Since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011, only one Silicon Valley titan seems to carry a similar air of dark mystique. This would be Elon Musk, currently the chief executive officer of the rocket company SpaceX as well as the electric-car company Tesla Motors. The 43-year-old Mr Musk is also chairman of SolarCity, the largest American solar power installation company. His wealth at the moment is estimated by Forbes to be around $13 billion, yet Mr Musk emigrated from South Africa to Canada at age 17 with barely enough money to feed himself, living off the kindness of Canadian relatives and working odd jobs - cleaning boilers, cutting wood - before ultimately signing up for undergraduate classes at Queen's University in Ontario. Not long after, Mr Musk switched to the University of Pennsylvania to study economics and physics. Then he moved west to Silicon Valley and began to build and sell companies. He is now, quite arguably, the most successful and important entrepreneur in the world.The

The technical vision of Elon Musk

Rarely did the left-wing Praja Socialist Party (PSP), the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Jana Sangh (BJS), and the liberal Swatantra Party ever find common ground throughout their existence. Fewer still were occasions when the survival of the Indian government in the Lok Sabha was contested due to conflicts taking place far way from India. And only once did India recognise a state and yet defer diplomatic ties for as long as 42 years. Such is the enigma of India's foreign policy towards Israel that it has been the cause of all these three rare occurrences.The Evolution of India's Israel Policy is a scholarly work in which the author Nicolas Blarel, an Assistant Professor of Political Science in Netherlands, develops a framework to explain the change in India's relationship with Israel. What he provides here is a dispassionate and analytically rigorous account of India's policy in West Asia.The objective of this work is to raise and answer some key empirical questions. Why did India not est

India's balancing act in West Asia

Business Standard

The contents of this book by A K Luke, a Gujarat cadre officer of the Indian Administrative Service (who preferred resignation in 2006 to accepting a sudden transfer) suggest that he should have been named the divine hero Hercules and not the mortal Alexander, because cleaning up the Augean stables of corruption appears to be his (self-appointed) mission in life.At the start, this reviewer must admit to some confusion. In November 2006, the local press referred to Mr Luke's departure as voluntary retirement. He himself terms it so the first time on page 280. That becomes resignation in the very next paragraph and remains so for most of the book. Respected retired members of the service have told the reviewer that the two are not quite the same. Mr Luke needed to clarify what it was that he did, especially in view of the moral tenor of the book.Mr Luke says this is neither a conventional management book nor a soliloquy.  He claims it is about ethical principles he used in running and re

Gujarat's self-styled Hercules

The First Firangis's radical thesis is that the firangis 'became Indian' through the process of adapting their bodies to an Indian environment. By adjusting to the region's weather, terrain, social rituals,etc, they underwent 'bodily transformation'

India's firangi factor

Jack Ma

This extract from a new book by Porter Erisman, a former Alibaba vice-president, explores Jack Ma's mercurial mind

Book excerpt: War on eBay

In the late 20th century, while the blue-collar working class gave way to the forces of globalisation and automation, the educated elite looked on with benign condescension. Too bad for those people whose jobs were mindless enough to be taken over by third world teenagers or, more humiliatingly, machines. The solution, pretty much agreed upon across the political spectrum, was education. Americans had to become intellectually nimble enough to keep ahead of the job-destroying trends unleashed by technology, both robotisation and the telecommunication systems that make outsourcing possible. Anyone who wanted a spot in the middle class would have to possess a college degree - as well as flexibility, creativity and a continually upgraded skill set.But, as Martin Ford documents in Rise of the Robots, the job-eating maw of technology now threatens even the nimblest and most expensively educated. Lawyers, radiologists and software designers, among others, have seen their work evaporate to Ind

When robots take over

For many reporters like me who covered the media industry in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, the polite and soft-spoken Ronnie Screwvala was our favourite dial-a-quote. He was always ready to respond on any issue and invariably provided incisive analyses that made your story richer. But as he stepped into the big boys' club and his companies grew, access to Mr Screwvala became harder, there were fewer meetings and, of course, he had acquired a plethora of experts to answer mails - formal, cryptic responses that lacked Mr Screwvala's acuity.That is probably why his book Dream with Your Eyes Open stands out. It gives you the same perceptive insights of an entrepreneur who grew at an amazing pace in the past few decades, from a toothbrush manufacturer to media baron through UTV and then exiting a large part of that business. It also stands out because, unlike many other books of the same genre, this one examines in detail his failures and the lessons from them.Biographies of successful peo

The upside of failure

The cover of Raghav Bahl's new book Super Economies: America, India, China and the Future of the World is replete with endorsements from the likes of Fareed Zakaria and Shashi Tharoor, calling it "fresh" and "insightful". But, within the first 10 pages or so, one gathers there is little within the covers to merit these glowing endorsements - which may have been, charitably, intended for the striking cover design.Ostensibly this book claims to explain the vastly changed nature of the world since the Cold War, the movement from bipolar hostility to atomic balancing -involving much more talk than fighting, largely through multilateralism or rather through small, flexible, purpose built "mini-lateral" groupings. According to Mr Bahl, the basis for much of this is apparently the emergence of the "super economy" of the 21st century, in place of the "superpower" of the 20th. This is not that clear to a reader, though - not till right at the end does the author's narrative become comprehensibl

