Page 106 - Book Review

The vultures still feed

As the veteran journalist Josy Joseph argues in his new book, A Feast of Vultures: "India's socialist economy has not really been replaced by laissez-faire in these decades

Bandhan's high-yielding bonds

Bandhan Bank has grown its deposits phenomenally in the first year of its existence, thus continuing in the footsteps of Bandhan Financial Services, which, as a microfinance institution in 2009, took over all the loans on the books of the non-governmental organisation (NGO), Bandhan-Konnagar. If the bank can maintain this deposit growth it will be able to continue to both reduce its lending rate and also keep paying above the market to attract deposits. This will be a killer.The best answer to the question "how does Bandhan do it?" can be found in the history of Bandhan by Tamal Bandyopadhyay, author and leading financial commentator, produced at a pace that has become the hallmark of the organisation and anything it touches. The story of Bandhan Bank is very much the story of its Founder and Chief Executive Officer Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, who, from the humblest of personal beginnings, has created with his drive and vision a robust bank with around 700 branches and 20,000 employees.The

The rise of modern philosophy

The Dream of Reason the first volume in a history of Western philosophy by Anthony Gottlieb, a former executive editor of The Economist, appeared in 2,000, and took us from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance.

Women on a beaten track

All in all, She Walks, She Leads is an uninspired tome, enlivened only in part by some of the exceptional women who inhabit its pages

Tamil Nadu's business guidebook

Surge: Tamil Nadu's Growth Story starts promisingly with a description of how Tamil Nadu's story is the under-reported story of modern Indian business history

One night in 1987

Muzaffarnagar is a shameful episode but it is, sadly, not the worst communal carnage since 1947

The fertility debate

For several years I was a professor of creative writing at an English university, and a native habit of finding metaphors and similes in unlikely places occasionally led me to glimpse a strange half-analogy between the writing student and the woman embarking on in vitro fertilization (IVF).Like the IVF industry, the creative writing business has many critics who deplore the notion that creativity can or should be taught and believe some central mystery of life is being violated therein. Part of the humiliation of being helped to bring forth what should emerge naturally (or, by implication, not at all) is the speed with which the most generous impulse - to create - begins to look like the most selfish.The analogy between creative writing and fertility is not entirely facile: The story of IVF is essentially a female story, and it requires women writers to tell it."The truth," Julia Leigh writes early on in Avalanche, "was that many women had gone before me and found ways to lead a creati

The rise and ruin of 'Mother Merrill'

Catching Lightning in a Bottle describes how Charles Merrill democratised investing by enabling countless middle-class individuals to save and invest

Nationalism and its instant discontents

The authors of the three essays that constitute this book do not make any bones about why they came together at this juncture. They think the notion of nationalism has been contorted under the National Democratic Alliance to serve a political purpose with which they strongly disagree and they argue that this contortion has put society on a perilous path.This is putting it politely.Romila Thapar, A G Noorani and Sadanand Menon are the three writers. Their essays dwell on the concepts of nationalism and patriotism and the reformatting of these concepts in contemporary politics. They come to the subject from their individual subject domains and, therefore, bring three perspectives of the political mechanics at play around the idea of nationalism.Mr Noorani's essay is easier to approach. It deals with the issue through a specific tool in the state's legal repertoire that has been much in use and in the news - sedition. His piece is stitched from two essays he wrote for Frontline. The edit

Naguib Mahfouz's trivial pursuits

As protestors dug their heels into Tahrir Square, Cairo, chanting "Go Mubarak!" and demanded the eponymous liberation that their chosen site promised, Arab Spring arrived in Egypt, in 2011 - quite appropriately, the birth centenary of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Perhaps the best known writer of the Arab world, Mahfouz was the prolific chronicler of the troubled modern history of his ancient nation, leading to the popular uprising against the dictator, Hosni Mubarak. His works are also a desperate yearning for democracy and social justice that sparked the revolution - and decades after they were first published, the novels continue to inspire those seeking social justice.Now, this slim volume - purportedly the first of his collected non-fiction - brings to us some of his earliest writing: Essays and newspaper articles penned mostly as an undergraduate student of philosophy at the Cairo University in the late 1930s. In the Introduction, Rasheed El-Enany, professor of Arabic and compar

A tower of Trump books

Over the last year, we've been plunged into the alternate reality of Trumpland, as though we were caught in the maze of his old board game, "Trump: The Game," with no exit in sight

Manchester City's last blue moon

Mr Lawton takes the reader beyond the football and into the hearts of City's golden generation, whose closeness, both on and off the pitch

Modern India, traditional remedies

Aarathi Prasad's book provides a good idea of how the two worlds co-exist happily

Plain tales from the UPA

In India Rising Ravi Velloor leans towards the politician's view and picks the general election of 2004 and the subsequent theatre that went into the choice of Manmohan Singh as prime minister to weave into his book

The case for euro reform

Mr Stiglitz's main point is that for the euro to work its nation-states will have to function more like American states

Remembering the Nazi hunters

The work of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, instituted by the Allied victors after the war, is regarded as a valiant, if flawed, effort to bring Nazi leaders to book for these and other war crimes

Shallow dive in the Indian Ocean

The Pacific and the Atlantic are larger and deeper than the Indian Ocean and, in the last century, have figured more prominently than it in global geo-strategic considerations. But the Indian Ocean has certainly been of far more seminal significance in shaping the world as we know it even today. That is what the sub-title of Sanjeev Sanyal's new book aptly says and that is why I was eager to read it. But 300 pages of thumbnail sketches covering the entirety of four-and-a-half billion years of Mother Earth's existence is not exactly an overwhelming read.When homo sapiens emerged over 100,000 years ago, it was on the rim of the Indian Ocean. When they started moving out of Africa 50,000-plus years later, it was the edges of this ocean they traversed. When they first built rafts and dugouts and other primitive craft, it was to negotiate the waters of this ocean. When they settled to being cultivators, it was mostly in the region abutting this ocean. The earliest towns and cities and tradi

Game, set and yawn

Ace Against Odds is a book that starts off brilliantly but somehow struggles to hold your interest as it trudges along

Shah of Iran's heavenly legacy

The former shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, staked his modernisation project on the secularisation of Iranian life, and the emancipation of traditionally religious women. He urged them to come out from under their veils, attend university and show up as citizens in the public sphere. He passed sweeping secular laws that gave women greater rights in the family, appointed women to high office and encouraged a Western liberality that involved Dior swimsuit shows and broadcasts of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. His efforts empowered a small elite of secular feminists, and led to women making up one-third of all university students by 1978.The 1979 Iranian revolution disrupted all this. It produced an Islamic Republic that imposed Sharia law and mandated veiling. But in the years that followed, female literacy spiked, women's university attendance expanded dramatically and women's participation in public life soared. By the 1990s, far more Iranian women were "emancipated" than had ever been

The real story of the China miracle

Arthur R Kroeber provides a detailed and masterful analysis of how China succeeded in his book China's Economy