Rajiv Bajaj & Sanjiv Bajaj

Family feuds do not just tear businesses apart, they shape them, says the author in his latest book that brings the inside stories of some of India's most high-profile business battles. An excerpt

Business Battles by Shyamal Majumdar

Business Standard

Rick Perlstein always hoped his book on the rise of Ronald Reagan would set off serious debate among scholars and historians. Just not this debate.Perlstein's new 856-page book, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, is proving to be almost as divisive as Reagan himself. It has drawn both strong reviews from prominent book critics, and sharp criticism from some scholars and commentators who accuse Perlstein of sloppy scholarship, improper attribution and plagiarism.The most serious accusations come from a fellow Reagan historian, Craig Shirley, who said that Perlstein plagiarised several passages from Shirley's 2004 book, Reagan's Revolution, and used Shirley's research numerous times without proper attribution.In two letters to Perlstein's publisher, Simon & Schuster, Shirley's lawyer, Chris Ashby, cited 19 instances of duplicated language and inadequate attribution, and demanded $25 million in damages, a public apology, revised digital editions and the de

Reagan book sets off debate

V Krishnamurthy, who steered Maruti in its initial years, says he wanted to share the many management ideas he introduced to turn around state-owned companies. But there aren't many earth-shattering management concepts in At the Helm

God in the details

Jeremy Seabrook uses the textile industry and the cases of Dhaka and Lancashire to illustrate that evolution can also follow a circular path

Dhaka's 'Lancashire' experience

At the 1955 Afro-Asian Relations Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote "Sudan" on his handkerchief to fashion a makeshift flag to celebrate the African nation's imminent independence. Nehru and Indira Gandhi had visited Port Sudan in 1938, while Mohandas Gandhi had dropped by three years before in 1935. India's first chief election commissioner, Sukumar Sen, oversaw Sudan's first multi-party elections in 1953, and India opened a liaison office in Khartoum two years later.A half-century later, in 2003, then deputy prime minister L K Advani stood at the Mangalore harbour as the oil tanker Sea Falcon delivered 600,000 barrels of Nile blend crude from ONGC Videsh Ltd (OVL)'s oil block in Sudan. "This is not imported oil," Mr Advani reportedly said. "This is India's oil."In The New Kings of Crude: China, India, and the Global Struggle for Oil in Sudan and South Sudan, Luke Patey details the corporate battles and diplomatic manoeuvring that made OVL and the China National

India, China and crude politics

Robert J Mayhew's Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet - the title notwithstanding - is not really about Thomas Robert Malthus or his life. It's about Malthusianism - the context in which it arose, the manner in which it was received and the manifold ways it has lived on.This Malthusianism is best summed up in two sentences from the man himself, in the 1798 first edition of his "Essay on the Principle of Population": "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio."Others later expanded the focus from subsistence (that is, food) to fossil fuels, and more recently to the entire planet and its atmosphere. But the idea that nature has limited carrying capacity and that in our reproducing and our consuming we risk running up against that limit remains central.Other ideas have also taken the name Malthusian. Decades after Malthus' death, birth-control advocates in Britain called themselves the Malthusian Lea

Malthus and Malthusianism

More than a year after the Uttarakhand floods, journalist Hridayesh Joshi seeks some answers

The saga of the Uttarakhand deluge retold

James Montague falls off the map to capture an aspect of football that is outside the perception of most global fans

Agonies and ecstasies of football's outsiders

A poor education is boring in a dinner companion. In a parent it is unfortunate. It can make your eyes bleed in a clerk who can find four different ways to misspell your name. It is chilling in a notary whom you catch entering the number of a visa stamp instead of the passport as identification. It is shocking in a court judgment that turns out to include random pages cut and pasted from some other case. But in the classrooms of a large country with a huge, job-hungry, unpleasantly polarised population that is increasingly encouraged to express its feelings via violent tantrums, it is downright dangerous.A poor education teaches children disdain, excessive pride, exclusionary or majoritarian thinking, outright fiction in place of facts, and an inability to tolerate dissent or to think for themselves.Dina Nath Batra, whose devotion to education is built on a bedrock of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, "values", is best known as the octogenarian who successfully said boo to Penguin a

