It's not generally known that Margaret Thatcher had two near-brushes with India early in life. Jonathan Aitken, author of this chatty biography, mentions one in passing but probably doesn't realise that if, as a science undergraduate at Oxford, she had married her fellow-student, Lord Craigmyle, she might have been a very burra memsahib indeed. Craigmyle was one of the heirs to Lord Inchcape's commercial empire, but according to the young peer's cousin Lord Tanlaw, better remembered in India as Simon Mackay, guardian of the Inchcape interests, Lady Craigmyle dismissed her son's girlfriend with, "In trade and in science! We know nobody who is in either!"Thatcher's father killed the other prospect by warning that the Indian Civil Service wouldn't take her far since the British were already marking time in India. One suspects she wanted to take the exam not so much for "the glittering prizes of the Raj" as to be the first female to storm a male bastion. Ultimately, of course, she shattere

'That stubborn Salome'

Business Standard

On a March evening in 1971, eight antiwar protesters burglarised a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) office in Media, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, with astonishing ease. A few weeks of elementary surveillance had shown them the vulnerability of the target: there were no cameras to elude, no alarms to disconnect. Because the building contained residential apartments, the group chose the night of the first Joe Frazier-Muhammad Ali heavyweight championship fight, an ideal distraction. It turned out that the Pennsylvania office, like so many others across the country, had almost no physical protection. Security was largely symbolic, resting on the bureau's carefully buffed reputation for efficiency in tracking down America's "most wanted" criminals. Put simply, no one messed with J Edgar Hoover's FBI.That fantasy ended with the break-in. Calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, the burglars not only stole every file in the office, they also circul

Breaking in

Two experienced writers have turned out a compelling chronicle of the highs, lows and long-playing success of one of the world's insanely great thrash metal bands

Metal. Magnet. Music. Metallica.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad played, with great dedication and distinction, the roles of a leader of the Indian Muslim community and the Indian national movement. If, on the one hand, Azad firmly maintained that the Quran was the true guide for religion and politics, on the other he described himself as "…a reformer, guide, of the Caravan of the Quam, the Muslims".This great reformist Muslim leader and scholar of Islamic holy texts and traditions comfortably merged his Islamic loyalties with secular Indian nationalism and, as a committed Muslim believer and a nationalist, he unhesitatingly - and unambiguously - fought for Hindu-Muslim unity. Syeda Saiyidain Hameed deserves to be congratulated for writing an extremely competent biography of the scholarly nationalist leader who remains an unquestioned symbol of India's "composite culture".The first six chapters are devoted to the development of Azad's personality and ideology, and the remaining four narrate his role in the freedom struggle.

Maulana Azad's tragic contradictions

For any writer, recording roller-coaster changes through six generations of one family, as well as the attendant social and economic changes in the country over 200 years, in just 164 pages is a daunting task. But R Gopalakrishnan, director of Tata Sons and a respected corporate chief, has done so with ease and simplicity in his book A Comma in a Sentence.

A brief history of India

General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the wily military dictator who ruled Pakistan for much of the 1980s, was famous for, among other things, his gleaming teeth, which he used to dazzle visitors with a smile that left them guessing about his true intentions.So it was in July 1982 when General Vernon Walters, an envoy sent by President Ronald Reagan, delivered a stern message to Zia. The United States had "incontrovertible proof," Walters said, that Pakistan had accelerated its nuclear bomb programme, despite assurances to the contrary.Zia, Husain Haqqani writes in Magnificent Delusions, reacted with feigned shock. He had "no knowledge" of such a programme, he assured Walters. "Pakistan might not be a large or important country," he declared with a straight face, but it was "an honorable one".Walters left the meeting nonplused, but with a sense of grudging admiration. "Either he really does not know," he wrote later, "or he is the most superb and patriotic liar I have ever met."Patriotism, lies

A history of misunderstandings, lies and violence

India's most well-known bad guy, Gabbar Singh, is immortalised in a new graphic novel

Villainy in graphic glory

Shinzo Abe

Shinzo Abe's re-election may just be the 'shock' Japan needs to pull itself out of two decades of genteel decline, says David Pilling in this excerpt from his book, Bending Adversity

All hail to Abe?

