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| 0143446843
| 4.07
| 615
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| Feb 03, 2019
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really liked it
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This was such an engrossing book that I felt it should have gone on some more. And I also felt it to be a great example of speaking truth to power. To
This was such an engrossing book that I felt it should have gone on some more. And I also felt it to be a great example of speaking truth to power. To have worked for the BJP on multiple elections and then come out so openly and eloquently against their brand of politics takes guts. Despite its title, it’s not exactly a guide on how to win elections. The author writes from personal experience about how a bunch of state elections played out, along with juicy behind-the-scenes tidbits. Then he zooms out and looks at larger electoral trends. These latter bits are dispassionate and sobering. The overall sense I got from this book is that electoral politics in India is marked by money power, propaganda, entrenched caste and regional loyalties. Not to mention the increasing religious polarization propelled by the BJP. Given that prominent media houses are now owned by industrialists and politicians, there seems to be little wiggle room in the field of electoral politics today. It's one thing for us to know all this as outsiders, but the author builds up each of these aspects nicely as he intersperses his own trajectory through this space. The author's electoral work takes him from doing small time work for the BJP during the 2014 Central government elections, to working closely with an MP from Sikkim, to intense electoral work with Prashant Kishor and his team for the Congress in Punjab, to working for BJP in Manipur, Tripura elections. These sections are full of action and riveting anecdotes, without getting bogged down in any one incident that you start feeling bored. I found the inner workings of the Question Hour scandal very interesting, and also how the incumbent Congress CM in Manipur nearly turned the tables on the BJP campaign that the author was part of, using absolutely outrageous political actions (British Empire level skulduggery). I liked the glimpses of how top party functionaries and political consultants like Prashant Kishor operate. He talks about inner party dynamics and the pervasive sycophancy. There is a long section on identity politics that is both brutally honest and empathetic. He calls out the cynical Islamophobia fanned by the BJP and shows using a lot of facts and data that it is baseless. He is more sympathetic about the role of caste, and believes it is often the only path of solidarity available to marginalized communities. He also says that identity politics along caste and religion appear too entrenched and there seems to be no easy way out. His description of the amount of effort that goes into pure marketing was fantastic. Like swamping the entire constituency with posters overnight, slogans, songs, jingles, multiple social media accounts, numerous Whatsapp groups, focus groups … and so on. Seems like there’s an absolutely mind boggling amount of money and effort going into elections these days! Not to mention the police looking the other way when these are happening.The part about TV news channels is as depressing as you’d expect. The author gives pages and pages of concrete information about how much of what we see on TV “news” today is propaganda, and channels are backed by big business and politicians. I’m reminded of the fact that the Election Commission hardly figures in this book amidst all this jamboree! Should they have a bigger role to play? Or should they just let the current laissez faire situation go on? There is of course a chapter on Fake News, about which the author went on to write a full book later with Anand V, titled The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities. There are parts where the book takes important personal-political turns, like when he publicly listed his reasons for quitting the BJP ahead of the 2019 Central government elections. That essay is a great read, and kudos for choosing to walk away from potentially more successful years with this strong political party. What I missed were some reflections on how one ought to look at the electoral space relative to other avenues available to engage with society. And whether at all one should look at elections if interested in making any kind of socio-political change. For people who have something material to win/lose from elections (the poor, and increasingly the minorities), electoral politics is not a spectator sport or a technocratic exercise. But since the author doesn't fall in either of these buckets and entered the scene willingly when he had other career options, I wonder whether the glamour and glitz of elections make them a pleasurable distraction for the elite, crowding them out from taking up other non-glamourous, long term social engagements. Elections and political parties come just one step before policy changes, are notoriously infested with criminal elements, and not everyone finds satisfaction in simply pushing messages to so-called swing voters. The RSS is another aspect the author could have elaborated on. The organization comes up a few times and he mentions the groundwork they do before elections, but a first-hand perspective of their activities would have enriched this book. To conclude, I think this book is a must read if you’re an Indian and even remotely interested in how politics - elections in particular - operate in this country. The author has mentioned politicians like Arvind Kejriwal, Pradyut Bora, and Jayaprakash Narayan (of Lok Satta) and how they broke into the electoral scene. This book is a great addition to that body of knowledge which should help future political actors in figuring out the electoral domain. ...more |
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| 4.00
| 13
| unknown
| Apr 01, 2016
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really liked it
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This book is an absolute delight and I highly recommend it. I am surprised that at least some bits from it are not included in textbooks for school ch
This book is an absolute delight and I highly recommend it. I am surprised that at least some bits from it are not included in textbooks for school children in India (perhaps that is so in Bengal). It is the autobiography of Surendranath Banerjee, who was a prominent political leader from Bengal and from the generation prior to Gandhi. He played an important role during the Swadeshi movement of 1905-1908 and was one of the founders of the Indian National Congress in 1885. There are other interesting biographical details about him but the book is also a delight for the period of the nationalist movement it covers and his beautiful writing style. He titled the book "A Nation in Making", because he believed that his long course of fifty years of public life coincided with the birth and growth of the idea of India as a new political nation-state! He was among the first Indians to pass the Civil Service exams and later worked for almost forty years heading Ripon College in Calcutta and teaching English there. He campaigned relentlessly for increased representation of Indians and for elected members in the thoroughly Imperial administration that he encountered. Towards the end of his political life he became the head of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation. He changed it to run along democratic lines and increased the number of Indian officials in it. His prominence in public life reduced after the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford reforms because he broke away from the majority Congress view on this propounded by Gandhi, Nehru and the likes. If you are interested in how the early Indian nationalists started imagining the idea of India as a modern political entity with a unified public, how the elite in Calcutta connected with kindred spirits in Bombay, Punjab and Madras, how they adopted modern/democratic forms of politics, how they attempted to shape public opinion via newspapers, associations and public meetings, how they progressively extracted more concessions from the British, and so on, this book offers a compelling first person account from someone who was in the thick of things (but it may not be an objective historical assessment). You'll also notice the limits of the "constitutional" methods of speeches and petitioning they largely relied on. Banerjee stresses right from the beginning of his political life on the need for Hindu-Muslim unity, much before cynical manoeuvres of the British like the Partition of Bengal. Another curiosity is the instinctive pan-India outlook of many leaders of the time. I don't know why people from Bengal, Bombay or Madras didn't agitate for independence for their respective states and chose to create ties with far-flung parts of the large subcontinent! The Swadeshi movement and Partition of Bengal create a huge rift within Congress, and by 1919 (the end of First World War and Jallianwalla Bagh massacre), the Moderate faction of which Banerjee was a big part starts to diminish. Banerjee himself was no stranger to conflict and confrontation (the British had