preview of some upcoming books to pack for the summer vacations

6 books to watch out for this summer

The author seeks to make intelligible connections among all moving parts of a megacity, with the help of characters - some unique and some like the boy next door

A megacity and its masses

The author, a former vice-president at JPMorgan in New York, writes in the introduction to Coined that his interest in money was sparked by the financial crash of 2008, which created in him an obsession to understand money. However, as he began researching the subject, it became apparent to him that to look at money through a traditional economic lens "belies the full range of what money means to us".That is the reason for Mr Sehgal's approach of coining multiple ways of thinking about money. He brings in behavioural economics (the psychology of people when making economic decisions), neuroeconomics (the examination and interpretation of brain scans of people while they make financial decisions), and even the manner in which organisms conduct exchange to survive (money is a medium of exchange, after all).The book is divided into three parts - "Mind", "Body" and "Soul". In Mind, Mr Sehgal asks why humans use money, and deploys biology, psychology and anthropology to find answers, even t

Money: mind, body and soul

Entire library shelves already groan under the weight of civil-military relations textbooks that try to explain a fascinating paradox: the contrast between the Indian and Pakistani armies. Despite their similar origins and organisation ethos, how did the former remain scrupulously apolitical while the latter evolved into a byword for military meddling in politics?Given the brainpower already applied to this question, one might imagine the last word had already been said. But Steven I Wilkinson, who is Nilekani Professor of Indian and South Asian Studies at Yale University, breaks fresh ground in zooming in on a structural fault line that he says largely explains the Pakistan Army's penchant for political intervention. Mr Wilkinson focuses on the ethnic imbalance within that army, where Punjabis form a large majority. A well-recognised tenet of civil-military relations holds that a military recruited predominantly from a narrow segment of the populace tends to become guardian of certain

That meddlesome Punjabi army

The Story briefly sketches Ms Judith Miller's early life before devoting itself to a more detailed description of her career

A reporter's mea culpa on Iraq

The Fall of the Ottomans

Third Battle of Krithia

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

A new book about the Great War looks at the less-discussed Eastern Front with a fresh perspective

End of an empire and the roots of the West Asian malaise

Following the events of the Arab Spring, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes in her latest book, Heretic, she came to the conclusion that "ordinary Muslims are ready for change." Hirsi Ali has strong thoughts on what form that change should take for Muslims: a major overhaul of their religion. "Without fundamental alterations to some of Islam's core concepts," she says, "we shall not solve the burning and increasingly global problem of political violence carried out in the name of religion."That may sound incendiary, but for Hirsi Ali, who has renounced her own Muslim faith, the idea that Islam should and could be reformed is practically conciliatory. Until recently, she tells us, she believed "the best thing for religious believers in Islam to do was to pick another god."How Hirsi Ali came to denounce her faith was the basis for her earlier book, the global best seller Infidel, a sharp polemic against Islam nestled inside a rich literary memoir. That book transported readers to Somalia, where Hirs

Islam's heretic

Lance Price puts in a few broad strokes of Mr Modi's earlier incarnations from a chaiwalla to CM of Gujarat before getting into campaign 2014

Lonely Planet guide to Election 2014

Ron Adner's Wide Lens (2012) looked at innovations, why they succeed and why successful innovations could be business failures. He used a series of cases to build a story that was coherent and consistent. Theory-building, like innovation, is a difficult area. Innovation by definition should break the status quo and the existing understanding. Therefore, an attempt to find the "principles" of innovative business should be lauded for its courage.In doing so, the authors usually expect to decipher a pattern that can be applied on an untested area. Based on the principles, we should be able to predict success. An easier path, however, would be to put the principles upfront, or develop principles from a handful of instances and then populate each principle with multiple examples, even if the example that illustrates principle one contradicts principle six. Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu have written another book, Frugal Innovation, that follows their highly successful first book, Jugaad Inn

Frugal theories

How can the interest rate policy alone tackle the problem when what is required is supply management?

Monetary policy in a bind

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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