A new biography asks the question but struggles for an answer

Mahendra Singh Dhoni: Is Captain Cool for real?

Business Standard

Much of history, when seen in retrospect, can take on an air of inevitability. Most susceptible to this illusion, in a way, are elections, especially wave elections. Once the results are in, and the extent of the wave is known, then it becomes as if we always knew - for we were walking through the very country that delivered the landslide, so surely we must have known.Something of that is at work already in discussions of the 2014 election. It is as if Narendra Modi's unprecedented majority in the Lok Sabha, his sweep of the north, was obvious to all even as it was happening. Books are being written in which this is the subtext. Harish Khare's How Modi Won It, therefore, is a doubly useful book: for it reminds us that while the 2014 election may not have been a close-run thing in the end, nevertheless few knew how it would turn out while it was happening. It sets out, in fact, to do precisely that. "We owe it to history," it begins, "to put winners and losers in the context of the day

What Harish Khare heard

Mihir Sharma is well-known to readers of Business Standard. His articles are incisive, sharp, hard-hitting and have a good measure of sarcasm. In his book Restart, we see one more aspect: impatience. Mr Sharma is in a hurry to cut the fluff and get to the point; to give a list of policy measures gone wrong from time immemorial and initiatives to fix them. He understands that the answers are not simple, that there are multiple pressures on policymaking and vested interests about which he writes extensively in the book. But he still believes that the way to go is to take the route of rapid and drastic reform. Reform that does not exploit the farmers and the poor; that does not stop manufacturing and industrial growth; that does not compensate farmers for parting with their land at the current rates laid out by the recent land acquisition Bill but compensates them "fairly". While he criticises successive governments for taking the middle path and not taking tough decisions, the solutions

Many panic buttons to press

A universal basic income as an anchor for the 21st century social-protection system of India is desirable, whether as an additional social protection policy or a substitute for other schemes

How cash transfers can work

As America's longest war draws to a close, journalists and diplomats, spooks and soldiers keep turning out books attempting to explain what was lost and won over the last 14 years in Afghanistan. While none so far have synthesised the disparate worlds of American civilian policy, military action and Afghan realities, the latest entry, 88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary, by Robert L Grenier, adds another on-the-ground view of how the early events actually unfolded. Mr Grenier, who retired in 2006 after 27 years with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was the station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002, with practical responsibility for Taliban-dominated ­areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan during the crucial early months of the war. The book's title refers to the period between September 11 and December 7, when an anti-Taliban tribal leader named Hamid Karzai made a perilous return to Afghanistan to rally Pashtun opposition to the Taliban, which culminated in their

How the CIA saved Karzai

The book is fascinating for its portrayal of a significant period in world history with a Punjabi princess-turned-activist as its protagonist

Book review: Sophia's choice

Wildlife 1

Wildlife 3

Wildlife 2

Valmik Thapar's book is a reminder of India's sumptuous wildlife wealth at a time when there is a steady dilution of conservation policies

Into the wild with Valmik Thapar

This is not really a book. It is a personal record room. Yet Green Signals is worth docking in your cupboard if you are trying to figure out how the suave, intelligent and light-footed Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament Jairam Ramesh occupied one of the thorniest chairs in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Cabinet and developed in the process a high profile both for himself and for the ministry he supervised - environment.To refresh memories: Mr Ramesh was the minister of state with independent charge of the environment ministry for about 25 months. Several of his Cabinet and party colleagues believed he was too independent. UPA Prime Minister Manmohan Singh kicked him out and up - to become the Cabinet minister for rural development.Mr Ramesh's book doesn't talk of this or any of the other juicy bits about his tenure. He says the book only documents what is in the written record. But, really, it's only a hasty compilation of what Mr Ramesh wrote as environment minister. He appears t

