A new book reflects on how it will be suicidal for journalists and news organisations to remain hostage to the old structures of journalism and not adapt with the changing reality

The challenge of staying relevant

Business Standard

The cognitive demands made by an increasingly complex world are generating survival strategies that lead to labour polarisation

Culture vs economics

The M T Vasudevan Nair not only reveals a new dimension, but also expertly demonstrates the important role that a narrator plays in telling an epic

The Mahabharata's tragic hero

Ms Nirmala Lakshman's book is a faithful gazette of the city's history

Chennai, kaaram and kaapi

No American president was more improbable than Thomas Woodrow Wilson. None better embodied how we like to think of ourselves in the greater world. A Princeton University president and political economy professor given to making high-minded speeches and advocating a parliamentary system, Wilson held no public office until he was 54 years old. Recruited to run for governor of New Jersey in 1910 by a Democratic machine boss who thought he would be easily controlled, the professor schooled the pro in practical politics, passing a reform agenda that curbed the power of parties and corporations alike.Adroitly riding the progressive wave breaking over the country, Wilson took the presidency two years later, only the second Democrat to capture the White House since the Civil War. He possessed a rare instinct for power and how to use it. Once in Washington he put his theories to the test, audaciously choosing to rule more as a prime minister than a traditional chief executive. Within 10 months

Professor in Chief

There are few works of fiction or non-fiction by Indians dealing with autism that capture the nature of the condition and its effect on children, adults and the families who have to deal with it. We've yet to have our The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Language of Others or the Manga comic book series With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child.It's a world of broken words and dreams, of silent languages and strange cries. Juliet Reynolds' Finding Neema certainly finds the right words to express the efforts of children and adults to cope with autism.Reynolds' book is located in the lives of a Delhi-based couple, hers, to be precise. The setting and lives of the couple is important because it shows that autism can affect anyone, anytime, anywhere. Reynolds arrived in India as a journalist and writer on art and teacher of English from Britain. Her husband was the late Bengali painter, the radical and gifted Anil Karanjai. She, thus, had a close view of the evolving Indi

Finding the right words

An important new biography paints an intimate portrait of a complex and all-too-human thinker, redressing the culture of Islamophobia that has gripped many parts of the world

Muhammad, prophet and human being

Punjab is a "consumerist" state. People here, any businessman will tell you, believe not in saving for the future but in consuming: cars, clothes - the works. They say the turbulent past of the land has shaped this mindset. Invaders in the Middle Ages came to India via Punjab, looting and pillaging whatever fell in their way. The lesson people learnt was: enjoy life while you can because you don't know what calamity might befall you in the days to come. To understand the present and anticipate the future, it becomes important to know the past.Now, the history of Punjab has been told and retold so many times, in short stories and in novels; so there is little that Rajmohan Gandhi could have uncovered. Even so, his book is a treasure trove of information. That's because Mr Gandhi has infused the narrative with fresh perspective. The book will also help you understand why the two Punjabs, one in India and the other across the border in Punjab, have followed different trajectories in recen

The land of harmony and discord

What do Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a serial entrepreneur, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a homemaker have in common? All of them have to make big and small decisions on a daily basis. Now, one may argue the importance of doing things differently for effective decision making. But the trick is to see things differently and for what they really are. The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli and The Proactive Leader by David De Cremer recommend this approach by examining the intricacies of various decision-making moments. What's interesting is how both authors have addressed different target groups. While Mr Cremer talks about the problem of "procrastination" in leaders, Mr Dobelli deals with fallacies made by people.The Proactive Leader belongs to the "how to" genre of leadership books. The author offers prescriptive methods to grapple with leadership challenges; he aggregates the solutions in a table after explaining each challenge. This gets boring once you are halfway throug

Decision making: Nothing esoteric, please!

Historian Rana Mitter makes a credible case to show that China and Chiang Kai-shek played a decisive role in the World War II

The Allies' forgotten ally

A little over 50 years ago a South Carolina doctor (and the grandfather of this reviewer) treated a family for injuries sustained when a sudden, inexplicable explosion tore through their backyard. The injuries were not serious, and after spending the night at the doctor's house they returned home to discover that the object in the 50-foot crater left behind their house was an atomic bomb that had fallen from a passing Air Force plane. The bomb had not been "armed" with its nuclear core; the blast came from the explosives intended to trigger a chain reaction. The crater can still be seen today.That incident, which led to an anti-­nuclear movement in Britain, where the plane was bound, is one of many stories Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, tells in Command and Control. During the cold war, nuclear bombs fell out of the sky, burned up in plane crashes and were lost at sea. In the incident Mr Schlosser describes in greatest detail, "the Damascus accident" of September 18,

