Former Chief Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi's book is a paean to the elections and their quinquennial recurrence

The bureaucrat in his labyrinth

Business Standard

We all know Fuleco the Armadillo. He's the official mascot of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. But did we know that mascots were first introduced in England in 1966? World Cup Willie, a lion wearing a Union Flag jersey emblazoned with the words "World Cup", was the mascot for the 1966 World Cup in England.This is just one of the many footballing facts you will learn in Novy Kapadia's The Football Fanatic's Essential Guide, which offers the low-down on all the 19 editions of the FIFA World Cup. Mr Kapadia also previews the 20th edition of the football extravaganza that kicks off in Brazil on June 12, complete with the usual mass of information - the  list of venues, the top goal scorers and so on.Origins of the beautiful gameThe book opens with a vivid description of the origins of the sport, which dates back to 1863 in England. It says that if one looks beyond 1863, one will find "at least half a dozen different games to which the historical development of football can be traced". Th

The diminutive playbook

Oh no, not another book by a foreign correspondent on India growing/stagnating/declining (choose one). That was my initial reaction to the volume by John Elliott. I had previously abandoned reviewing a couple of others of the genre. I suspended my judgement, however, because of the author's background. He worked in the India bureau of the venerable Financial Times. He now contributes to The Economist and New Statesman, lives in India and has a rather prolific blog appearing in The Independent. He also claims the coinage of privatisation, no less! And I must admit, the title is alarming enough to compel reading.Mr Elliott takes the reader through contemporary India, along a road much travelled. Deteriorating environment, land scandals, crumbling cities, unchanging villages, corrupted defence, tangled telecom, cesspits of mining, unlimited bribery, rampant nepotism and dynastic hegemonies - all appear on the scene. In fact, scarcely a blemish on the Indiascape escapes the author's attent

A jugaad of chalta hai blogs

He's written a really good book - we might as well get that out of the way, as so much else about Timothy F Geithner remains unsettled. Mr Geithner served as president of the New York Federal Reserve from late 2003 to 2008 and secretary of the Treasury from 2009 to 2013, and so sat near the centre of the American financial system as it prepared to self-destruct. He then had a courtside seat to the global catastrophe. He has rich material to work with, and he has contrived to preserve its freshness. His inability as Treasury secretary to explain himself, or his actions, or the financial crisis, or his beliefs about financial reform, to the wider public will leave many readers, I suspect, feeling they are hearing his voice on these subjects for the first time.Mr Geithner is clearly more at ease, and more himself, on the page than on the stage or the screen - which is, for an American public figure, both odd and charming. So much so that I finished his book half wishing he had just skippe

The hot seat

The polymath tells Kanika Datta why he is attracted to Narendra Modi's economic model and talks about life after his mammoth translation of the Mahabharata is through

Lunch with BS: Bibek Debroy

In recounting the story of his semi-autobiographical hero, Patrick Melrose, in a series of interlinked novels (Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk and At Last), Edward St Aubyn established himself as a dazzling writer with an utterly distinctive voice. The harrowing story of Melrose's life - from being raped at 5 by his monstrous father, to his years as a heroin addict, to his achievement of a measure of perspective and peace in middle age - was simultaneously heartbreaking and funny, devastatingly sad and cuttingly acerbic: painful experience transmuted into art through beautifully hammered, aphoristic prose.His new novel, Lost for Words, is a very different sort of book: a satirical romp that showcases just one octave of St Aubyn's keyboard of gifts: his Waugh-like talent for comedy and his unsparing eye for people's pretensions and self-delusions.In the Melrose novels, the world that St Aubyn so expertly skewered was the high-altitude one of British aristos - preening, na

Britain's high-tone scribblers

As Allied combat troops prepare to pull out of Afghanistan, the inconclusive 13-year military engagement in that country will remain a discomfiting memory in the West, forever bracketed with George W Bush's equally indecisive war in Iraq. But Afghanistan holds a special place in British imperial historical memory. In some ways, Churchill's First War, by the executive foreign editor of The Daily Telegraph, is a reflection of that frustrating sense of hubris.A pawn in the Great Game, the hot-and-cold war between the British and Russian empires in the frozen fastness of the Karakoram and Himalayas, Afghanistan has forever been the untamed frontier. The Russians rarely managed to make durable forays among that country's unruly militant tribes even in their Czarist heydays, and scarcely succeeded when they tried in their Soviet avatar in 1979. The British expended much blood and treasure on three major and savage wars against Afghanistan between 1839 and 1919 and could claim a victory of so

Young Winston and the Taliban

Video games have emerged as a vibrant, imaginative pursuit, the art form at the intersection of computers and interactivity. But they are also a business, one that was built by people with experience making and selling toys, consumer electronics and coin-operated amusements like pinball machines.Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation, a new book by Blake J Harris, focuses on the history of video games as an industry rather than as a creative enterprise. The "war" here is a contest of commerce, a battle for market share between two companies that is not unlike the Coke and Pepsi wars or the Nike and Reebok sneaker wars.Mr Harris is right that this conflict, occurring mostly from 1990 to 1995, was an important one. The 1990s were when video games matured from being perceived as a faddish toy for young children into mainstream entertainment for teenagers and, soon, adults.At the start of that decade, Nintendo was a near-monopolist, holding 90 per cent of a

