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

Business Standard

Having spent time critiquing films and being an avid reader of thrillers, I have often wondered - not without apprehension - why Bollywood has not picked up the formula of "tiger-poaching-dashing, forest officer-dazzling reporter". To my mind, this combination makes for a perfect or imperfect potboiler, depending on which way you look at it. So it is surprising that when this masala formula finally makes it to the popular media, albeit in print rather than onscreen, it is via a bureaucrat.The author, an Indian Administrative Services officer, pens a fast-paced thriller based in Madhya Pradesh's Kanha Tiger Reserve, though it travels on to assorted exotic locales - from ancient Amarkantak, source of the holy Narmada, to  Mumbai, Myanmar, Kalimantan, China and the US. But I hasten to add that the book comes as a pleasant surprise, for not only is it a good, racy read, but it also quelled my apprehensions, given the potential for such a plot to go awry or lack the  finesse and sensitivity

Tiger poaching burning bright

Though J K Rowling breaks no new ground with her latest thriller, The Silkworm, the book still is an entertaining take on the traditional British crime novel

Killer Plot

Green Wars is very important reading material for budding environmentalists, environmental reporters and civil society activists

Just how much is too much?

For someone like me who has spent a lifetime in the tax department and researching tax systems, it is not easy to complete a review quickly, since I typically tend to agree or disagree with the author's views. But this is not the place to air them elaborately as the space is limited. Suffice it to say that this voluminous compendium of principles and applications of taxation should be a constant companion for anyone interested in all sorts of taxes and their working in various countries. What the Shorter Oxford Dictionary is for a writer in English, this book is for the tax analyst; it contains everything.Overall, the scope of the coverage is very wide. Beginning with historical references to taxation in India, the book goes on to discuss the incidence and distribution effects of taxation, particularly the impact on efficiency and resource allocation. When taxation is not neutral, it has a distortionary effect, which is neither known nor discussed. There is considerable emphasis on con

The go-to tax compendium

Sahara, The Untold Story provides interesting and rare insights into how the regulators - mostly RBI in this case - went after Roy like hounds

The poor little rich man

Somewhere along the long, bumpy road of human evolution - between the emergence of Davos Man and the TEDification of everything - a new breed of journalist emerged, specially adapted to the corporatised landscape of the modern media biome. Call him Aspen Man, after his proclivity for Ideas. (Aspen Woman exists, too, but the breed skews male.) Like all journalists, Aspen Man feeds upon stories, studies and statistics, but his unique genius lies in his ability to transform the resulting partly digested mix into brain candy for well-heeled aficionados of Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman.The Economist's editor in chief, John Micklethwait, and its management editor, Adrian Wooldridge, are exemplary specimens of Aspen Man. Their thesis: for 500 years, the West's ability to reinvent the state has enabled it to lead the world. Today, however, the West is weighed down by dysfunctional governments, bloated budgets and self-indulgent publics; it risks losing its edge to the hungrier, more aut

Aspen Man's world view

The conservative Bavarian prince who managed the Rolling Stones' finances for 40 years has written a wryly amusing and fascinating memoir of life with the world's most famous rock band

Serving their satanic majesties

In The Train to Warsaw, the author forgoes quotation marks, indentations and line breaks with dialogue, allowing the words of her characters to roll into one another like a kind of psychic enjambment

Remembrance of things painful

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."- George SantayanaThe recent international financial meltdown following the failure of two hedge funds owned by the US investment bank  Bear Stearns and the subprime crisis has spawned a large number of books that review similar episodes in the past, in an effort to trace the common threads through them and the lessons to be learnt. Bob Swarup's book belongs to this genre. He has organised the material not by chronology but around common human foibles. It deals with 25 centuries of financial bubbles, investment manias and human folly with historical details relating to the period from ancient Rome to the crisis of 2008. As the blurb on the back cover says: "Greek bailouts of the fourth century BC, the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Dutch love affair with tulips, bicycle and railroad booms in the 19th century, the Great Depression, the brief ascent of the Japanese to the Hollywood villain totem pole, virtual bank runs in

Booms, busts and human nature

If there were still any doubts about Hillary Clinton's intention to stand for US president in 2016, her latest book, Hard Choices, should finally lay them to rest. This is a very carefully measured account of her four years as US secretary of state from 2008 to 2012, with tensions with the Barack Obama White House only discreetly hinted at. We know from other sources that the bitterness and bad blood from the campaign for Democratic Party nomination lingered on in the aftermath, but Hard Choices portrays a more convivial relationship. As she herself says, in the early pages, "... I also knew the press would be looking - even hoping - for any signs of discord between me and the White House. I intended to deprive them of that story." The book also describes a relationship of mutual trust and respect between her and husband, Bill Clinton, with no hint of the storms that buffeted it in the wake of his serial philandering in the White House. Here he appears, as always, supportive - a friend

