If the McDonald's outlet down the road were to charge the same amount of money for its McChicken and Aloo Tikki burgers, you would probably say the multinational is out to fleece you. On the other hand, if your friendly neighbourhood bhojanalaya did something similar and labelled its vegetarian sandwich "Jain Shudh Burger", chances are you will be ready to shell out a premium for it. Such is the power of marketing, and that is exactly what Ambi Parameswaran - you really need an introduction here? - has sought to explore in his new book, For God's Sake. Mr Parameswaran - okay, Dr M G Parameswaran is a 30-year advertising veteran, and is now advisor, FCB (earlier Draftfcb + Ulka Advertising) - is clearly not interested in the my-religion-is-better-than-your-religion genre of arguments that has taken on an alarming intensity these days. A compilation of essays (24 in all, spread over 258 pages if you take into account the acknowledgement and index sections) based on his own experiences, F

Divining the marketing pitch

Business Standard

On a Prayer is actually about Mr Birla's bonds with the people around him

Lifestyle and times of Yash Birla

From India to Palestine has focused attention on the sufferings of Palestinians and the aggressive policies that Israel pursues against Palestine

India's betrayal of Palestine

THERMONUCLEAR MONARCHYChoosing Between Democracy and DoomElaine ScarryW W Norton & Company582 pages; $35The problem posed by nuclear weapons - that they work by holding their possessors hostage, with the threat of catastrophic retaliation if used - has confounded thinking about them since the beginning of the nuclear age. One of its earliest analysts, the American physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, the first director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos laboratory, which developed the atomic bomb, once compared the two dominant nuclear powers of his day and ours, the United States and Russia, to "scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life". Oppenheimer chose not to note that scorpions, a species almost as well known for belligerence as Homo sapiens, would sooner or later take that risk. We humans have not done so, at least not so far. But while circling each other warily during the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union occupied them

Absolute power

Olen Steinhauer's recent three-volume Milo Weaver series was about the Tourists, a top-secret CIA spy unit

Romancing Cairo

GODS OF SMALL THINGS: Krishen believes that there is still hope for forests in Central India if small shrines exist under trees and are worshipped by the people

Pradip Krishen's latest book is not just a chronicle of trees, but also a reminder that a part of the country is still shaped by nature

Green tales from the heart of India

Bhasha Singh's Unseen: The Truth About India's Manual Scavengers takes a look at the age-old practice of manual scavenging

Raising a stink

Sandeep Goyal remains a man in a hurry, even though he shed his adman avatar three years ago. Since he sold his 26 per cent stake in Dentsu India in 2011, Mr Goyal, now 50, has taken the Common Admission Test (CAT); launched a television channel on food; floated Mogae Media, a venture to monetise the mobile phone; and has written two books.That sense of hurry is visible all through his latest offering, Konjo: The Fighting Spirit. The 248-page book is like an airport quickie - gripping enough to be read at one go. However, some would say the author missed the opportunity to present a deeper understanding of the advertising world beyond the usual petty politicking and the extraordinary success of Dentsu India.For example, Mr Goyal says his high-flying career "inexplicably" came to a sudden halt before he embarked on the Dentsu journey. But there is no effort to answer why his sudden resignation as CEO of Zee at the young age of 40 was "inexplicable".But Mr Goyal more than makes up for th

Fighting words

One of my pet theories, pooh-poohed by professional economists, is that in a large measure Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was a response to the challenge of Communism. Clever man that he was, Keynes needed to, and did, persuade Western governments to tax the rich more because governments needed to intervene in the economy from time to time to stabilise it. The alternative was the spectre described by Marx.Another pet theory of mine - once again pooh-poohed widely - is that during 1950-70, the Cold War was as much a battle for the minds of Western intellectuals as anything else. Sociologists, historians and political scientists showing broad agreement with Marx, economists were the exceptions. But data being scarce, economics research had to prove the virtue of markets. Plenty of funding was made available for this.The more substantive attempt was to show that the West produced more of everything than the USSR did because Western markets allocated resources bet

