The author compiles a list of the most eagerly awaited books next year

What to read in 2015

Business Standard

On February 24, 1988, when a 14-year-old curly-haired kid took the crease for Shardashram Vidya Mandir against St Xavier's High School in the semi-final of the Harris Shield, the face of Indian cricket changed forever. "The boy is called Sachin Tendulkar," groundsmen at the two nurseries of Bombay cricket - Shivaji Park and Azad Maidan - would tell spectators who would drop by to see the wunderkind bat. The name Tendulkar was well known in Bombay (now Mumbai) cricket circles, but that afternoon at Azad Maidan catapulted the young boy to national stardom. Little did we know that these nine letters would go on to form the most iconic name in the history of Indian sport.Exactly two months shy of his 15th birthday, Tendulkar decimated the bowling attack that February afternoon, scoring a stupefying 326 not out. While Tendulkar was busy whacking the cricket ball to all parts of the ground and Indian cricket was discovering its new poster boy, careers of upcoming, aspiring batsmen from acros

How Sachin created a cricket humourist

At a time when religious faith is coming under intense scrutiny, The Norton Anthology of World Religions is presenting a documentary history of six major faiths with sufficient editorial explanation to make their major texts intelligible across the barriers of time and space. This second volume in the series is a textual overview of the three monotheisms - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - from the early scriptures to contemporary writings. It is presented as a journey of exploration, but any reader who hopes to emerge from this literary excursion with a clear-cut understanding of these religions will be disappointed - and that is the great strength of this book.First, the selected Jewish writings show that contrary to some popular assumptions, religion does not offer unsustainable certainty. The biblical story of the binding of Isaac leaves us with hard questions about Abraham's God, and later, when Moses asks this baffling deity for his name, he simply answers: "Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh", w

Monotheism's nuanced uncertainties

By the end of the 19th century, almost all the major surviving classics of Greek and Roman literature had been translated into English. Since then a few new gems have turned up, mainly from papyri found in the rubbish dumps of the Egyptian town Oxyrhynchus. It is unlikely, however, that many more great works of classical European literature will surface; the canon of ancient European literature we have now is likely to remain largely unchanged a century hence.It is often assumed that the same is true for the other great classical literatures of the world, but this is very far from the case. In particular, the rich treasures of ancient Indian literature remain almost completely unexplored, even to those few who can read languages such as Sanskrit or classical Tamil. For there survives in manuscript form in libraries across South Asia a corpus of literature which is, at a conservative estimate, a thousand times larger than what has survived in Greek. Only a very small proportion of these

Sacred histories

"Old soldiers never die, they just fade away," said General Douglas MacArthur in his farewell address in 1951. But old high officials write books instead of fading away. They often hit the jackpot of best-sellerdom and sometimes even act as valuable deus ex machina explaining the labyrinths of politics and governance. Some become, or attempt to be, tell-all exposes. Others just amble along, saying little but in a pleasing manner.  Most Indian attempts are of the last category, but few are good reads.We have been treated to a surfeit of these last lately. The former foreign minister Natwar Singh leads the pack with his far from dramatic revelations barely camouflaging attempts at justification of acts of his heroine, Indira Gandhi (and, en passant, himself).  Sanjaya Baru's account of his years as former prime minister Manmohan Singh's media advisor led to a short-lived debate, but added little to what the reader knew or suspected.The president of the Republic, Pranab Mukherjee, is the

The President's meandering memories

An exquisitely illustrated book documents the seminal role European Jews played in the flowering of India's modern art movement in the early 20th century, demonstrating how outside impulses and influences enriched Indian art and artists

Book Review: Indian heritage and its Jewish influences

Readers of a certain age may remember The Great Escape, the sensational story of the breakout of 70-odd Allied airmen from a Nazi prison camp in 1944, in two ways. One, the 1963 movie with its stellar cast of a young Richard Attenborough and an even younger Charles Bronson (those fascinating wrinkles were yet to show) and the delectable Steve McQueen on the cusp of his fame. Two, the classic book by Paul Brickhill, on which the movie was loosely based (my dog-eared second-hand copy notes that Faber and Faber Ltd first published it in "mcmli", that is, 1951, though this edition with stills from the film was published in "mcmlxiii").During World War II, thousands of Allied prisoners of war (POWs) escaped Axis prison camps, as they felt duty-bound to do, by methods ranging from outright bribery to ingenious techniques and schemes. Most were caught and suffered long periods in solitary confinement for their pains (not that this deterred anyone). Some made it back to base, thanks to the Res

A greater escape

'I don't march in step. I don't ask people to trample all over me because it might make them feel better. That's not who I am.'