This has been a season for "incredible India" books by itinerant journalists and peripatetic academics alike. I follow a simple yardstick about them: does the book tell me anything new or enlighten me in any way? If it does, I recommend it to others, as I have done with Bibek Debroy's tome on Gujarat and Ravi Venkatesan's interesting take on India as a training laboratory for multinationals. The present book, despite the gravitas of its author, Ashutosh Varshney, holder of a prestigious chair at Dartmouth, an Ivy League university, and the enormous weight of scholarship and professional idiom it carries, unfortunately belongs to the other category, for the simple reason that it has left me none the wiser.To be fair, a major reason for this letdown is the book's subtitle, "India's improbable democracy". Professor Varshney has widely published learned discourses on Indian politics. He is a regular columnist for The Indian Express and a frequent presence on television discussion panels. T

Analysis half done

The second half of the 20th century was marked by a global event, one where the world was at war behind the scenes, and stood many times on the verge of annihilation by nuclear weapons: the Cold War. Fought between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1946 till 1991, the Cold War was probably as global as the two World Wars that preceded it. At any rate, it generated considerable social and political turmoil in several nations where communists and capitalists, supported by their respective superpowers, struggled to seize power - mostly with tragic consequences for the country in question.Oscar Guardiola-Rivera's book discusses an event that took place at the height of the Cold War: the coup d'etat by the military in the South American nation of Chile on September 11, 1973, three years after the country had elected a Marxist president, Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens. The coup ended with Allende at the presidential palace shooting himself in the head with a Kalashnikov gifted

Blood on the Southern Cone

Copies of Bird in a Banyan Tree at terminal 1D, New Delhi's "domestic" airport, stare you in the face, but the newspapers in the adjacent rack ripe with scandal about a minister's wife in the capital and an alleged mistress in Pakistan are far racier. At nearby T3, copies of Bina Ramani's memoirs aren't in stock but the newspapers are now speculating over the mysterious death of the minister's wife, with a tiny mention of Ms Ramani's absence from the Jaipur Literature Festival. In the world of dubious celebrity, nothing changes much, only allowing for new names to replace jaded ones, fresher tittle-tattle edging out older, shop-soiled scandals.There was a time when Ms Ramani was at the vortex of staid Delhi, her jaunty hibiscus-in-the-hair pictures a symbol of India's emerging Page 3. She ruled that space with a flair born of instinct. As a woman streetwise and ahead of her times, her private story added a tinge of romantic pathos to her public persona. Editors didn't have to go far lo

Will the real Bina Ramani stand up?

After his important debut book on the Kargil conflict, which he had personally overseen as chief of the Indian Army, General V P Malik has now opened another small window into the functioning of the government with what he titles an "inside view of decision making" during several strategic crises. General Malik personally played a role in each incident that he describes, having occupied key appointments in the military operations directorate during his long and distinguished military career. In describing these events, he provides useful primary-source inputs for historians and sets an example for high government officials who are too often held back from documenting events by outdated notions of secrecy.General Malik's book provides vignettes of India's misconceived intervention in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, which eventually took more than a thousand soldiers' lives; the more successful intervention in the Maldives in 1988, when Indian paratroopers were landed in Male to neutralise

A window into strategy

What did you do in the war, Auntie?Actually, Priscilla Thompson was long dead when her nephew Nicholas Shakespeare was moved to find an answer to that question. He knew she had lived in France during the German occupation, and family lore even had her jailed by the Gestapo for her work in the Resistance. But, like many people who experienced the horrors of this conflict, she chose not to talk about it. Her novelist nephew set out to learn more.The result makes for gripping reading, not least because his findings on how his blond, blue-eyed relative survived four years of Nazi rule were not what he expected. When Priscilla returned to England in October 1944, two months after the liberation of Paris, she told her best friend, Gillian, "I got out just in time." In Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France, what she meant becomes much clearer.Priscilla's life was troubled well before it was disrupted by Hitler. Born in the summer of 1916, she was just eight when her

No resistance

Simon Singh picks a subject of interest, draws the connections to mathematics, and writes a thinly disguised ode to the ultimate subject