nicknamed him "Surrender-Not"). He took hardline stances against the British government when the occasion demanded, and went to jail due to an editorial he published in his newspaper "The Bengalee". Hindsight tells us that these well intentioned elites had their blind spots. Their approach was not just gentlemanly towards the British, but also top-down in terms of the society they were part of. The book talks about the injustice of not having Indians represented in various aspects of Government. But it doesn't raise the issue of rampant poverty, de-industrialization, agricultural distress and caste oppression in contemporary India. History tells us that each of these were used as a major grouse against the British in the freedom struggle in the 20th Century, but you wouldn't be able to discern that from reading this book. Going by the tone of this book, even by the late 19th Century one can sense that the days of the British empire are numbered. The elite of the country who have deep roots in this society have already turned against it. And not in some regressive way, but using the latest and greatest ideological and political tools. Meanwhile, on the British side you get a parade of Viceroys who do one short stint here, probably cursing the climate and the natives and eager to head back home. Banerjee is active through the reigns of Viceroys Lytton, Ripon, Dufferin, Lansdowne, Elgin, Curzon, Minto, Hardinge and Chelmsford! A purely extractive and repressive bureaucracy like that doesn't stand a chance against an awakened local citizenry. I was looking for his take on reforms within Hindu society, given Bengal's long and contentious history of those in the 19th Century. Curiously, Banerjee sidesteps it completely, and only adds a bit in the last chapter saying social reform is really, really hard and needs to be done in stages! His interest is in increasing Indian representation in the government, and urban facilities like roads, water supply, sanitation etc. He comes across like one of those modern day technocrats who hope that social problems will disappear on their own if you ignore them long enough. Very few parts of this long book are not noteworthy, but if I were forced to highlight some bits, it would be these: - His view of India as a unified nation based on travelling across the country, meeting the elites in various parts and using the Italian Unification movement as a model for India - His first experience of jail because of an editorial he wrote against a British judge and of the public protests that accompanied it - Noticing how the British community in India closed ranks and put up a strong fight against a law that would allow Indian judges to pass judgments on them - Connecting with Dadabhai Naoroji and Gokhale in Bombay, Subramania Iyer in Madras and others in the context of setting up the Indian National Congress (Banerjee was already running a local version of the same, and merged his organization into the INC), the attack by the British administration against the nascent INC as they recognized the threat it posed - The many ways he fights for rights of Indians in the existing administration: increasing upper limit of age for ICS exams, simultaneous exams in India, selection of Indians in more departments, elections by popular mandate as opposed to nomination by the British - The massive backlash against the Partition of Bengal and his role in the subsequent Swadeshi movement. The way the British police assaulted members at events he had organized. - His multiple visits to England as part of various committees and to press various Indian causes among the high officials there - The fact that elite Indians worked in close proximity with the British - often as judges and administrators - and still arranged themselves against the British in the larger national interest - His final years implementing democratic governance within the Calcutta Municipal Authority. - His short and highly gracious biographical sketches of the many famous people he partnered or jostled with in his long public life. The book is broken up into 36 chapters of elegant prose and you can bounce around them a bit if you don't feel like reading them in strictly chronological order. ...more |
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| 0140107819
| 9780140107814
| 0140107819
| 4.11
| 4,345
| 1987
| Jan 01, 1989
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it was amazing
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It feels presumptuous to be reviewing what is practically a textbook, and that too one authored by a group of reputed historians! But hey… readers be
It feels presumptuous to be reviewing what is practically a textbook, and that too one authored by a group of reputed historians! But hey… readers be readers :) This book was totally worth the time I spent on it. Even though we're all aware of the broad outline of the freedom struggle, it's likely to be remnants of what we were taught as schoolchildren, and the odd nuggets we pick up later from popular cinema or culture. A book like this is worthwhile because not only does it cover the movement in its entirety, it also avoids gross simplifications that are inevitable in both those contexts. To cite just one example, in the Introduction the authors contextualize their own approach to understanding that period, and contrast it with other schools which downplay it as different native elite groups trying to grab power, or deny that economic and democratic ideals were under contestation at all! On the contrary, the precise joy of this book is in watching a brand new, gargantuan democratic formation emerge from the ruins and contradictions of late-stage monarchism and colonial arrogance. What starts out as intense-but-localized misgivings about political economy in the 1850's acquires broader theoretical structure through the work of intellectuals like Dadabhai Naoroji, M.G. Ranade, Gokhale and Surendranath Banerjee (to name a few). As per this book, theirs were pioneering critiques of colonialism anywhere in the world. It was this foundation that the next generation of leaders like Gandhi, Tilak and Nehru built upon as they went about popularizing the need for a political alternative. They not only had to grapple with conceptualizing this new entity (what we take for granted as today's India), but innovate in terms of mass political action and mass communication - innovations which movements elsewhere in the world have adopted since then. Imagine the vitality and integrity of a cause which drew to it organically people of the calibre of Subhas Chandra Bose, Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajagopalachari. No resort stays or ministries in the offing! Just decades of struggle and possible jail time. Even the harsh criticism of Gandhi and Congress by Ambedkar can be interpreted as they were not going far enough or fast enough, not that they were headed in the wrong direction. No wonder he was the one at the helm of a Constitution which is filled with grand dreams for future generations to realize. Apart from descriptions of well known events like the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre or the Salt Satyagraha, other incidents that made an impression on me: frequent farmer revolts and famines that pointed to deeper problems, Naoroji's explanation of how wealth was being drained out of India, the relentless speechifying and constitutional approach of Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta and others, the coalescing of regional socio-political organizations into an annual "Congress" event, the intensity of protests against the partition of Bengal and the massive "Swadeshi" movement, the long-running advocacy through literature and music in Bengal, the extraordinary courage of Tilak, Gandhi's first stab at resisting the British in Champaran, the factious but fairly transparent and big-tent nature of the Congress, the Ghadar movement, the Gurdwara reforms after Jallianwallah Bagh, the founding of many newspapers by nationalists, Patel's phenomenal groundwork in Gujarat, the long debates on whether to withdraw from colonial institutions or overpower them from the inside, the Marxist turns Nehru took the Congress into, how big capitalists eventually threw their weight behind the freedom struggle, Jinnah's tragic decision to make a career out of communalism, the strategizing around the Vaikom Satyagraha, protestors with the new flag in their hands being bludgeoned by police, the Navy revolts … and too many more to list. Personally, when reading this book I felt the tide turned in the 1930's. When the all-British Simon Commission had to shamefacedly scamper around the country and the subsequent elections swept the Congress to power almost everywhere, the morale of the colonists was crushed. Two to three generations of political activism had revitalized Indian society across its length and breadth. The cultural renaissance that had begun in Bengal in the 19th Century had washed all over the subcontinent. Political sentiment bled into poems, plays and even religion. The few British people who still fancied India as their dominion had to pay heed when this large country started yelling at them with every ounce of its civilizational heritage: Quit India. Lest you think this book is only a long cavalcade of events, there are two great chapters at the end that locate a larger political strategy - albeit emergent - in the freedom struggle. What's significant about the strategy is that it was adapted to the specific type of the colonial regime: what the authors call "legal authoritarianism". In order to be profitable and sustainable, British rule had to appear to be in Indians' best interests, and appear to provide civil liberties and rule of law. Over time the leaders of the freedom movement learnt to leverage its strengths and prey on its weaknesses. I've summarized these chapters on strategy in the next couple of sections, as they're worth pondering over. Strategy across people 1. There is going to be a battle of ideas. Convince people that British rule is neither benevolent nor invincible. This necessarily starts with the elite. 