Combatants caught in the fog of war may often be unaware of the larger context. That perspective is usually provided by historians, with the luxury of hindsight, and the liberty to dilate and compress time frames and emphasise what they choose.But the search for a broader perspective often overshadows the subaltern. How do individuals behave in the heat and confusion of battle? How do they respond when bullets are flying and civilians are being bayoneted and raped?Although countless books have been written about the birth of Bangladesh, this is perhaps the first to collect just anecdotal accounts from individuals, Indians and Bangladeshis, who were participants in the seminal events of 1971. Liberation makes no attempt at pulling back to offer perspective in telling or retelling those stories.On December 3, 1971, after months of skirmishes and guerrilla actions, India launched a multi-pronged invasion of East Pakistan. On December 16, the Pakistani commander, lieutenant general Amir Ab

1971 relived on the battlefield

Business Standard

Jobs developed a wise, mature, deliberate executive style for which he is seldom given credit, one that helped lead Apple to glorious heights

A 'corrective' biography of Steve Jobs

An account of Sri Lanka after the 26-year ethnic war glosses over many inconvenient truths

A new book on the armed conflict in Sri Lanka misses the mark

He has been gone 67 years, as long as an average Indian's lifespan. But Mahatma Gandhi keeps turning up all the time.  He buys - everything in India (what can be a more cynical symbolism than the picture of one who abhorred material possessions gracing the country's currency notes?), votes for Tories in Britain, and general fame and respectability everywhere. He sells government programmes, education, caps and handspun fabric, and even films and books - and how! Only a few of these last are memorable (Ramchandra Guha's Gandhi before India, Joseph Lelyveld's Great Soul), some are quizzical (Ved Mehta's Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles) and the rest slip through the fissures into the abyss of indifference.  Professor Makarand Paranjape's weighty new offering, alas, falls into that category, despite the publisher's assurance of it being explosive and original.

On a Gandhi guilt trip

Across the families, two things were common when the fissures started appearing: affluence and poor family governance

Business families and their feuds

I almost gave up on this book, but the commitment to write a review made me stick with it. That decision, I can now say, has been worth it. Despite a meandering start that takes up a third of the book, it finally comes to grips with the fundamental question:  how does India make its seemingly unwieldy democracy stand up against all odds, even as its smaller neighbours find that difficult to do?It is not that the answer is dramatic, but that the quest for the answer is engaging, as Roderick Matthews takes the reader through the twists and turns of democracy in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, and comes up with valuable insights from a forest of events.For example, why was the end of imperialism in India not accompanied by a social revolution or, as Winston Churchill predicted, ruinous internal squabbles?The answer the author picks out is the non-ideological and consensual pragmatism that guided the leaders of Congress, unlike in the neighbouring countries where

India's Dharma of pragmatism

For many people, Bretton Woods stands for that rarest of moments: when governments and experts come together to restore order to a chaotic global economy. After the financial meltdown of 2008, the president of the World Bank and the financier George Soros joined Bill Clinton's and Tony Blair's earlier call for a "new Bretton Woods". It didn't happen. The world and especially America may yet come to regret that.To its admirers, many good things were achieved at the Bretton Woods conference over three hectic weeks in the summer of 1944. As the Allies made their final push to liberate Europe, 730 representatives of 44 countries gathered in New Hampshire to set the rules for the postwar economy. Crowded into the half-restored grandeur of a hotel named after nearby Mount Washington, they agreed to create two new institutions to oversee the world economy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, and to establish a managed system of exchange rates.Anchored semi-rigidly to the dol

Bretton Woods and its legacies

Mahabharata

The last two volumes of Bibek Debroy's 10-volume translation of the Mahabharata show how the story equips you to come to terms with life

Life lessons from the Mahabharata

Vir Sanghvi

Vir Sanghvi talks about his career as an 'accidental journalist, life after the Radia tapes and other controversies, and why he's moving away from conventional journalism