Mitali Saran: Back to school

Early in his travels across Sri Lanka, Samanth Subramanian stops at a school outside Kandy, a few hours' drive from Colombo, where police have called a meeting of local residents. When he asks what the meeting is about, he is told it is about the "Grease Yakas". This evocative sounding label applies to a strange phenomenon of men "daubing themselves with grease and attacking women in the countryside at night". These incidents happen primarily in Tamil areas in the east and near Jaffna. Even though there is no proof of who is behind them, it is widely believed that they can't, of course, be supernatural devils, or yakas. But the consternation continues: "Had the Grease Yakas really affixed springs to the soles of their shoes, to enable them to leap over bushes and stiles?"Who the Grease Yakas are is never explained, and so they hang like a metaphorical question mark over Sri Lanka in the aftermath of its decades-long, very uncivil war that ended in May 2009. The question is answered af

Between the devils and a hard place

Mr Tommy Koh's essays will surely appeal to the Asian fraternity, including India, which respects Singapore's tiny-but-feisty presence in the region

Singapore's 'accidental diplomat'

Ankit Fadia is now contemplating authoring a fiction novel "with a big computer hacking element to it" targeting the Indian readers in a couple of months

Now, Ankit Fadia plans to pen a fiction novel

The authors say that in business it can be easy to get so enamoured with your growth strategy that you forget to step back

Core competency is back in fashion

I once met a man with magic in his pocket. He was a former hairdresser named Maurice Ward, and the magic was a material he invented called Starlite. He said it was one of the most astonishing thermal barriers in the world and had been tested in high-profile labs, including a British atomic weapons facility, where it withstood several simulated nuclear flashes. Despite its dizzying potential - fireproof airplanes, laser-resistant tanks - Starlite never ventured far out of Ward's pocket, because he refused to sell or reveal its recipe before his death a couple of years ago. I mention this because it still intrigues me, as a good mystery should, and because it was my first encounter with the head-scratching, captivating possibilities of man-made materials.Mark Miodownik's book was the second. The mundanity of the title may be deliberate, for Stuff Matters is about hidden wonders, the astonishing properties of materials we think boring, banal and unworthy of attention - paper, concrete, gl

Much ado about everything

Rosie Llewellyn-Jones has written a well-researched book on Wajid Ali Shah, Awadh's ill-fated last ruler, but ignores the significant cultural context of his reign in Lucknow

King of hearts

"Why does the writing make us chase the writer?" Julian Barnes asked in Flaubert's Parrot. "Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?"In the case of Harper Lee, there aren't books, plural, but a book, singular. To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, won a Pulitzer Prize and became a classic of American literature. It still sells some 750,000 copies annually. Its author stopped talking to the press in 1965. To those who chase her, who can't leave well enough alone, she has developed a standard response to their proposed interviews: "Not just no, but hell no."There have been peeks inside Ms Lee's world. Journalists have made the pilgrimage to Monroeville, Alabama, where she has hidden in plain sight all these decades, and have sniffed around. In 2006, Charles J Shields published Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, a not-bad unauthorised biography.No reporter has gotten closer to this reclusive writer than Marja Mills. In 2001, she flew to Monroeville to

To kill a friendship

Hindu Hriday Samrat underscores how Bal Thackeray was always the leader in absentia and how he allowed his aura to rule over the people

Thackeray's true stripes

Read Why Soccer Matters to keep you occupied till the European football season starts. Be warned, though: where Pele is concerned, it's all about Pele

What matters to Pele

Astra Taylor, a documentary film maker, is the kind of creative person who was supposed to benefit when the internet revolution collapsed old media hierarchies. But two decades since that revolution began, she's not impressed: "We are at risk of starving in the midst of plenty," Ms Taylor writes. "Free culture, like cheap food, incurs hidden costs." Instead of serving as the great equaliser, the web has created an abhorrent cultural feudalism. The creative masses connect, create and labour, while Google, Facebook and Amazon collect the cash.Ms Taylor's thesis is simply stated. The pre-internet cultural industry, populated mainly by exploitative conglomerates, was far from perfect, but at least the ancien regime felt some need to cultivate cultural institutions, and to pay for talent at all levels. Along came the web, which swept away hierarchies - as well as paycheques - leaving behind creators of all kinds only the chance to be fleetingly "internet famous". And anyhow, she says, the w

Content and its discontents

Part ethnographic account, part historical narrative, this work analyses the problems that have consistently plagued this ethnic group

The pashtun conundrum

Mid-wicket Tales is well worth reading for some unexplored insight into India's world of celebrity cricket

Bowled over by cricket

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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