GDP: Neti, Neti, Neti

Simon Schama, the prolific and protean British historian whose topics have included the French Revolution and the history of art, arrives now with a history of the Jewish people, and it's a multimedia happening: two books and a five-part television documentary being broadcast on the BBC and PBS.The first volume, The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD, is before us. The second, out this fall, takes us up to the present day. It bears a rather more sombre subtitle: "When Words Fail: 1492-Present."It's no accident that the subtitles alight on language. Mr Schama is a wordy, frequently witty writer about a wordy, witty culture. Considering the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, he can't help summarising a bit of the implied content in one of them this way: "We are going to write the enemy into capitulation! Surrender to our verbosity or else!"Mr Schama's own verbosity offers deep pleasures. If he occasionally writes the reader into capitulation - there are more zealots and har

The Jews, a history in so many, many words

Sally Howard's entertaining and informative book traces changing sexual mores in Indian culture over the last twenty years

The Kama Sutra Diaries: Sexplorations of modern India

In the introduction to her book, The Liar's Club, Mary Karr writes about the time her mother's kitchen was retiled. Redoing a panel, the tile man finds a tile with an unlikely round hole in it - a bullet hole, he asks, joking. Mary Karr's mother, grey-haired, squints up from the pages of Marcus Aurelius, slides her glasses down her nose and confirms to her two daughters and the tile man that this is, indeed, where she shot at Larry (an old flame). "She wheeled to point at another wall, adding, 'Over there's where I shot at your daddy.' "Ms Karr wrote The Liar's Club as a memoir for two good reasons: that kind of material is irresistible, and, equally crucially, her mother didn't mind her daughter writing about the number of times she'd got married (seven), got drunk (many), or wagged firearms at assorted husbands and lovers (reasonably often). In the years after The Liar's Club was published, Ms Karr learned that her clan was not unusual in the rich bizarreness of its family stories, a

Family matters

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) conducted pre-election surveys in all 70 Assembly constituencies of Delhi to get a handle on people's concerns. Water-related issues turned out to be the primary concern for Delhiites. No wonder one of the first decisions of the AAP government, which was led by Arvind Kejriwal, was to supply more than 600 litres of water free of cost to all metered households every day. As far as intent goes, ensuring regular water supply to each household was spot on. However, was the decision to supply it free of cost anything more than a cheap election gimmick?Gimmick it was indeed, and harmful too in the long run, if one considers the water situation in the country. The book under review provides a glimpse of the gloomy situation that confronts us. The central argument of the book is that growing economies and expanding population need more water that can be made available only through sustained investment in the sector and through constant conservation of this seemingly p

Depleting blue gold stocks

This book is an excellent treatise on finance, seamlessly blending the discussion from Lenin to the principles of modern finance. In keeping with the recent trend of remixing old songs and themes in Bollywood, the book does an excellent job of updating the 17 published articles that cover nearly half a century until March 2013.Sunanda Sen has been successful in revealing the darker side of global finance. The book, though written with much conviction, is dense and difficult to read. But the persistent reader is rewarded with extensive knowledge of national and international finance.Ms Sen takes an alternative view of modern instruments of finance, mainly through the lens of output and labour. To illustrate her point, she observes that derivatives were invented with the tacit connivance of the authorities. She also argues that labour-displacing technology is responsible for many woes of the advanced and developing countries. She even cautions that financial reforms instituted by interna

The lows of high finance

Amy Chua and her husband have written a deeply researched and compelling book explaining the unique success of the Mormon and Jewish communities in AmericaThe Church of Latter Day Saints in the US this week was forced to issue a statement that its members do not actually believe that they will inherit planets in the after-life. This community, more commonly known as Mormons, is accustomed to being occasionally lampooned for its beliefs and sending earnest young men in white shirts and ties door to door to proselytise. So the opening paragraphs of The Triple Package will likely make its way into the churches of the Mormons across America. The book begins by revealing that the past and present CEOs and CFOs of American Express, Black & Decker, Dell, Marriott International as well as senior executives on Wall Street are Mormons. So too is former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.Mormons, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld explain, must typically go on a two-year proselytising miss

On a group and a prayer

Joachim Fest's fascinating memoir about what it was like to come of age during the years of the Third Reich is unusual because its central character is not the author but the author's remarkable father. Johannes Fest was the middle-class headmaster of a primary school in suburban Berlin, a pious Catholic and father of five, a cultural conservative who revered Goethe and Kant, and a loyal German patriot - "a dyed-in-the-wool Prussian," in Fest's words - the kind of person who might have been expected to become an active supporter of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists. In a foreword by Herbert Arnold (a professor emeritus of German studies at Wesleyan University who has also supplied informative notes throughout the text), the elder Fest is described as "tailor-made for a career" with the Nazis. And yet some quirk in his personality made him a fierce Weimar republican, ready to sacrifice himself, even his family, to principles he knew to be right even as everyone around him was yie