KP off the bat

To defend Pakistan in the court of public opinion is a task so difficult that only the most skilful of defence counsels would attempt it. In The Struggle for Pakistan the historian Ayesha Jalal takes on the task. She valiantly defends not only Jinnah and the idea of Pakistan, but "actually existing Pakistan". Professor Jalal fails to mount a satisfactory defence, but then that is not entirely her fault; finding endless external scapegoats for Pakistan's problems is not that easy when writing a rigorous history. What is her fault, I suppose, is the belief that a history of Pakistan must necessarily also be a defence.The Struggle for Pakistan is cleverly named. The title links the Muslim League's agitation under Jinnah to the struggles for the country's "soul" after Partition and independence. The not-so-subtle link is one beloved of a certain sort of Pakistani nationalist: that Jinnah's struggle for a secular Muslim state is still for some (to them, incomprehensible) reason incomplete.A

Pakistan's defence lawyer

Just after finishing Karen Armstrong's new book, I happened to hear a discussion on television about the latest outbreak of violence in West Asia. "We have to hope that this disagreement stays on the political level, rather than becoming a religious dispute," one of the experts said. "Political differences can be resolved. Religious ones cannot."Fields of Blood can be thought of as a long, wide-ranging and overall quite effective rebuttal to the outlook expressed in that comment. "In the West, the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident," Ms Armstrong says on the book's first page. It follows that the main hope for peace is to keep faith and statecraft separate.Ms Armstrong, a one-time Roman Catholic nun and the author of several influential works on religion including A History of God, argues that this is an incorrect diagnosis leading to a flawed prescription. The page-by-page detail of the book is much of the reason to read it, but if

Religions aren't violent, states are

Many people initially claimed authorship of the idea of declaring the Emergency only to repudiate their claims when the Shah Commission was set up, writes Pranab Mukherjee who had a ringside view of those seminal years for Indian democracy, in this excerpt from The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years, the first of a trilogy of the President's long career in politicsA few minutes before midnight on 25 June 1975, the President of India, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, proclaimed a 'State of Emergency' under Article 352 of the Constitution. I was in Calcutta for my Rajya Sabha election, scheduled for 26 June, and got to know of this development on the morning of the 26th. Indira Gandhi asked me to return to Delhi as soon as the election was over and meet her at the earliest. D P Chattopadhyaya - who was then the Minister of State for Commerce and also in Calcutta for the Rajya Sabha election - told me he had received similar summons from Delhi.I got to the assembly building at about 9.30 a.m.

1975: 'Shock treatment'

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, one question frequently asked is whether or not we can trust the issuer of money, which is the government. In the latest episode, the financial system, which was largely unregulated, made serious mistakes. Governments chipped in with quantitative easing programmes to bail it out. As a counterbalancing act, governments had to cut their spending on programmes that were directed at the common man. Is this fair?In this interesting and enjoyable book, Nigel Dodd delves into the sociological aspects of money and puts the pieces together to explain why alternatives to state-issued money could be the future. He argues that the rise of internet money or Bitcoins is primarily a response to the growing impatience with the generator of money.After all, what is money? It is something that is accepted by everyone for conducting transactions. Should this be the prerogative of the government? How do we move this domination away from governments, which h

The end of state money?

If the French painter Paul Cezanne understood that to see is to question, not to believe, as BBC News arts editor Will Gompertz has put it, then perhaps Raymond Williams understood that to speak is to confound, not to explain. That might not have been a new idea to philosophers when Williams' Keywords, a cultural contemplation on some of the more popular words that the British were using then, appeared in 1976, but it opened a new way of seeing for those studying how language shaped culture. In fact, Williams went a step ahead of the philosophers by deciding that "the emphasis of my own analyses is deliberately social and historical". And though the Cambridge Marxist took the venerable Oxford English Dictionary as his point of departure, he also realised that "especially for words which involve ideas and values, [looking up a dictionary] is not only an impossible but an irrelevant procedure". In Keywords for Modern India Craig Jeffrey and John Harriss bring to our contemporary use of E