2. Politicize the masses: farmers, students, youth and workers. 3. Convince British people and public opinion in England 4. Strengthen and expand whatever democratic space is already available. 5. Win over the British state apparatus in India like the police and the courts. Results of these were evident during the 1942 Quit India movement and the revolts after the end of World War Two in 1945. Strategy across the time dimension Across time, the strategy had the following pattern: Struggle - Truce - Struggle (S - T - S’) Mass agitations can only last for a short while. So call a truce at some point and prepare for the next one (Gandhi believed that it’s better to retreat with dignity than appear to be routed). Use every win to delegitimize British rule and make more demands. The periods between mass agitations are full of ideological work and constructive work. Speeches and tours by leaders, organizing farmers and workers, or working on setting up schools, developing village industries, spinning Khadi etc. The net effect is to create a spiraling movement, where every new agitation is more intense and wider than the previous one, with everyone being aware that the eventual goal is Independence. Non-violence Non-violence was a sensible and effective tactic. It lessened the severity of backlash by the government, allowed more people (esp. women) to participate, prevented British from demonizing the freedom movement and it reinforced that the issue at stake is a moral and ideological one, and not one of brute force. Indians would never have sufficient military firepower as long as the British controlled the police and the army. Conclusion As I reached the end of this book, I could see how each important thread and theme of the freedom struggle left an imprint on the new Constitution and the first few decades of policies that followed. Be it universal adult franchise, secularism, civil liberties and freedom of the Press, poverty alleviation, land reforms, equity for lower castes, socialist industrialization, a scientific temper, marriage and inheritance laws … there's probably a story going back to the first half of the 20th Century or beyond. I consider it a remarkable accomplishment of that movement that some of us didn't feel a compelling need to substantially dive into its history or wonder if the project needs more hands on deck. Until now. ...more |
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Aug 12, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0691033056
| 9780691033051
| 0691033056
| 3.79
| 260
| 1993
| 1993
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really liked it
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This book has many delectable details about the cultural politics of 19th Century Bengal and a few hard bits of theorizing that you may have to chew u
This book has many delectable details about the cultural politics of 19th Century Bengal and a few hard bits of theorizing that you may have to chew upon at length. It argues that nationalist resistance to colonialism started showing up in cultural projects much before a political movement could be launched. These took the shape of reimagining Hinduism, India's history, the life of women, relationships between castes, and a new approach to literature and art in Bengal. Each of these categories is explained with wonderfully recounted examples. A few that stand out are the analysis of Ramakrishana Paramahamsa, the history book of Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay, and the chapters on what women were expected to do and how they didn't quite agree. It was not just women, but even different caste groups and communities wouldn't submit completely to a kind of "homogenizing" project launched by Bengali intellectuals of the time. The book traces these resistances as well, and notes that these contests went unresolved as the nationalist project was only interested in them instrumentally. Historical theorizing is interspersed throughout the book, but the really large chunk is saved for the end (more on that later). By the second half of the 19th Century, the contradictions of British colonialism were becoming obvious to people in Bengal. While its rhetoric was of spreading Enlightenment values, its economic interests wouldn't allow it in practice. Therefore racial superiority was subtly invoked and discrimination became institutionalized in government machinery. The Bengali middle class realized their position of subjugation. Their association with British government and culture were no longer objects of pride but of self-pity and ridicule. The book gives many examples of this attitude as shown in popular Bengali plays of the time. The author is himself a poet and playwright apart from being a top class historian, so these sections make for great reading. Even history books quickly traversed the long arc of being disinterested accounts of kingly activities, to lamenting the current state of "Bharat" as a big fall from past glory! Since a head-on confrontation with the state’s apparatus was out of question given the one-sided status quo and memories of the horrific reprisals after the revolt of 1857, the cultural domain was where "resistance" began. The British were no longer welcome to reform Indian society (a position they too were happy to take after 1857). It was "resistance" in the sense that the intellectuals and middle class were out to prove that their cultural domains can be as "modern" - using whatever fanciful notions of equivalence - as the British state institutions were undeniably "modern". Hence arose a major push for all forms of Indian cultural production that would appeal to the sensibilities of the anglicized middle class but couldn’t be blind copies of forms of British culture. Even an anachronistic turn to the occult/mystic along the lines of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa was excused, as long as the import of his teachings could be shown to align with Christian missionary teachings or the nationalist project. The author’s exegesis of a book of Ramakrishna’s teachings is remarkable! The two sensitive chapters about women also deserve special mention. One is about how they were expected to behave: get an education in one of the newly established nationalist schools that taught mostly in Bengali, and even work, but still not ape the British "memsahib" in cultural aspects. New attire was devised for them, books and magazines in Bengali catered to them. On the whole, their cultural life was to have an imprint that could be projected as the anti-thesis of the racially subjugated political and economic status of the male elite. The other chapter is how the women themselves responded to this new instrumentality for their life. This doesn't find much voice in public life, but the author unearths and carefully analyzes some female memoirs of the time. To quote just one example: the memoir of Saradasundari where she writes of her love of pilgrimages and tolerance of idol worship. In fact her son Keshab Chandra leads a major faction of the Brahmo Samaj and is opposed to both! Also relevant is that Keshab Chandra was the biggest evangelist of Ramakrishna among the Bengali middle class. Similar stories of attempted co-option of lower castes, peasants are presented in the book, as also their resistances. As the nationalist project gained in political strength, the cultural projects took a backseat until Independence, or were left unresolved. Except for one: the writing of a nationalist history, which would go on to add fuel to the fire of communal politics in the 20th Century. In the early years of the Bengal cultural project it had proved convenient to characterize medieval India under Islamic rule as a time of decay. But that had sowed the seeds of Muslim resentment, and later allowed all kinds of parochial historians to ride this misbegotten horse long after its legitimacy was debunked. To return to the historical theorizing that I’d mentioned up top. In general the reading gets hard whenever this book theorizes, as opposed to being beautifully fluid when it’s just recounting. And the same applies to an overarching theory that it propounds. The author argues that political philosophers have missed the deep impact that capitalism has had on destroying communitarian belonging. After examining four such figures (John Locke, Montesquieu, Hegel and Karl Marx), the author notes that none of them assign sufficient importance to different communities that humans feel substantively attached to - like caste, religion, region, language and so on. Marxism asserts that capitalism takes off at any place