A super confusing narrative

The Real-Life MBA is a brilliant book - but in patches. The biggest disappointment is the introductory chapter, which starts with a cheesy "Hello and congratulations" and the promise of "best learn-it-today, apply-it-tomorrow techniques" that make you wonder whether Jack and Suzy Welch have taken too long a break from writing - after all, it's a decade since their blockbuster international bestseller Winning was published.The chapter is also full of boring homilies. Sample these gems: "Create a strategy that never gets stale", "Stand still at your peril", "Reward your employees by giving them raises", "Make sure work is fun!!", etc.This over-simplification of a complex topic gets a touch of irony as well when the authors write that leaders forced to fire employees should handle it with extreme care. Irony, because one of the co-authors was nicknamed "Neutron Jack" for his repeated lay-offs during his General Electric CEO days in the early 1980s.The nickname was in reference to the neut

Patchy but brilliant from management's first couple

Free speech martyrdom ain't what it used to be in these United States.Over the past half-century, the courts have widened and re-widened the channel through which our rights to speech flow. Smut prosecutions are largely a thing of the past (with the exception of child pornography, of course). The Postal Service hasn't actively fished the mails for "obscene" novels in decades. A series of Supreme Court decisions, starting with 1964's New York Times versus Sullivan, have disarmed those who would inhibit free expression with libel suits. Another measure of free speech glory: Lenny Bruce's explicit stand-up act earned him court trouble and a four-month sentence to Rikers Island more than 50 years ago, whereas today, the same material would land him an HBO series. Finally, thanks to the internet, Americans by the hundreds of millions can create and partake of free speech with few restrictions or repercussions.Still, there's trouble in paradise, the former New York Times reporter David K Shi

American minds are still without fear

My Little Epiphanies

Two books, written two millennia apart, show how some women have the extraordinary ability to confront hardship with irony and wit

Two books about smiling through adversity

Look Who's Back, a satirical novel by the German author Timur Vermes, imagines Adolf Hitler waking up, Rip Van Winkle-style, on the streets of Berlin in 2011. He's mistaken for an actor and becomes a talk-show host and a YouTube phenomenon.Since it first appeared in Germany in 2012, the book has sold two million copies in that country, where it topped best-seller lists for 20 weeks. It has been translated into 42 languages, including Hebrew. A film version is scheduled for release in Germany this fall, and Vermes says fans are clamoring for a sequel.The book's success - especially in Germany, where it received minimal attention and some unfavorable reviews from the mainstream media - has surprised even its author, a former political reporter for German tabloids and sometime ghostwriter for "minor celebrities", as he puts it."This is something like a social experiment with two million participants; it must say something," says Vermes at a cafe in Munich.Just blocks away, the Documentati

Laughing with Hitler

Ranjit Kalha is a distinguished expert on Sino-Indian relations. He knows China well. Speaks Chinese fluently. His book, in my judgement, will have a long shelf life. I hope someone will bring it to the notice of Prime Minister Narendra Modi before he visits China in mid-May.On May 16, 1959, at the height of the Tibetan uprising, the Chinese Ambassador arrived at South Block and handed over a note, purported to be personally authored by Mao Zedong, which, though rambling in content, had a very important message for the Indian leadership. The note said, "China can only concentrate its attention eastwards of China, but not South westwards … . It seems you too cannot have two fronts … . Here lies the meeting point of our two sides." Sadly, as Mr Kalha points out, Jawaharlal Nehru brusquely rejected the offer. The stage was, thus, set for confrontation. On August 25, 1959, for the first time the Himalayas reverberated with gunfire as Chinese and Indian soldiers clashed. From that point

A convenient stalemate

Family companies score over other forms of ownership on many counts, but they have not received the deserved attention and have, in fact, been vilified for corporate nepotism and lack of professionalism

Holding the family business together

In 2015, Edward Glaeser published Triumph of the City. The central theme of that book was that "… cities magnify humanity's strengths … and that the achievements of cities - whether in Brunelleschi's Florence or Ford's Detroit - benefit the entire world". He gave his views on why cities decline or succeed with details on a number of issues from cities all over the world. Now, along with Abha Joshi-Ghani, Professor Glaeser has coedited The Urban Imperative: Towards Competitive Cities, a collection of 15 chapters commissioned under the Urbanisation Knowledge Platform launched by the World Bank in 2011. Professor Glaeser is the director for knowledge and learning at the World Bank, and Professor Joshi-Ghani the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University.The 15 chapters are written by some of the best-known of urban scholars, and contain a wealth of knowledge for those interested in details of what is happening in cities around the world. However, the book is n

Essential reading on tomorrow's cities

"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

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

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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