Lunch with BS: Vir Sanghvi

Ruskin Bond's latest book, A Book of Simple Living, as he says in the introduction, is about all the things that have brought him joy and contentment - books, companionship, laughter and a sense of humour, mist in the Himalayan valleys, monsoon rain sweeping across the hills, a whistling thrush in full-throated song, and his relationship with the natural world.He finds pleasure in simple things - a marigold growing out of a crack in a balcony, the sight of a ginger cat that curls up on his terrace every afternoon, the sound of the wind in the trees, the mellow whistle of the pygmy owlet, pellets of rain water flung in his face by the swaying branches of a cherry tree. Happiness, for him, is a mysterious thing, as elusive as a butterfly - which, if not pursued, may come and settle on one's hand.The book lives up to its sub-title too. The chapters are brief, the longest of them no more than two pages. Some are just half a page. Some are in prose, others in verse, and Bond writes in a sim

In the nature of things

The rather basic production values of this book make it better suited to placement in a railway station book kiosk than a serious bookshop. Its timing, to coincide with Barack Obama's visit as chief guest on Republic Day - the cover has clumsily executed cut-outs of Mr Obama and Narendra Modi greeting each other - suggests an opportunistic quickie. Likewise with the title, a play on one of Mr Modi's taglines that has left businessmen puzzled and hopeful at the same time.But the shabby appearance is deceptive. The co-authors of this book, who are co-founders of a relocation firm, are astute businesswomen. They have managed to gather some A-lister corporate names - such as current and former CEOs of Ford, Facebook, Microsoft, Nokia, Biocon, Tata - to offer advice on business culture for foreigners investing in India and Indian companies working with foreign investors, the kind of stuff that doesn't figure in Doing Business rankings. Messrs Manian and Huskey call it "the wisdom of the tra

Negotiating India's business culture

International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde fleetingly remarked during her recent visit to India that perhaps the IMF should have heeded the early warnings of then IMF Chief Economist and current Reserve Bank of India governor in 2003 on the potentially catastrophic consequences of complex financial products on the global economy. Little has changed since then.In the Indian context, the National Spot Exchange (NSEL) that traded in commodities without underlying physical stocks collapsed in 2013 inflicting a Rs 5,500-crore damage on allegedly 15,000 investors. NSEL operated in a regulatory vacuum between the Forward Markets Commission (FMC) and the Securities & Exchange Board of India (Sebi) and had evoked a sneer from the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram who derided market regulators for being unable to cope with financial innovators. Current Finance Minister Arun Jaitley endorsed this by announcing the marriage of the FMC with Sebi in his Budget speech this year. Indian

Derivative dangers in financial markets

Labouring up a steep sand dune outside of the Chinese city of Dunhuang, one of the major stops along the Silk Road, I doffed a metaphorical hat to the fortitude of merchants of yore who would have trudged another 800 kilometers through the Taklamakan Desert to reach the next halt of Kashgar.We tend to think of the Silk Road primarily as a trade artery connecting the fabulous silks and porcelain of China to the avid markets of Europe. Scott C Levi's slim volume, Caravans: Indian Merchants on the Silk Road, dispels this notion with a detailed account of the huge trade between the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia, which continued from early antiquity to as late as the beginning of the 20th century. The Central Asian theatre was not merely a passage along the East-West trade route, but a thriving and dynamic economic region in its own right, and Indian goods were ubiquitous in the camel caravans that traversed it. Moreover, Indian merchant communities settled down across the region, fi

Indian business links along the Silk Road

In Chinese, the region that was once the cradle of the mighty Qing dynasty is today rather prosaically known as Dongbei, the Northeast. Home to 110 million people, it has smoggy cities and bitingly cold weather. It can seem drab or worse to a visitor. But Michael Meyer has a more refined sense of history and poetry, and with his new book he seizes the opportunity to dig beneath the region's gritty surfaces.Mr Meyer's motivation for writing his book is simple. "Since 2000, a quarter of China's villages had died out, victims of migration or the redrawing of municipal borders", as the country urbanises, he notes early on, adding: "Before it vanished I wanted to experience a life that tourists, foreign students, and journalists (I had been, in order, all three) only viewed in passing."In Manchuria shifts back and forth among various genres. It is part travelogue, part sociological study, part reportage and part memoir, but it is also a love offering to Mr Meyer's wife, Frances, who grew up