only after a sufficient mass of people are (forcibly?) separated from their means of production and turned into “labour”. The author boldly renames this well-known process of “primitive accumulation” as nothing but the destruction of the dominant forms of (pre-capitalist) community in that place. The reason this perspective gets missed is because for one, the political world today and its historical trajectory are impossible to delink from the outward expansion of European colonialism, and for another, capitalism rides atop the two ideologies of liberalism and the nation-state. The former proclaims emancipation at an individual level, and the latter tries to subsume all of one’s communitarian feelings. Locke, Montesquieu and Hegel - embedded as they are in capitalist societies - fail to see all societies for the “melange of communities” that they originally start out as. That epithet instead gets applied only to societies like India when colonialism or imperialism meets them - driven by the expansionary nature of capital as it so happens. These societies fail to match the simpler spectrum of family-civil society-nation that capitalist societies have by now settled into. Thus the tendency is strong among colonists to enumerate and classify this bewildering melange and in turn racialize these societies as somehow backward. At the same time, an overwhelming number of these populations too see themselves as bearing the narratives of different communities they’re part of - intersecting or concentric - and by no means as a nation! Therefore what all this theorizing (if you agree with it!) will let you conclude is that when the twain met, both the community-based cultural resistance and the racial profiling of the kind seen in 19th Century Bengal were more or less inevitable, in hindsight. ...more |
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| 0860915468
| 9780860915461
| 0860915468
| 4.11
| 13,780
| May 1983
| Jul 17, 1991
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really liked it
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This book does a great job of describing what is meant by nationalism, how the idea arose and spread across large parts of the world. Everyone assumes
This book does a great job of describing what is meant by nationalism, how the idea arose and spread across large parts of the world. Everyone assumes today that the nation-state is the default sovereign political unit but it’s not easy to explain why it has come to be so. As with any historical analysis, you could disagree with its thesis or certain aspects. On the whole I found myself agreeing with many of its points. And even where you don't agree with the author you'll find it worthwhile to think through the questions he raises. The techniques used in the book can be applied to other related questions, making it a worthwhile investment of your time. Overall it's no surprise that this book is considered a classic and must-read for academics studying nationalism! It's important to explain this book's definition of nationalism, since interpretations of the word can vary. First, what is a Community? A Community is a group of people who feel they are connected to each other in some way. This connection can be through direct interactions (or a traceable chain of interactions), or through a common experience that they're going through - like being part of a pilgrimage. Also, members of a community think that in principle they're all roughly equal, even if some levels of differentiation exist. Now what is an "Imagined" Community? It's a group of people all of whom imagine they are connected to each other in some way, even if it's physically impossible to have direct interactions with everyone. This connection is usually brought about through some shared experience they're going through (or perhaps imagine that they are all going through). When this shared, imagined experience is political in nature, and/or their reaction to that is political in nature, that community is said to have developed "nationalism". The other aspect remains that they all feel roughly equal to each other. An assumption runs through this book that the community is physically co-located or contiguous, which also meant that the nation was conceived within a limited geographical boundary. There isn’t any talk of purely online political communities. If the preceding two paras appeared needless and belaboured to you in this 21st Century, the genius of this book lies in demonstrating how each of those bits - the imagined part, the egalitarian part, the shared experience part, and the political orientation - only arose a couple of hundred years ago and was inconceivable before that. Any notions you may carry around that nationalism was a feeling your countrymen have sustained for hundreds of years is likely delusional, or an elaborately crafted myth. The author proposes that nationalism started as an 18th Century phenomenon in Europe, and had its roots in cultural changes that were ongoing and irreversibile. Only later does this cultural artefact take a political form. The age of science and geographical discoveries was truly on and religious certainties were being shaken up. One of the deep levels of impact it had was on people's notion of time: "Time" became a continuous, one-directional entity. History began to be seen as a long chain of cause-and-effect events, and communities and societies graphed against that notion of time. What possible other notions of time can exist?? Well, "time" can be also measured in a religious way, where your primary marker of time is your own life stages: your individual, internal development and your ongoing relationship to the ever-present divine. Christ is not a historical figure but someone who can be comfortably imagined to be still around. This book's extraordinary cultural argument is that there was no longitudinal-historical concept of societal time among the greater mass of society until then. At the same time, this new notion of time and the removal of religious certainties created a discomfiting hole around philosophical questions like one's mortality and continuity. New geographical discoveries unravelled the exceptionalism and universality of the current known cultures namely Christianity, Islam and Judaism. They were now seen in territorial and relativist terms. Here comes another blinder of a cultural argument from this book: People's relationship to language underwent a huge change, in part due to the decreasing prestige of existing "sacral" languages like Latin, Arabic or Hebrew. Long-held beliefs like Latin as the only way to approach God, or Quran being untranslateable from Arabic etc began to be discarded. Vernacular languages began to be seen as on par with these. If the notions of time and language of the previous two paras seem far-fetched today, recall the joke where an old fish came along and asked two younger ones, "How's the water folks?", leaving them utterly puzzled about what is Water? Along with the slow degeneration of religious control and the new societal-historical notion of time, there was a turn away from "dynasties" and the "divine right" of kings. This allowed people to relinquish one big relationship from their mind: that of an hierarchical, subject status to a ruling dynasty who may have nothing in common with you, and who probably ruled from a far away capital. In time this gave primacy to the egalitarian aspect of the community that I'd mentioned as necessary for nationalism. By now, some parallels with nationalism can be seen: the changing notion of a "time" that is no longer mediated by religious thought-processes, the changing notion of "space" where you care less about distant centres of power, and a change in your perception regarding how sovereign or exceptional your current authority figures are. "Nationalism" evolved to fill these cultural gaps. The individual saw both temporal and spatial continuity through this imagined political community, even though their own life was reduced to one blip in a long historical time, and their own (religious) culture was not exceptional anymore. Eventually, a notion of nations having a "hoary past" was routinely pushed from the top. That isn't to say that "nationalism" was a foregone conclusion! What is to say that a new belief will necessarily replace a pre-existing one, and not just leave a vacuum in its place? The book takes pains to explain how a last factor was crucial to the sustenance of this nascent feeling of imagined political community: namely "print-capitalism", i.e., capitalism’s applications of printing technology. What capitalism and printing together achieved were the dominance of vernacular languages vis-a-vis the hitherto hegemonic Latin, and the eventual hardening of political/administrative boundaries along linguistic regions. The Protestant Reformation had made full use of printing technology and gave a big boost to vernacular languages as it wore down the authority of the Church and Latin. After establishing this basic outline of nationalism, the author embarks on a vast comparative study to see how well different nationalisms fit this mould. There is a detailed chapter comparing nationalism in the Americas vs Europe, many snippets about Southeast Asian countries and Continental Europe, Britain. Among the myriad points brought up, I found these three worth highlighting. First, the