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

Business Standard

Arun Maira, unassuming and soft-spoken, is an iconic figure to those who know him. He has thought through the layers of baggage that hold India back from achieving the socio-economic growth that is its potential; he is deeply committed to charting the path forwards. As a business consultant, he has worked on system reform and the human face of change.Since 2000, at the Confederation of Indian Industry and then as member of the Planning Commission (2009-2014), he has worked at "scenario planning", a method for crafting consensus among mutually opposed stakeholders on complex eco-societal issues. The "scenario planning" method was refined in 2005, when the National Council of Applied Economic Research was brought in and predicted that the heady days of nine per cent growth would not last owing to structural deficiencies. Finally, in 2012, a quasi-official exercise at the Planning Commission threw up the same deficiencies."Scenario planning" permeates the  book, which concludes with four

Of buffaloes, peacocks, tigers and fireflies

Hard Choices is a statesmanlike document intended to attest to Ms Clinton's wide-ranging experience on national security and on foreign policy

Hillary Clinton, in her own words

Tom Bower's new book offers an alternative view of entrepreneur Richard Branson, drawing attention to the need to dig deeper into business excesses

The Branson story you didn't know

I remember the first time I was in the kitchen with Maya Angelou. It happened in Sonoma, California, some 40 years ago. A mutual friend had been invited to spend a week, and I trailed along. Angelou maintained a home in that Mediterranean-looking town of red tile roofs in the wine country, complete with a guest suite in which we were comfortably ensconced. At dinnertime we walked up to the main house.The kitchen had an open plan, with a fireplace in the dining area, and I remember her burning lavender in a fire shovel, which perfumed the entire space in an aromatic prelude to what was to come.Then it was time to cook; the meal was a 12-boy curry. She explained that the dish, a British colonial curry, was named for the number of servants who would carry the condiments to the table; the more boys, the more prestigious the curry. I do not remember all of the 12 condiments (or if in fact there were 12), but they ranged from chopped peanuts to Major Grey's chutney. I do not remember the tas

A way with words and pans

Technology becomes meaningful, Biz Stone writes, only when people use it in ways that change their world and quality of life

@serendipity

The author lists three must-reads ahead of the FIFA World Cup this year

FIFA World Cup books: It's a hat-trick

This book consists of 10 papers focussing on the theme embodied in the title, from different perspectives. As with all Reserve Bank of India (RBI) publications, the introductory chapter carries a brief yet comprehensive summary of the central thrust of the papers.The first paper by the former governor, D Subbarao, elaborates on how the Lehman crisis followed by the Euro zone debt crisis changed the theology of central banking in a fundamental way. Post-Lehman, financial stability drew attention. He also highlights how the Euro zone Sovereign debt crisis opened the eyes of the central bankers to the concerns arising out of sovereign debt sustainability and its linkages with financial stability. In the later pages he articulates apprehensions about how the US Federal Reserve/European Central Bank steps to secure financial stability could endanger price stability thus introducing the 'Trilemma'. A detour into the etymology of Trilemmas as also a discussion of Mundell's famous 'impossible'

New trilemmas of monetary policy

The book walks you through the process of setting up a business from planning to execution, with handy checklists, case studies and model business plans

Advice from the launch pad

Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player who ever lived. Of that, there is very little dispute. He was also, at the apex of his career, a global ambassador for the game and for Nike (not necessarily in that order), a veritable ATM for various corporate partners, a hero to millions, if not billions, of fans, and very likely the most famous person in the world. I know this because everyone knows it, and also because I witnessed at least a little bit of it all. I covered Jordan and the Bulls for an all-sports radio station in Chicago for four years while he was at the height of his power and fame.It was an experience I never cease reliving, in the same way you would never forget being allowed to watch Picasso paint or Mozart tinker at a piano. I have made these analogies before and will defend them to the death. Michael Jordan absolutely was an artist on the basketball court, every bit the equal in his milieu of any of the great masters in theirs. Whatever his flaws away from the

His Airness

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

The bureaucrat in his labyrinth

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

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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