Joystick wars

Glimpses of the PM-elect from books written by Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay and Andy Marino

Modi through biographers' eye

After Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine and Russian troops made their poorly disguised forays into western Ukraine, several commentators suggested that the world was witnessing the real endgame of the Cold War. The uninhibited triumphalism of the West after the Russian humiliation in Afghanistan and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, this line of thinking goes, has left deep scars on the Russian psyche, which Mr Putin has tried to heal with his brazen conquests in Chechnya, Georgia and now Ukraine.It is a temptingly attractive explanation but a partial one. The history of this strange half-century stand-off is far more complex than the binary terms in which it was projected by politicians, from Winston Churchill to Ronald Reagan, and analysts, from George F Kennan to John Lewis Gaddis (also Kennan's biographer). With Roosevelt's Lost Alliances, historian Frank Costigliola has courageously attempted a nuanced pre-history. Rather than recounting the well-worn narrative, he

Personal politics and the Cold War

One afternoon in the summer of 2008, as the financial system was careening towards the abyss that would send the United States into the worst economic emergency  since the Great Depression, Timothy F Geithner - then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and later, President Barack Obama's Treasury secretary - tried to lighten the mood in his office with "an impromptu contest for the best metaphor for what was happening."Among the phrases suggested that day were: the wheels are "coming off the bus", the engines are "falling off the plane" and "the rivets are coming off the submarine". There were comparisons to wildfires and earthquakes, "cancer and contagion, sweaters unravelling and boulders rolling down a hill". (And this was before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September accelerated fears into an extreme panic.)It wasn't until he saw The Hurt Locker, the Oscar-winning film about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, Mr Geithner writes in his new memoir, Stress Test, that he

A memoir from the eye of a financial storm

Tibet: An Unfinished Story  offers a sympathetic Western perspective on Tibet

A tryst with realpolitik

All things bright and beautiful,All creatures great and small,All things wise and wonderful,The Lord God made them all.- Cecil Frances AlexanderEvolutionary biologists may quibble over the popular Anglican hymn, but one thing is clear: irrespective of how "things" and "creatures" came about on this planet, we know for sure how they are now becoming extinct. Unlike previous five mass extinctions over the past 540 million years, this time around it is not microbes or meteorites but humans that are the cause. In a short span of 20 years since the Earth Summit in 1992, the Living Planet Index of biodiversity declined 12 per cent globally and by as much as 30 per cent in the tropics.If humans are single-mindedly destroying the planet's biological diversity (or biodiversity), can they also be its saviours? Can the dismal science of economics and economists save Mother Nature? Can an economist caricatured as "someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing" actually help pr

The dismal science as saviour?

A Spy Among Friends is an attempt to describe a particular sort of friendship that played an important role in history

Between friends

The English translation of Amales Tripathi's monumental work in Bengali on the Indian National Congress deserves special attention for several reasons. It is not just one more book on the well-documented theme of India's struggles for freedom between 1885 and 1947; it is also a study that deepens the levels of understanding of one of the most powerful anti-imperialist struggles in the history of colonial societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Harvard University professor Rupert Emerson concluded in the last chapter of his seminal work, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples, that there were only two models of anti-colonial struggles that deserve to be noticed across the continents: those of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi of India and Mao Zedong of China. Only these two acted as real role models for freedom fighters and, in his historical judgement, Emerson asserted that Gandhi's path of struggle for freedom was much more successful than Mao's,

India's multiple freedom struggles

David Van Reybrouck's Congo is a gripping saga of one of the world's most devastated countries

History's stranglehold

Bob Dylan said it best, in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview timed to the release of his Tempest album: "Why is it when people talk about me, they have to go crazy?" More than 50 years after he first started attracting fanatical followers, Dylan was facing a more brutal and dangerous species of devotee than he had seen before. The fans had social media, and the scholars had computers; en masse, they could track every move he made and every word he wrote, said or sang. "Dylanologist," once a derisive term for the self-styled expert who sifted through the Dylan family's garbage cans, was now a word with wide colloquial meaning, if not yet a dictionary definition.Now the world of Dylan worship has a book to call its own. David Kinney, author of The Dylanologists, is a cultist himself, but the book's opening epigraph promises a reasonable perspective. ("Fan: You don't know who I am, but I know who you are. Bob Dylan: Let's keep it that way.") And he starts with the innocent spectacle of pilgr

Living Bob Dylan's Life

Thomas Piketty's magnum opus on inequality amplifies a growing concern in the West, which probably explains why the book is more popular than its intellectual underpinnings warrant

R,G and all that

Thrive, it seems unlikely that many readers will be able to implement many of the life changes that Arianna Huffington advocates

Huffing over work-life balance

The Age of Wrath is the third volume of Abraham Eraly's four-volume history of pre-modern India

The benefits of Turkish treatment

The Wrong Enemy plots a pattern of US acquiescence to Pakistan's lethal pursuit of its perceived, but mostly exaggerated, national interests

The wrong ally

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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