The making of an enviro-politician

Would Barack Obama have been elected President without David Axelrod?That question is less far-fetched than it may seem. To be sure, Mr Obama is a man of prodigious talents - the most magnetic presidential candidate since Jack Kennedy, whip smart, fiercely competitive, burning with passion and ambition even as ice water runs through his veins. He was going places in a hurry long before he had political advisers.Yet a strong case can be made it was the partnership he formed with Mr Axelrod and then with the campaign staff Mr Axelrod assembled that propelled him to the White House. Mr Axelrod is too self-effacing and loyal to take credit, but his new memoir, Believer: My Forty Years in Politics reinforces the view that leadership is becoming less about a single, heroic individual and increasingly about extraordinary teams.After a decade-long acquaintance, Mr Obama and Mr Axelrod first joined forces in 2002 when Mr Obama began exploring a run for the United States Senate a couple of years

Obama's 'believer'

If some of the recommendations of Criconomics are accepted, cricket might end up like baseball. Shortening the game will not address the key issue, which has nothing to do with the game itself but with TV

Regressed excess

Ever since Sachin Tendulkar called it a day from international cricket, there have been so many books on him that another one with his picture on the cover is a good enough deterrent against picking it up. Fortunately, Soumya Bhattacharya's After Tendulkar: The New Stars of Indian Cricket doesn't focus on Tendulkar. Instead, it talks about the next generation of Indian cricketers who not only follow in the footsteps of Tendulkar but also Rahul Dravid, V V S Laxman and Sourav Ganguly.The "Fab Four", as these cricketing greats were fondly called, were as good as Indian batting got or perhaps will ever get. Consider the precedents in other sports: the National Basketball Association of the United States has discovered that the hunt for the next Michael Jordan has been a futile exercise and Liverpool Football Club will find it terribly difficult to replace their inspirational skipper Steven Gerrard. Likewise, Indian cricket's new stars have found it tough to fill the boots of their illustr

Gen Next for Indian cricket

Coming from a leader who shepherded the ministry of minority affairs during the years when several debates cropped up concerning the welfare of Muslims, including the Supreme Court judgment on the Babri Masjid-Ram Janambhoomi dispute, the book under review had the potential of stirring a controversy or two. But it manages to avert that possibility even though it takes a firm stance on several contentious issues.The book walks a tightrope by essentially reworking an older work. This has resulted in the author's decision to examine ghosts of the past, leaving the demons of today to, hopefully, be considered in time to come. That is perhaps why the two sections of the book, "Today" and "Yesterday", are of notably disparate length. "Today" takes up less than a quarter of the book, but "Yesterday" is voluminous. The problem with this approach is that the author unravels events more than a quarter of a century ago, but does not factor in developments on the same issue in the subsequent 25 ye

Being Muslim in India

An Unfinished Agenda should be compulsory reading for all those who want to know how India became a supplier of inexpensive medicine to the whole worldThere is never a dull moment for journalists on the pharmaceutical beat: this is where high science and innovation meet intense regulation and cut-throat corporate rivalry. Kallam Anji Reddy (1940-2013) was an insider, having been a part of the pharmaceutical industry all his adult life, first as an employee of state-owned Indian Drugs & Pharmaceuticals and then as the owner of Dr Reddy's Laboratories. Reddy's autobiography, published almost two years after he died of cancer, offers good insight into how the industry evolved over the last five decades: from the absolute dominance of multinationals in the 1960s to their absolute decimation in the 1970s and the 1980s once the patent regime turned against them, and then to the new order after 2005, where there is a level playing field for all.No less amazing is Reddy's personal journey,

Medicine Man

Nuclear terrorism has long been a staple of movies and television shows. But typically, Hollywood productions end with the bomb being defused. What would happen if heroes didn't save the day and the United States experienced the worst 24 hours in its history?That is the important question Benjamin E Schwartz, a career government official who has worked at the Departments of State, Defense and Energy, sets out to answer in his clunkily titled first book, Right of Boom. ("Right of boom" is government-speak for "after an explosion".) His analysis begins with a fictional narrative that unfolds in a flat, matter-of-fact tone: "On an otherwise calm and uneventful morning, a small nuclear weapon explodes in downtown Washington, D.C. ... The casualty count rises to over a hundred thousand, and the destruction is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars."Mr Schwartz rather arbitrarily assumes that the president is out of town at the time of the explosion, along with other key officials. They