The maths behind a comedy

The problem with staging a show trial is that the main actor has little incentive to follow the script. Yet that's never tempered Russia's thirst for judicial theatre. In 1964, a Soviet court demanded to know who had given Joseph Brodsky permission to write poetry. That future Nobel laureate's retort: "I think that it ... comes from God," became a classic of artistic defiance.Two years later, the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel stood accused of purveying "slanderous inventions". The defendants' principled stance did not save them from the Gulag, but it earned the support of people like Hannah Arendt, who called the proceedings "an ugly reminder of something one had hoped had passed into history".In 2003, the Russian president, Vladimir V Putin, ordered the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had amassed his billions in the post-Soviet chaos without much regard for law. The privations Mr Khodorkovsky faced in prison made him an unlikely symbol of Russia's plight.A decade later,

Punk, skirts, balaclavas: A Russian Revolution

Vikram Chandra's Mirrored Mind is a coming-of-age book. Not like The Catcher in the Rye, which recounts the adolescent tribulations of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, but more like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, which, on the face of it, recounts a young girl coming of age in segregated 1953 Alabama but whose enduring value is in its examination of societal rules, written and unwritten. Mr Chandra's book's value is in the examination of the written and unwritten rules that govern the intellectual life of Indians of our generation.The narrator - like many middle-class Indian school boys, including me - is fed a diet of Victorian classics, and bowdlerised editions of books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His literary epiphany is when, digging through the stacks of a Bombay commercial lending library, he encounters Ernest Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". That drives him to an undergraduate degre

A writer's code

Despite a title redolent of pop science,  A Never-Before World by Rama Bijapurkar is an amusing, if somewhat uneven, book. It tracks the evolution of consumers in India and examines why some companies failed while others succeeded in this market.The first part of the book is pretty fascinating; it does a neat job of discussing the factors that make the Indian consumer so unique and the market so distinct. Ms Bijapurkar's genius lies in her keen perception of how the elements of business and society must work in harmony (that good old "synergy"), and in her unfailing ability to spot what many global companies operating in India do not. She does a really good job of joining the myriad scattered dots that constitute the heterogeneity of the Indian market and the failings of mass marketing. It is well written and well organised, and is even funny at times.The most interesting part of A Never-Before World is how persuasively the author argues that India is full of contradictions and double

Old things new

Jagdish Khattar

The former Maruti CEO's memoirs offer a fascinating insight into the inner workings of the government and the public sector

Driver's seat

The author tells you how to take a vacation where Mowgli romped and Hanuman had his tail set on fire

Step into a story

When the game of table tennis became the focus of diplomatic efforts to defuse Cold War tensions between the United States and China, no detail was too small to warrant careful scrutiny. As Nicholas Griffin demonstrates, in a book filled with well-chosen examples, the Chinese team visiting Colonial Williamsburg in 1972 was comfortable eating apple pie and singing Home on the Range. But Row, Row, Row Your Boat was dicier: the line "life is but a dream" was politically incompatible with the teachings of Chairman Mao. Thanks to some fancy footwork on the part of a translator, the line quickly turned into "life is full of steam."The team was en route from Virginia to Washington to meet President Richard M. Nixon, who had ordered a heavy air assault on the port of Haiphong in North Vietnam, China's ally. One purpose of Ping-Pong diplomacy, as it came to be known, was its way of spreading good will and distracting both nations from such things.As Griffin explains, the whole idea of Ping-Po

Table for two (countries)

Frederick Taylor pays more attention to the economic issues of the 1920s, but even then what he really seems to want to write about is the general craziness that was Weimar GermanyFrederick Taylor's The Downfall of Money promises, on its jacket, to deliver "an economic horror story". A horror it was: we've all seen the photos from Germany with the wheelbarrows full of cash or the children playfully stacking bricks of worthless bills (by late 1923 the mark had deteriorated from a value of 4.2 to the dollar in 1914 to over four trillion). The monetary crisis was so traumatic that to this day, it renders the German people thoroughly allergic to price increases.But despite its title, this book is primarily concerned not with money but with everything else the Germans were also concerned with from 1914 to about 1929: military strategy, starvation, assassinations (of people good and bad), putsches (fruitless and fruitful), foreign occupation, riots, strikes and pretty much every other permut

Remembering Weimar Germany

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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