Indian English as she is spoke

Kirstin Downey credits Isabella with instituting a 'shift from medieval to modern management principles'

The warrior queen who transformed Europe

B N Goswamy

B N Goswamy, the pre-eminent scholar of Indian miniature painting tells Sunil Sethi that an art historian's life is not all swotting in libraries, but requires the resilience of a camp commander

Lunch with BS: B N Goswamy, Art Historian

This magisterial biography gamely searches for the "inner woman" in Britain's longest-reigning monarch and one-time Empress of India

The enigma that is 'Rani Bhikteria'

"I am not a gentleman, I am a communist," Ashok Mitra had shot back at a bureaucrat in the late 1970s. This was to become the signature riff of his persona of an angry, an uncompromising and a radical Marxist. In real life, Mr Mitra is a communist and a gentleman. At his high-rise home in an upscale neighbourhood in Calcutta, as it was originally known, he would personally serve tea to visitors, listen patiently, dismiss praise with an air of self-deprecation and see guests off at the elevator.In an eventful career, Mr Mitra has worn many hats: economist, administrator, politician, activist. But what has endured is his dexterity as a rare bilingual - Bengali and English - writer of eloquence and insight, sometimes lapsing into dreadful polemic, but almost always readable. Political economist T J Byres described Mr Mitra as a "puritan" with a "conscience deeply offended by the poverty, squalor, inhumanity and injustice which are rampant in India".This collection of 46 essays that he wr

An angry communist gentleman

Jeeves placed great emphasis on understanding "the psychology of the individual" as he found ways to resolve romantic entanglements for his employer's circle. Saurabh Mukherjea similarly emphasises the role psychological orientation plays in generating consistent, high, long-term equity returns.The tools investors employ are not rocket science. It takes relatively little time to learn the basics of balance sheet-based research. But even so, while many people know the standard methods, few manage to beat the market.The ones who do beat the market may differ in their focus, and in the weight they place on specific ratios. For example, some are value investors looking for a margin of safety, others seek growth, others look for businesses with "moats" of competitive advantages and so on.But they all have certain psychological traits in common. They have the ability to be contrarian and think independently. They exhibit patience, confidence in their own judgement and, counter-intuitively, a

Money-making psychology for the markets

Tom Standage's Writing on the Wall starts from the premise that social media is not something new.Ancient Roman towns' houses' walls bustled with written messages the same way as Facebook's walls do today.The walls were smeared with sex talk and toilet humour that are similar to what we see, and perhaps enjoy, on Facebook: "I screwed a lot of girls here"; "Celadus the Thracian gladiator makes all the girls sigh"; "Secundus defecated here"; "The man I am having dinner with is a barbarian"; "Atimetus got me pregnant"; "Samius to Cornelius: go hang yourself!"; "Virgula to her friend Tertius: you are disgusting!"; "Sarra, you are not being very nice, leaving me all alone like this".Much like modern social networks, the Romans would also respond to messages. Sample this: "Successus, a weaver, loves the innkeeper's slave girl named Iris. She, however, does not love him. Still, he begs her to have pity on him. His rival wrote this: 'Bye, loser!' The response: 'Envious one, why do you get in t

History re-tweets itself

The bedrock claims of Putin's Kleptocracy are that the essential character of Vladimir Putin's system is colossal corruption and that he is a prime beneficiary

Kleptocrat in the Kremlin

It came as a great surprise to Lev Golinkin when he discovered, at the age of nine, that there was more than one town named Lafayette in the United States.It mattered to him quite a bit, since the Golinkins - Lev and his older sister, Lina, along with their parents and a grandmother - were en route to that very place, wherever it was, from Vienna, their first stop after fleeing the Soviet Union in late 1989."I found Lafayette ... again," he announced after further study of his atlas. His family, which was just getting used to the idea of settling in Louisiana, was stunned. "Are you joking?" Lina asked. "How can there be two?"Easily, it turned out. "They were everywhere," Mr Golinkin writes in A Backpack, a Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka, his hilarious and heartbreaking story of a Jewish family's escape from oppression. "I found them in the mountains, I found them on the plains, I found them tucked into little forgotten corners. Ohio had two - in the same state! How do these people fun

Fleeing Ukraine with little more than wit

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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