When nuclear terrorists strike

Bad taste or good is not a uniform entity but a malleable force governed by social parameters

Let's talk about  taste

It was in a little house in a slum district of London in 1931 that two little men, who were clearly among the most famous people in the world, met. One of them was leading the struggle for India's independence through his unconventional ways. The other was using the medium of films to become the silent voice of the underdog and the working class. But apart from that, there wasn't really much that the two - Mahatma Gandhi and Charlie Chaplin - knew about each other. Some accounts, in fact, suggest that Gandhi hadn't even heard of Chaplin, while others say he wasn't really interested in meeting him.So then what did these two men talk about when they met? And how did this meeting change them, if at all it did? Sitting in the pages of Thomas Weber's Gandhi at First Sight is a first-hand account of that curious meeting in the words of Chaplin.Gandhi at First Sight is a delightful compilation of 49 such first-person accounts of first meetings with - and first impressions of - the Mahatma. Am

Meeting the Mahatma

It is, of course, a well-known fact that nobody ever actually reads the books by which they wish to be outraged. We live in an age of outrage, in which mobs, the law and the courts can be mobilised to prevent the release of just about any act of creativity. Still, there have been few examples of the complete and utter pointlessness of this approach, the colossal stupidity that undergirds this mechanism of suppression, as the long fracas that surrounded The Red Sari, by Javier Moro.The Red Sari is a "dramatised biography" of Sonia Gandhi. It has, at long last, been released - many years after legal threats from the Congress first kept it from our shelves. Naturally, now that it's been permitted into bookshops, they can barely keep it in stock. Clearly, the fascination with the Gandhi family is intact, whether or not the Congress itself is over as a political force.The book has been helped along by being the lightest possible confection, a sugary version of recent history that skims over

The beatification of Sonia Gandhi

Chinese numerology claims "4" is unlucky. Is belief in this superstition self-fulfilling? An American study says so. Apparently, people of Chinese origin are more likely to suffer heart attacks on the fourth day of every month. Another study asserts that people with initials that make up nice acronyms (such as "ACE") do better than people with "nasty" initials (such as "GAS").Academic research can be directed in many unusual directions. But every branch of science, and most of the social sciences, relies on the correct handling of data. The cross-disciplinary reliance on crunching of data in multiple ways has led to many insights. But it can also lead to absurd conclusions such as in the studies described above, which all involved convoluted methodology and cherry-picking.Poor statistical logic or flawed methodology can cause more subtle errors. This book describes many cases where data were badly handled, or deliberately falsified, and some cases where those data were brilliantly anal

The fault is not in our stats

Guantánamo Diary is the most profound account yet written of what it is like to be that collateral damage

The Gitmo connection

As a fledgling artist, Vincent van Gogh hired a carpenter to build a perspective frame: a wire-grid window. He used it to draw the Dutch countryside, his eyes darting between his pencil and the views through the frame. A few years later, van Gogh suffered a spate of psychiatric crises that sent him to an asylum in Saint Remy, France. There his bedroom's barred window doubled as a new perspective frame, albeit one with only verticals, through which he sketched the wheat field below.This "wrenched him out of orthodox perspective," Julian Bell writes in Van Gogh: A Power Seething, a new biography as brief and intense as his subject's life. A painter as well as a writer, Bell takes full measure of van Gogh's use of this imposed device. His skewed panorama "made plain his own tangential, left-sided relation" to the land, "even while thrusting the stuff of the crop dynamically forward." It was a breakthrough. In what could easily be the book's epigraph, Bell writes: "The painter may be in he

Up close with Van Gogh

Pakistan, peculiarly, represents the best and worst of cricket. Over the years, its players have exhibited an unmatched hunger for success but are not averse to a bit of individual profiteering, whether in terms of sporting achievement or material gains

On test, always

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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