newspaper played a crucial role in the formation of US nationalism (part of the print-capitalism thesis). Newspaper readers are a community of politically minded people reading commentary everyday in the silent privacy of their homes, but imagining that thousands of others are also doing the same. Further, the intrinsic format of a paper is that it marks a community’s progress against time. Second, the success of US nationalism led to the model being adopted by European countries by consolidating around language plus a reading public (both facilitated by print-capitalism) and egalitarian values. Lastly, these established models formed a template for anti-colonial nationalisms in various parts of Asia when the circumstances became ripe. My review has been structured as a detailed summary partly for one reason: the book’s ideas are great but its writing is uneven and takes effort to get through. I found the initial few chapters beautiful and lucid but found the comparative study tough going. I skipped a lot of the details about the nationalisms of Southeast Asia and smaller European countries. Also, the culturally grounded claims about changing notions of Time and Language can only be argued indirectly and hence the author is forced to rely on an eclectic set of literary sources and political texts. This means obscure novel and book extracts, which don't add up to an easy read. But if you are interested in nationalism, esp. the way historians and related academics see it, this book can’t be missed. ...more |
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| Jan 10, 2022
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it was amazing
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This is like a book version of the Netflix "slow burn". Its plot unfolds gradually, systematically but thoroughly. The author, a legal scholar, demons
This is like a book version of the Netflix "slow burn". Its plot unfolds gradually, systematically but thoroughly. The author, a legal scholar, demonstrates how the Indian government at the Centre is operating like the linchpin of a totalitarian machine. But for a good part of the book you may be forgiven for wondering why you're reading legal minutiae from the 1970's (note: I'm not a lawyer)! Then the dots start connecting and the implications of legal loopholes and judicial shortcomings emerge. By the time it signs off with the famous "First they came for the socialists ... ", you'd have traversed a range of emotions - from befuddlement and curiosity through to shock and despair. At its core it highlights the similarities and differences between the Emergency and today's India. Not only are we seeing the same governmental patterns in play today, we've gone beyond that in observing popular support for the government's obviously unconstitutional steps: the abrogation of Article 370, laws related to "love jihad", cow slaughter and so on. The author stays remarkably restrained as he deals with these and other emotive topics. Being a legal scholar, he lets the text of such laws and their case histories speak for themselves. The one striking commonality between the two eras are the illegal arrests and preventive detentions. These phenomena rip the heart out of "due process" and understandably drive constitutional lawyers to despair. Therefore, this book could become the go-to source to learn exactly how the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) and the NIA (National Investigative Agency) epitomize India's undeclared Emergency. The book also taught me a good deal about the political phenomenon of totalitarianism and how it differs from authoritarianism. The latter relies on someone grabbing hold of the reins of power and enforcing a sullen obedience from the population (think Putin today). Totalitarianism, on the other hand, expects the eager participation of the masses in bizarre and masochistic political actions. Thus, it needs some kind of deranged ideology to go along even as those in power look to entrench themselves. They can choose from mythical histories, past oppressions, misplaced fears, victimhood complexes - or any combination of these that fits the current population. The traditional big checks on executive power (the judiciary and the media) need to be cowered into submission. Grand or macabre displays of mob mentality are used to gradually dull individual thinking or squeeze any hope of action out of it. As the author explains via Hannah Arendt, the mob becomes a "direct agent" of nationalism. The above is just one of many exquisite references to Arendt (the famous political philosopher of post war Germany). The other person who gets top billing is Juan Linz, a Spanish political scientist and author of "Totalitarianism and Authoritarian Regimes". Both are cited many times, often to illuminate subtle points, and not once gratuitously. Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" has been on my radar for a while and has now transformed into a must read. The deranged idea of Hindutva and its mobs and their calls for genocide, the utter paralysis of the Supreme Court, crony capitalism and compromised corporate media, the hounding by the NIA and endless detentions using UAPA (most notably of the Bhima Koregaon-16) are visible realities for Indians today. Still, one achieves conceptual closure after seeing a legal scholar tie these together cogently with the help of legal and political frameworks, and drawing connections to other places and times in history. Cobwebs clear up, cracks gets filled and the mind opens itself up, even if hesitantly, to the possibility of light at the end of this tunnel and what to do about it. The book takes on this last question in a chapter titled "What is to be done?". Unfortunately I found this less than fulfilling (hence my emotional journey ending at despair), and certainly so when compared to the rest of the book (an admittedly high bar). Even here, a terrifically persuasive case is made for unrelenting legal activism. Drawing from examples in Palestine, apartheid South Africa and the USA, the author shows that all the individual bits of legal data gathered during the years of gloom can greatly mobilize public sentiment when a ray of hope appears in future. No one knew when apartheid would end or when the Berlin Wall would fall but as soon as momentum gathered, the paper trails of these "regimes of evil" helped in hastening them to oblivion. Why this will be so is explained through political scientist Ernst Fraenkel and his "The Dual State" analysis of Nazi Germany: a capitalist, pro-corporate totalitarian regime needs the make-believe of rule of law in order for businesses to run. Hence the "normative" State will keep up this charade, while the "prerogative" State of the all-powerful cultish leader and brutish mobs continue running on a parallel track. This hypocrisy is bound to get exposed. To list some of the other suggestions in this chapter: dissent within the bureaucratic setup, espouse constitutional values and an inclusive nationalism, address inequalities, create networks of solidarity and so on. An interesting one is the technique of relying on native/Indian traditions of dissent and humanism. While this was tried with some degree of success during India's freedom struggle, it has lost its appeal over subsequent generations. The author invokes Basavanna, Kabir and Tagore as possible sources of inspiration. Taken as a whole, this list feels like the full-spectrum "war of position" espoused by political theorist Gramsci and ascribed as such to the RSS and its affiliate organizations at multiple places in this book itself! There’s a small bit by Arendt that offers a breakthrough here as well: every human being needs to be programmed/conditioned into the totalitarian cult of the day. But the wonderful diversity and contingencies of humans is not something totalitarianism can manage forever. Thus, every birth offers a new beginning! Curiously, both in his analysis of the Emergency and of today, the author spends very little time commenting on how the rest of the political players are responding, how State governments are behaving (or whether they're themselves becoming totalitarian). Legal and bureaucratic activism are not open to the common man, and hence a more thorough analysis of the political response would have been welcome. But that's just my minor quibble about this otherwise breathtaking book. ...more |
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Mar 10, 2022
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| 9354227406
| 9789354227400
| 9354227406
| 4.11
| 72
| unknown
| Aug 02, 2021
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really liked it
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This is a timely and informative book. It explains how companies and powerful institutions like the government are nowadays engaged in a continuous ca