The retreat of rural China

Sir George Barlow, Hay Macdowall

Almost 50 years before the 1857 rebellion, British officers of the Madras Presidency mutinied against their superior officers and plunged southern India into turmoil for three months

The little-known mutiny by British officers in Madras

Political history had once occupied high status in the teaching and study of historiography in universities and schools not only in Europe and America but also in India.  The focus of studies in political history was all-inclusive; it did not confine itself to narrations of forms of governance but also comprehensively devoted attention to society, economy, culture, architecture, art and so on. Later, the boundaries of this discipline were extended to the study and teaching of colonial conquests and expansion and peoples' struggles against colonial exploitation.Of late, however, it has become fashionable for elite historians from the Subaltern School of historiography to belittle the importance of political history; they have incorrectly alleged that the discipline is narrow in scope because it focuses on politics in a very limited sense and particularly because it ignores the reality of the "subaltern classes" and their struggles. It has been alleged that there is a real need to study

The plunder that was colonialism

The trouble with this book begins with its title - Indian News Media: From Observer to Participant.I asked myself, has Indian news media ever been an "observer"? The first newspapers in India were born to aid, abet, participate and exhort others to participate in the fight for freedom from Britain. Their whole purpose was to needle, rile and irritate our British rulers. That is why newspapers set shop and shut down with such speed. Ram Mohan Roy started the first Indian-owned English daily Bengal Gazette in 1816. When that shut down, he launched Sambad Kaumudi, which shut shop in 1823. Before that, in 1822, he started the Persian weekly Mirut-Ul-Akhbar (Mirror of News). This, too, closed eventually. Many of the top publications today, Malayala Manorama, The Times of India (TOI), Mumbai Samachar, Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) and The Hindu, among others, are all survivors of the Indian freedom struggle.And that is where my disagreement with this book begins. Usha M Rodrigues's and Maya Ran

The argumentative Indian media

The year 1971 and the word "war" have different connotations in India and Bangladesh. On our side of the border, it was the finest moment of Indian defence forces and the then prime minister Indira Gandhi. In Bangladesh, the "war" was one for liberation from Pakistan. In the aftermath of the war, there were no further expansionist expectations from the Indian political leadership, but the Bangladesh leadership that took charge of the nation faced the challenge of making the country be what people dreamt it to be in the course of the liberation movement.Yet for the major part of four decades plus that Bangladesh has been in existence, it has been, as Salil Tripathi notes, a pale shadow of Pakistan. Clearly, the legacy of the liberation war has not been as exemplary as the Indian national movement's. The manner in which the nascent Indian nation-state shaped its destiny after independence became an inspirational model for countries breaking free from colonial bondage in the 1950s and the

Bangladesh's existential challenges

One day seven years ago, while on a magazine assignment, I found myself on a boat off the coast of Ireland, bobbing in dark, heavy seas 300 feet above the slumbering wreck of the R M S Lusitania as sport divers returned triumphantly to the surface. When they came aboard, the gleeful explorers, part of a marine archaeology expedition sanctioned by the Irish government, produced a piece of history - a plastic container holding a handful of .303 rounds they'd found inside the plankton-­hazed ruins, rounds that had been manufactured in America and bought by the British to kill Germans during World War I. One of the divers peeled back the lid, and the corroded ammunition greeted fresh air for the first time in 93 years.Few tales in history are more haunting, more tangled with investigatory mazes or more fraught with toxic secrets than that of the final voyage of the Lusitania, one of the colossal tragedies of maritime history. It's the other Titanic, the story of a mighty ship sunk not by

The mystery of the Lusitania

Granta's second book on India aims at providing a subaltern perspective on the country but doesn't quite achieve that, with too many English language writers and not enough regional works forming a part of it

India: Imagined and experienced

The book glosses over all the moral complexity that, these days, books for children about animals in captivity usually embrace

Bear extraordinaire

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