Playing it safe

In early 1990, when Indian political reporting was widening its base from limited and structured coverage of government and Opposition politics, this writer was told by a newspaper's political bureau chief of that time to go and spend some time with Kanshiram. Parliamentary polls were held a few months before that and Rajiv Gandhi had been unseated. Assembly elections were being held in several states and, though the paper for which I was working was still at the "dummy stage", it appeared to be a good idea to spend time with the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which performed creditably without winning any seats.Caste was one issue that was yet be embedded in journalistic discourse. The only time that one heard - or wrote - about caste combinations was when it came to talking about Ahir-Jat-Gujjar-Rajput or Muslim-Ahir-Jat-Gujjar-Rajput combinations that were forged from the time Charan Singh experimented with alternative vote banks to replace the Congress combination of Brah

The will of a disruptor

A red flying squirrel in Lansdowne

An adult male desert chinkara in Gajner, Rajasthan

INDIAN MAMMALS: A FIELD GUIDE

Naturalist Vivek Menon's latest book on India's mammals, exhaustive and thoroughly researched, will appeal as much to the lay reader as to the expert

Class: Mammalia Indica

Last fall the pugilistic Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave an interview to Jennifer Senior in New York Magazine so playful and revealing that the transcript could nearly be made into a stage play and movie, in the manner of Frost/Nixon.Justice Scalia, 78, and Ms Senior, 44, faced off across a generational, political and religious chasm. The most memorable moment was probably when Justice Scalia began speaking about how Satan operates in the modern world.When Ms Senior widened her eyes, he pounced. "You're looking at me as though I'm weird," he said. "My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It's in the Gospels!" He added about her stare: "I was offended by that. I really was."This moment captures the man we meet in Bruce Allen Murphy's sweeping new intellectual biography, Scalia: A Court of One, in pea-size form. That is to say, Mr Murphy delivers to us a man driven by three fundamenta

A justice alone, even if surrounded

Of all the various disciplines in the social sciences, only economics has been obsessed with making immutable rules. Economists have liked to think of these as being like the laws of nature. The practitioners of other disciplines, on the other hand, have been content to describe and leave it at that.While many of the rules of economics have possessed descriptive completeness and predictive ability, a much greater number have not. In general, the predictive failures can be ascribed to an insufficient accounting for all the non-economic factors            that influence the behaviour of economic agents, acting singly or in groups.Within this general failure, no single sub-group of economists has been more at fault than macroeconomists. In their anxiety to catch the eye of governments, they have tended to overlook that most frustrating of all human qualities - irrationality.Eswar S Prasad's overly long and discursive but highly readable and comprehensive book is (I think) about this. He h

Why size matters

The Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan have chosen multiple sectors to illustrate their point

That unsettling feeling called globalisation

"It is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that capital could survive," David Harvey concedes towards the end of Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, "For example, by a capitalistic oligarchic elite supervising the mass genocidal elimination of much of the world's surplus and disposable population while enslaving the rest and building vast artificial gated environments to protect against the ravages of an external nature run toxic, barren and ruinously wild."This most recent book in Professor Harvey's prolific career as an anthropologist and a Marxist scholar is an attempt to read the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash through the prism of Marx's Capital, Volume I and II. Clear and concise, Seventeen Contradictions is a useful resource for those seeking steady and reasonable Marxist analyses of our troubled times.Those in search of a revolutionary handbook, however, are likely to be disappointed. The early Harvey offered an exciting and radical new way of lo

Marx is dead, and I don't feel too good myself

A 25th anniversary edition of Morgan Chua's cartoons of the events around the Tiananmen Square massacre is a chilling reminder of how states can turn against their citizens

The great squall of China

An ineffective ruler steeped in debauchery? Or a creative genius who was robbed of his throne by the East India Company? A new book by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones throws light on the life and times of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh

A celestial star

Agrasena was the legendary king of Agroha (now in the Hisar district of Haryana). It is said that 17 of his sons decided to become tradesmen. As their profession was vanijya, Hindi for commerce, they came to be called the Banias. When north India was hit by waves of invaders, the community spread to towns and villages in other parts of the country. For centuries together, they controlled commerce in the country as traders, shopkeepers, moneylenders and bankers. Some of them even financed wars and military campaigns. The most famous of them are those from the arid regions of Rajasthan - what was once called Maru Desh, or desert. Over time, they came to be collectively called the Marwaris.The rise of the Marwari community has been documented very well by several researchers. Thomas A Timberg is an old expert on the subject. His Harvard doctoral dissertation was on the rise of the Marwaris as industrialists. In 1978, he wrote The Marwaris: From Traders to Industrialists, which is recognis

It started with Plassey...

Do we need more states? The division of Andhra Pradesh has become a reality. And the verdict of the people on the division is also out. The party that was seen to be behind the division of the state, the Congress, has been routed on both sides in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. The Congress' electoral fortunes show that either the logic of the division was flawed or if there was, indeed, some solid reason for the split, it was not properly communicated to the people.A closer look at the history of the demand for a separate state of Telangana suggests that the movement that started in the 1960s and 1970s gained momentum after the state made rapid progress in the subsequent decades. That progress - not the region's relative backwardness - is seen as the catalyst that fuelled the demand for a separate state. One of the possible reasons would have been the relative marginalisation of political leaders of the Telangana region. However, no one knows better than the voters of Andh

A state of confusion

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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