This is a timely and informative book. It explains how companies and powerful institutions like the government are nowadays engaged in a continuous campaign to shape how we perceive the world around us. While appealing to our "senses" this way is much better than controlling us through brute military force like in pre-modern times, it's possible for such efforts to have very deleterious effects when employed by authoritarian governments and other bad actors. To borrow some terminology from the book itself, after reading it your viewpoint on such operations will go from "clandestine" (where you're not even aware they exist), to "ambiguous" (where you can observe them but can't conclusively prove who's behind them). Even if you think you have a keen eye for misinformation campaigns around you, you'll be grateful to the authors for deep diving into the relevant research literature (which often straddles disciplines) and providing handy summaries and signposts for the rest of us. Some notable techniques that emerge from this include: 1. The "ON3C" framework for an information campaign: You define the Objective, frame a suitable Narrative (or story), then understand the Context in which it will be executed, then come up with the specifics of the Campaign and the Content. The example used here to illustrate each step is how the BJP tried to consolidate Hindus as a vote bank by using the patently false notion of "love jihad". 2. Reflexive Control (RC): You get your adversary to voluntarily opt for the path that best suits your interest. This might require shaping their worldview to such an extent that alternatives other than the one you want them to take will seem less desirous. An example of RC is how China gambled that India will not publicly admit that they have foreign troops in their land, as it would make them lose face. This gamble had a good chance of succeeding because over the preceding years the Indian Prime Minister had made many public displays of bonhomie with his Chinese counterpart and would be loathe to admit it was all in vain! So in effect, they were able to get the Indian government to seriously downplay Chinese incursions. For me, the most useful bits were the ON3C framework and the chapter with a careful exposition of how information "silos" are identified, infiltrated and gradually subverted for new purposes. I felt this mirrors how "special interests" and "lobbies" operate in the real world. Silos are an unavoidable consequence of the fractured media consumption landscape today, and when they're combined with "target audience analysis" (TAA), it's possible to craft not one - but many! - alternative realities for people in respective silos. The parts that didn't resonate with me were lengthy explanations connecting certain Indian myths and fables to the notion of conjuring alternative realities. They seemed a bit far-fetched. In any case, you don't lose much by not taking these bits seriously. The book isn't restricted to shady political operators though, and talks of other kinds of scamsters as well - OTP hackers, pickpockets and the good old conman/trickster types. But the overwhelming emphasis is on politics. In fact, the second half of the book goes deep into the making and workings of an authoritarian state and potential ways it can implode. Again, India's BJP and its Central government serve as a running example and convenient punching bags. It’s arguable whether such level of detail was required in this book. These bits might be particularly hard to stomach for people who still remain invested in that party! How do you counter a false reality or narrative that's already in progress? The book offers precious little hope here. Its sombre advice is to ignore that narrative and craft a new, completely orthogonal narrative that can take precedence in people's mind over the first one. Well, at least one should appreciate the authors for their honesty. Developing a faux methodology and making us pin our hopes on it would pretty much defeat the whole purpose of this book! Overall, this book can be a valuable introduction to the bewildering world of information wars in which we are already unwitting, unwilling pawns. ...more |
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Mar 05, 2022
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| 0976470705
| 9780976470700
| 0976470705
| 3.94
| 16,143
| 2003
| Jul 17, 2013
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really liked it
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This is actually two books masquerading as one. The first is full of great advice on how to identify a genuine customer need and validate it before cr
This is actually two books masquerading as one. The first is full of great advice on how to identify a genuine customer need and validate it before creating a company around it. In my opinion, you should absolutely read this part, ideally 1-2 years before setting up shop. The second half is largely standard advice about scaling your product and marketing efforts as the mist around customer expectations starts to clear. The author Steve Blank has built many successful startups, consults for VC firms and is a passionate teacher at Stanford and Berkeley - https://steveblank.com/about. The operating context for the book seems to be B2B companies (no specific talk about SaaS vs On Prem) doing some kind of enterprise workflows and driven by sales + marketing. I learnt a lot from the first two "Steps": Customer Discovery and Customer Validation. You should bounce back and forth between these steps till clarity is attained. In practice, these phases should feel substantially different from the "Product" development model where you spend most of your attention on the Product because the "Customer" part is thought to be well understood. It takes experience and humility to acknowledge that discovering a worthwhile customer problem to solve and validating your understanding about it are easier said than done! It’s for this same reason I feel you should read this book a year or two before starting a company. Moreover, if you’re planning to launch a B2B product that also has to earn money from the get go, you better have domain expertise and a list of prospects. This book is too optimistic in assuming you can succeed without meeting either of these prerequisites. Anyway, to list just a few of the many, many great points I took away from its first half: 1. "The facts" live outside your building. So go out and talk to customers, make lots of calls, buy lots of lunches. 2. The problem should be sufficiently painful that customers' eyes will light up when you start describing your solution. If you already have a solution ready, they should have no hesitation in reaching for their wallet. 3. Despite talking to customers, you'll be going with the founder's instincts on many decisions w.r.t the product. When you talk to prospects, try to sell the product you've built and not promise one-off changes. Don't try to convince, because that means your value proposition was not strong enough. If you meet a prospect who's not able to perceive the problem, or is only dimly able to comprehend the solution, move on. 4. Search till you find "earlyvangelists", who are people who are not only aware of the problem, but are actively looking for some kind of solution and have a budget to go with it. These are not equivalent to the "early adopters" of Crossing the Chasm (those would be people who are into novelty for its own sake). 5. Your end goal should be to find a repeatable roadmap of how customers buy, and a path to profitability. At this point I should pause to point out - as the author also does repeatedly - how different this feels from a typical sales effort in larger companies. You're not compiling long lists of features, not promising what the customer asks for. Instead you're validating if you have a market for what you've built, takers for your vision. That's not to say disregard customer feedback entirely. But only examine them in aggregate and look for patterns in it before you start "pivoting". 6. There are four different market contexts, with massive implications for your customer discovery and adoption process: i) New product in existing market (without segmenting) ii) New product in new market iii) Segmenting existing market at low end iv) Segmenting existing market in other ways. The book deals with these four market types in great detail. I started to feel my interest wane in the latter two Steps: Customer Creation and Company Building. Customer Creation is akin to marketing and demand generation. Assuming you’ve kept in mind the specific insights into your customers and the type of market, you should be able to refer to any good material about marketing. Ditto with Company Building. The book has some real life stories on how the role of the executive team should change as the company evolves, but nothing earth shattering. A word of warning about the writing style: you could miss the wood for the trees due to the sheer verbosity of this book and the seemingly endless parade of bullet points (Five Characteristics of Earlyvangelists, Four Types of Markets, Four Phases of Customer Discovery where each Phase has its own A,B,C,D,E ..etc). There are also many workbook style questions you can ask yourself at various points during the Four Steps. But Blank's obsession with detail begets two crucial features that are usually lacking in books of this type: i) You almost always know the Context for which a piece of advice is being given ii) You're also given ways to Verify whether the advice is actually working. There's somewhat of a shortage of examples. Some chapters begin promisingly with anecdotes, but they're soon forgotten and you find yourself wading through paragraphs of prescriptive text on how to write down hypotheses, create presentations and so on. There's a surprisingly good Bibliography at the end, where Blank explains the origins of some of his ideas and recommends other books. ...more |