Just say nein

"I received about 35,000 pieces of mail and propaganda from the Jews in this country," Harry Truman told Senator Claude Pepper in 1947. "I put it all in a pile and struck a match to it." The man destined to be canonised by American Jews as a champion of Israel felt exhausted and outmatched by the young but influential Zionist lobby.Over the course of Genesis, John B Judis recounts Truman's predicament, trapped between his desire to find a fair and equitable outcome for Arabs and Jews in Palestine and the seeming impossibility of doing so. But Mr Judis is interested in telling a larger story, one that lays a good deal of responsibility on the American Zionist lobby for Truman's - and America's - failure to construct a just and peaceful solution.The influence of America's Israel lobby has, of course, become a loaded topic in recent years. Genesis comes trailing John J Mearsheimer and Stephen M Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and Peter Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism, both

Where it began

The 1980s saw the rise of what socio-anthropologists call the "corporate athlete". If Tommie Smith could climb the Olympic podium in 1968 and raise the Black Power salute, you would be loath, however, to see, say, Michael Jordan doing something political in 1984 after winning the Olympic gold. You see, unlike Smith, Jordan couldn't afford shenanigans that could put his corporate sponsors in a spot. After all he needed the sponsors as much as the companies needed the endorser. Sachin Tendulkar, in that respect, is India's first true corporate athlete, and, for 24 years, remained the inscrutable human being while being the most feted sports personality. He steered clear of controversy, and that implacable baby face revealed nothing of his approvals or opprobrium.That is why we have questions when we consider the man God. Was the halo over his head a genuine one and was he incapable of ever losing his temper? Was he superhuman and never feared bowlers? Did he ever succumb to the arrogance

God as man

Rogue Elephant tells the story of the chaos better known as Indian democracy today. Simon Denyer, the former India bureau chief of The Washington Post, gets to the heart of India's prickliest issues to paint a compelling picture of modern Indian society, bogged down by corruption, inequality and the utter breakdown of trust between its leading political parties - yet still somehow being held together by democratic forces. Through a series of interviews with the nation's most influential political leaders such as Manmohan Singh, Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal, as well as thought leaders such as Arnab Goswami, the world's longest hunger striker, Irom Sharmila, and lawyer-crusader Bhuwan Ribhu, Mr Denyer says that underneath all the chaos, he sees glimmers of hope. The growing significance of the TRP-chasing, yet independent, media and the Right to Information (RTI) movement's demands for greater transparency and accountability in governance offer signs of a new, vigorous way forward.

India glimmering

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi should have been in advertising. His speeches are packed with peppy buzzwords and catchy slogans, some of which make very little sense when seen in isolation. Someone seems to have figured that out, and thus the Citizens for Accountable Governance - Mr Modi's think tank in Gandhinagar that is, among other things, working on a giant statue of Vallabhbhai Patel called the Statue of Unity - has come out with a slim book it hopes will explain them. The Citizens for Accountable Governance is stocked with idealistic young people, and this earnest book deserves to be taken seriously.What Moditva: The Idea Behind the Man tries to do is take 14 of Mr Modi's more trite buzzwords - "per drop more crop", or "5F: Farm to fibre, fibre to factory, factory to fashion, fashion to foreign" - and explain what he might mean by them. It is unclear, in many ways, what Mr Modi's own input into this exercise has been. As with much else relating to how Mr Modi's words are i

Mr Modi's prose of governance

Why has Penguin inflicted anew on Indian readers this desultory book on Mahatma Gandhi, quite the worst by a long chalk among the lot I have read?  That may sound heretical in view of the many laudatory reviews excerpted on the flyleaf of this edition (obviously not corrected or updated). "It has not aged well" might be a charitable explanation, but I would have rated it the same had I read it when it first came out 37 years ago.The contents of the book appeared initially in The New Yorker. They are grouped into three sections: subtler and more lasting shapes, in the steps of the autobiographer and his biographers, and, finally, the company they keep.The second section, the longest (nearly half the book), is also the easiest to deal with. It is a straightforward narration (and only that) of the great man's life, based on secondary sources. The reader should not expect anything new here. And there isn't. Ved Mehta anticipates this in the foreword. "The life of ... Gandhi ... is abundant

The Mahatma on the periphery

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

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