Atomic gaffes

Naushadnama

Raju Bharatan's book on Naushad does justice neither to the man nor his music

Killjoy of odes

A compilation of essays catches the reader's interest at first glance because it talks about a state that has taken India by surprise

Understanding the Bihar model

Population explosion is not the nightmare of the future but the quality of people's lives, says demographer Danny Dorling

A long view of demographics

Earlier this month, Samsung, the world leader in smartphones, unveiled a wristwatch device that can make phone calls, surf the Web and take photos. The device syncs with tablets and smartphones using Google Inc's Android software to make phone calls. A built-in speaker facilitates hands-free conversation, while its voice recognition feature allows users to draft messages, set the alarm and check the weather. If you are yearning for more, this device has a fitness tracker and works with about 70 applications, according to Samsung.Phew! Going by the race - Sony, Apple and Qualcomm have already thrown their hats in the smartwatch ring - one might conclude that a majority of us dig complexity and love it when our devices have the kind of controls that would confound even an inveterate puzzler.So, is simplicity redundant? Is there proof that the greater the degree of complexity the better are the chances of a product or a device notching up scarce market share?It's good to see there are som

Simplicity is the best policy

President Obama is drifting towards an unwarranted and ultimately unwinnable war with Iran, according to the well-known Mideast expert Kenneth M Pollack. With Unthinkable, he hopes to persuade the administration to reverse course.As Mr Pollack hammers home, Mr Obama has explicitly pledged to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear power. And he has flat-out rejected a policy of living with a nuclear-armed Iran. In short, he is threatening preventive war.Since the election, he has repeated his pledge on several occasions. Administration officials like former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former secretary of defence Leon E Panetta have made equally tough remarks. Some commentators scoffed at the pledge as simply another phony Obama "red line," pointing to his warning last year to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria against using chemical weapons. After Mr Assad crossed that line this spring, Mr Obama's response consisted of nothing more than a small-arms package to Syrian rebels,

Bomb scare

The Competent Authority

Shovon Chowdhury illuminates how the ineptitude of the Indian state borders on the ridiculous

The incompetent authorities

This is essentially a book for management practitioners because it provides many practical tips on running a corporation - how to handle the media, deal with high-profile consultants, or hire the right person for the job. But it is also an interesting read for those who do not understand management jargon and yet want to gain an insight into the challenges organisations face in their journey from a start-up to a large corporation. That's because The Elephant Catchers bears Subroto Bagchi's trademark readable style. The veteran manager and entrepreneur knows how to tell a good story: he links anecdotes from his childhood in Odisha to the challenges he confronted as founder and CEO of information technology (IT) firm Mindtree, through to running an organisation.So why is the book called The Elephant Catchers? The title is the heading of one of the chapters, but it also reflects Mr Bagchi's core message. Mr Bagchi grew up in the tribal districts of Odisha, where small-game hunting was usu

The elephant in the start-up

The shadow of Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk", the first president of modern Turkey, loomed large over the protesters at Taksim Square earlier this year as they vented their discontent at, specifically, construction that would disfigure a public area but more generally against Prime Minister Recep Erdogan's conservative, Islamic-leaning pronouncements. Ataturk's ruthless programme of modernisation in the thirties fashioned a dynamic country from the dying Ottoman Empire - the "sick man of Europe" - and established it as a power to reckon with in European politics (his last name literally means "Father Turk" and was bestowed on him by the Turkish Grand National Assembly in 1934).Not unlike Jawaharlal Nehru (incidentally a big admirer of Ataturk) and Mohandas Gandhi in India, Ataturk is something of a haloed figure in the Turkish national pantheon, around whom a quasi-religious personality cult has developed and persists in many parts of country. The result is that Turkish historiography often p

Ataturk's Turkish treatment

The Muslim Brotherhood

Dispatches From the Arab Spring

Caught between the Islamists and dictatorships, the Arab Spring has failed. But does that mean the end of hope for the region? Two books suggest otherwise, though the process will be chaotic

Winter of Arab discontent

The 21st century has ushered in new kinds of warfare that don't involve soldiers wielding weapons. One type, cyberwarfare, seems to have drawn the most commentary and analysis. A less publicised type of attack, financial warfare, is covered in Treasury's War, a useful new book by one of this strategy's architects, Juan C Zarate, a former assistant Treasury secretary.Mr Zarate, now a senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, makes a persuasive case that a series of financial weapons developed after 9/11, and used mostly by the Treasury Department, have given the US opportunities to weaken terrorists and rogue states as never before. He develops that argument by tracing Treasury's aggressive actions against various American foes over the last decade, whether Al Qaeda, North Korea, Iran, Libya or Saddam Hussein's Iraq.For those of us who start feeling drowsy at the very mention of the words "Treasury Department", this book is an eye-opener. Under Mr Zarate, and

Missiles for a financial battlefield

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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