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Sep 29, 2021
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| 039472903X
| 9780394729039
| 039472903X
| 4.14
| 10,506
| 1983
| Mar 12, 1985
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really liked it
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This book is quite insightful if you've not read much about advertising or marketing before. It helps that it stays readable by keeping a dry sense of
This book is quite insightful if you've not read much about advertising or marketing before. It helps that it stays readable by keeping a dry sense of humour throughout. The author David Ogilvy was a titan in the field and worked from the 1930's till the '80s. His lasting legacy was to turn advertising from a purely creative pursuit to one backed by research and experiments. He tried hard to show that his methods led to more sales. In his own words, the most important sentence in the book is this: "Advertising which promises no benefit to the consumer does not sell, yet the majority of campaigns contain no promise whatever." A bit of biographical detail may help locate this book better. Ogilvy started off selling cookers door-to-door in England. But he soon moved to the US to work for Gallup's "Audience Research Institute" where he learnt the effectiveness of surveys and quantitative tools. This remained an influence throughout his long career in print, billboard, radio and TV ads. While he can write a chapter titled "The 18 Miracles of Research", he can also come down hard on research which takes too long and produces no actionable items to drive a campaign forward. An utter rarity of a man, he was at one time both the Research Director and Creative Director of Ogilvy Inc! The book's chapters are essays on topics like how to create advertising that sells, what copywriting techniques work for print and TV, what you can learn from Procter and Gamble, what kind of research should back up your advertising...and so on. There are also chapters on the logistics of running an ad agency - finding clients, hiring etc. These you can skip if you're interested only in advertisement related advice. According to Ogilvy, to create a good ad you should first do some homework and understand the product's positioning and the brand's image / personality. After that, if you get a "big idea", you might go on to make a great ad. What are some examples of great ads? Well, not that you'd have heard of any of these: Merrill Lynch's Bull Commercial, the Marlboro Country commercial and so on. What makes this book great is passages like the following, where Ogilvy explains why staying humble is key when a possibly great idea is being birthed. Ask yourself: Did it make you gasp? Did you wish you'd thought of it yourself? Is it unique? Does it fit the strategy to perfection? And crucially, Can it be used for 30 years (meaning a loong time)? That Ogilvy has spent a long time connecting the creative to the commercial becomes clear: "Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed [emphasis as in the original], or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you". He admits that such big ideas happen only a few dozen times in one's career. For the rest of the occasions, he offers suggestions he believes can multiply your ad's effectiveness. "For 35 years I have continued on the course charted by Gallup, collecting factors the way other men collect pictures and postage stamps." These "factors" span everything from font size (serif is better!), color combinations (never white text on black!), to should you use sexuality (not if it's irrelevant to the product: "To show bosoms in a detergent advertisement would not sell the detergent") and so on. A surprising pattern he recommends is to use lots of text in a print ad as opposed to little, and an unethical method he suggests is to camouflage ads like editorial content. Also, he believes celebrities don't help! Personally, I can see the sense in getting the basics right: lead by mentioning the benefit of the product, show the product a few times, demo the usage or packaging etc. But there is a tension in the broader suggestions which I don't think Ogilvy is able to settle, nor is there a permanently correct answer for all places. For example, he says that an ad with a story is always preferable. His own famous eye-patch for a shirt brand (link) hints at a backstory and makes the reader pause. But how far can you go in search of a story, brand image or big idea before you start undermining the benefits and relatability of a product? I could end this review with any of a dozen quotable quotes from the book. So how about this one where he's berating again the prizing of form over function, aesthetic appeal over commerce: "Do you want masterpieces? Do you want glowing things that can be framed by copywriters? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?" [emphasis in the original] If such questions and their inherent tensions interest you, I suggest diving into this book. ...more |
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Sep 23, 2021
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| unknown
| 4.12
| 52,366
| Sep 19, 2017
| unknown
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liked it
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This book is from 2017, It became famous because Ray Dalio has been running the investment company Bridgewater Associates since the time he started it
This book is from 2017, It became famous because Ray Dalio has been running the investment company Bridgewater Associates since the time he started it in 1975. Dalio is from Long Island, NY and has a degree from Harvard Business School. The book is about the principles that he's extracted (210 of them) over the decades of running his firm. He feels the principles are applicable to both a corporate context and life in general. The book has 3 parts (Why principles are important in general, The actual principles, and How the principles are applied to managing Bridgewater). I only paid attention to the second of these parts, and my review could be biased due to that. There's also a lecture+interview with him on YouTube where he does a great job of explaining his backstory and why he wrote this book. I appreciated Dalio's attempt to be clear and specific in his advice. This applies to both the book and the video above. Part 2 is structured well and doesn't appear like rambling filler material. If anything, you could say he tries to be too granular! Many of the ideas in this book are not too subtle or pathbreaking. Which is a relief in a sense, because you can correlate them to concepts you may already be aware of, and further strengthens your belief in their validity. His top-level advice is to set audacious goals, face upto reality often, be objective, don't shirk from pain etc. This core loop of going after audacious goals, and using expert feedback to see where you are going wrong and correcting yourself seems very much like the idea of "Deliberate Practice" described by Erik Andersen. This Part stands out for the hefty dose of realism that Dalio injects into it. Things like acknowledging your failures, realizing that "Pain + Reflection = Progress" are worth mulling over, given how human nature tends to lean towards wishful thinking and naive optimism. In the video above, he gives a brilliant example of one such failure from his own life (minute 7:55) that nearly destroyed his company. For an effective feedback loop and learning process, he recommends writing down your reasoning behind important decisions you make. This is so that you can refer back to them later, and build up your own archive of useful lessons over time. The other thing he emphasizes is figuring out your goals for yourself. This book and other mechanisms can get you to a goal, but won't help in figuring out the goal itself. In the corporate context, he calls for "radical transparency" and "idea meritocracy" in running your company (recording meetings, some weird scoring system that people use as meetings are in progress - see from minute 15 of that video). It seems a bit too idealistic. It's almost like he's reacting against some horrible incidents that involved politics or lack of transparency in his life? Not sure why a company has to be that extreme. Anyway, the applicability of these would vary from culture to culture and the kind of business your company is in. On the whole, the book is worth a skim and Part 2 is worth a proper read. If you're pressed for time, I suggest reading Part 2 and watching the relevant parts in the video. If you're looking for company-applicable tips, Part 3 would be helpful. If you're not at all convinced that general principles do exist and can be made to work, then there's a Part 1 too for you :) ...more |
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May 23, 2021
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| 1578518520
| 9781578518524
| 1578518520
| 4.05
| 13,160
| Jan 01, 2003
| Sep 01, 2003
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really liked it
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None
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Apr 08, 2021
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| 0471028924
