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

Business Standard

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

This book is a focused and timely analysis of what has gone badly wrong in Pakistan, and what could be done to correct the situation

Pakistan's call to arms

If you are one of those people who on seeing newspaper headlines like "RBI keeps repo rate unchanged" or "Rupee drops by 8%" wonders what the fuss is all about and are curious to know more, there are three recent books from Oxford University Press that are worth checking out. Each of these books is slim enough (150 pages or so) and small enough (seven inches by five inches) to fit in your trouser pocket (or purse, if you are a woman) to quickly read through on a Mumbai-Delhi flight.When the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) insists on keeping the interest rate high, and thereby keeps the equated monthly instalment on your home and car loans punishingly high, is it doing the right thing? What stops the RBI from dropping the interest rate drastically and letting us all go on a buying spree?  Should we believe the RBI when it says it is keeping interest rates high to stave off inflation, which, if left uncontrolled, will make all things we buy more expensive? What makes the RBI believe that suc

Book value on basic economics

In his 2007 book, A Farewell to Alms, the economic historian Gregory Clark argued that the English came to rule the world largely because their rich outbred their poor, and, thus, embedded their superior genes and values throughout the nation. In her comprehensive takedown, the historian Deirdre N McCloskey noted that Mr Clark's idea was a "bold hypothesis, and was bold when first articulated by social Darwinists such as Charles Davenport and Francis Galton in the century before last". Indeed, over the past 150 years, various white Western scientists and writers have repeatedly offered biological explanations for Caucasian superiority. They have repeatedly failed because, as Ms McCloskey noted, none ever mounted a credible quantitative argument.Now, in A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade, a longtime science writer for The New York Times, says modern genetics shows that "the three major races" - Africans, Caucasians and East Asians - are genetically distinct races that diverge much

The fault in our DNA

A former radio newsreader has produced a thought-provoking account of a British military camera team's attempts to relay good news from Afghanistan at the height of the insurgency

A journeyman's candid camera

Contestants on Jeopardy! this week were asked to identify the book that opens with this line: "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton." The answer (or rather the question) was: What is The Sun Also Rises?Yet, as a new edition of this 1926 classic by Ernest Hemingway shows, up until the final galleys, Cohn's college feats were not even included in the opening chapter. Originally, Hemingway began his tale of the Lost Generation by introducing its beautiful and heartsick embodiment, Brett Ashley: "This is a novel about a lady."This discarded first chapter, along with other deletions, earlier drafts and alternate titles, is included in a new edition of the novel that Scribner is releasing later this month. The glimpse into Hemingway's creative process is not new. As the author's grandson Seán Hemingway explained in an interview, "While the material has been discussed at great length by scholars, it hasn't been brought together in this way before, and it hasn't been

Hemingway's novel reissued with alternate opening

The Arsenal of Democracy, the Ford Motor Company and its production of the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber take centre stage

Bombers' early light

The book is packed with theory, policy and data, based on which several issues are analysed with broad sweep and outstanding depth

The fall and rise of developing countries

C Christine Fair's new book on the Pakistan Army turns out to be an informative primer on the strategic and political evolution of Pakistan

Reading the tea leaves in Pakistan

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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