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| 4.04
| 1,721
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| Oct 01, 2001
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| 4.02
| 23,071
| Jan 01, 2010
| Apr 15, 2010
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it was ok
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| 9781635573954
| 1635573955
| 4.19
| 12,576
| Sep 10, 2019
| Sep 10, 2019
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really liked it
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I felt that “Anarchy" was an unfortunate title for this book. Because to me it served as a reminder that the book did not live up to its intent althou
I felt that “Anarchy" was an unfortunate title for this book. Because to me it served as a reminder that the book did not live up to its intent although its contents are brilliant. Author William Dalrymple writes in the introduction that he’s making an attempt to answer the question of how a small company operating out of London went on to conquer a large part of India between 1756 and 1803. Part of the answer to that, obviously, is the anarchic political conditions in India during that time, when the Mughal empire was on the wane; Dalrymple claims the Company added to this existing anarchy through its actions. Therefore the strategies and manoeuvres of the East India Company's officials are described in obsessive detail. From short personality sketches to the long arcs of political and military campaigns waged across the length and breadth of the subcontinent, Dalrymple keeps you hooked (for the most part) with his narration. But once the book had settled into its rhythms, I had the gnawing feeling that it was being sketchy about the other part of the answer: namely how the military ambitions of the Company could not be checked by England’s political system at the time. Dalrymple doesn't overlook this matter and brings it into play a few times. But it's almost always to describe an end state and rarely for how things got there. For example, we're told that a significant percentage of British MP's had a stake in the Company, Governor-Generals would go back and buy mansions and Parliament seats, the Government had to repeatedly bail out the Company as its military adventures racked up debts. All these are fascinating tidbits but considering these took decades to unfold, there must have been heated debates back home? What were the flaws in the English political system that let this empire building go on? The few times that Dalrymple gets into details are for already well known incidents like the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, the impact of Calcutta "Black Hole" deaths and so on. So while you get a blow-by-blow account of all the Company's misadventures in India, you'll have to turn elsewhere to figure out why England's society could not stop its rapaciousness. This omission is all the more surprising because in the Epilogue the book warns against the overreach of MNC's in modern times! Once you keep aside that overarching thesis, there's much to savour in the book. Many juicy details about people, battles, regimes and strategies are sprinkled throughout! To name just a few that I found interesting: - The sheer scale of the Mughal empire in the 17th Century, before it falls apart after Aurangzeb. - The intrigue and double crossing that surrounded the battles of Plassey and Buxar. The interplay of kings, generals, financiers and soldiers. - The long life of (nominal) Mughal king Shah Alam and its incredible twists and turns which span the entire book and mirror the larger political anarchy. - The surprising birth of Madras and Calcutta as port cities. And then the rapid growth of Calcutta into one of the grand cities in the world. - The horrendous Bengal famine of 1770 which exposed the Company's apathy and the exploitative nature of England towards India (which lasted centuries). - The personalities and events back home of people like Robert Clive (he is posted to run the Company's India affairs three separate times!) and Hastings. - French military mercenaries staying on in India to provide "expert services" to Marathas and Tipu Sultan. Also the fact that many "expats"(?) from Afghanistan, Persia, Turkey etc wielded positions of power in certain kingdoms in India. - Descriptions of many battles: Plassey and Buxar (of course), the Calcutta Black Hole, the siege of Patna, the attack of Persian king Nader Shah on Delhi, Afghan invader Ahmed Shah Durrani's raids on Delhi, the Anglo-Mysore Wars (the siege of Srirangapatna in particular), Anglo-Maratha Wars (the battle of Assaye, the siege of Aligarh). - The diverse variety of horrific brutalities committed by the Marathas, Tipu, and the Mughal/Delhi based rulers (the latter are often cruel to their own kith and kin). Politics required you to literally have "skin-in-the-game" back then! All these battles and crisscrosses across the length and breadth of the country did leave me overwhelmed, even as someone who's studied the main events in school and later again read about them elsewhere out of interest. Thankfully the book has a glossary of all the main characters at the start, which is of great help. I do wish it had spent far less time on the details of every single battle, siege and fortification. Also, for a book from a top drawer writer like Dalrymple, the publishing has its warts: the illustrations are all bundled together rather than placed appropriately, a handful of okay-ish maps are given at the start and never again explicitly referenced. But the footnotes and bibliography are extensive and it's tempting to lose oneself in them. As I finished The Anarchy there was another thought that stayed with me. That period can only be described as anarchic if the earlier era of Mughal dominance is taken as a reference point. And even then, Dalrymple bases that sentiment on some contemporary writings, and then the 19th Century historian Henry George's "The Great Anarchy". But what's to say that India wasn't actually as peaceful earlier as this book presumes, or that the absence of the Company could have led to a somewhat less stable but far less exploitative set of kingdoms in what we today call "India"? Any book that transports you to another era and later makes you ponder all these questions, is worth reading, in my book :) ...more |
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Feb 2021
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Feb 18, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0395083621
| 9780395083628
| 0395083621
| 3.18
| 39,936
| Jul 18, 1925
| May 11, 1973
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I picked up this book thinking it will be a quick read of the rants of a raving lunatic. Its author is named Hitler, after all! Little did I expect to
I picked up this book thinking it will be a quick read of the rants of a raving lunatic. Its author is named Hitler, after all! Little did I expect to be trudging through a 650-page tome containing intricate and elaborate arguments regarding history, nationhood, parliamentary politics and propaganda, among other things. Race But first, the utterly evil nature of the man is unmissable. In a long chapter titled Race and People, he hurls all kinds of accusations against Jews. His enumeration of points starts from a) and goes all the way up to l) ! But that's largely beside the point as he can only speak in vague generalities and can't (obviously) summon any concrete examples that stick. And my God, the sheer amount of mental gymnastics to blame everything wrong with Germany on that one community. In Hitler's version of history, the same people who benefited from monarchy in Germany also intentionally brought it down because they decided they'll now benefit from parliamentary democracy. The same people who control banking and finance in the country are also fuelling the Marxist revolution so that they can destroy local business and integrate with global capital and finance. He won’t even concede that Judaism is a religion and so doesn't engage with the religious beliefs at all. To him, the religious practice is just a pretence - a cover - for the underlying racial core. Naturally, intermarriage of other Germans with Jews is a strict no-no and deserves strong condemnation. This list goes on and on... Which brings me to why this book is worth reading: It's a rare and magnificent demonstration of how the mind of a megalomaniacal, power hungry person operates - although available at one remove. I add that latter part because though you are reading Hitler's own words, it's obviously what he wants you to think the history is, the politics are, and what the right course of action is. The book's tone throughout is that of a seemingly highly logical mind laying out detailed arguments and opinions on a range of issues that ought to interest the average German, with occasional bouts of emotion in the form of self-pity, racist hate or nationalism. But no matter how intricate a tower of ideas he's constructing, a quick dip into professionally written history will turn that structure into rubble. This book serves as a lesson that by now, humanity knows better than to take such populist, racist leaders at face value (I hope). The State The driving force behind the book is the compensation that Germany had to pay out after its defeat in the First World War. This wrecked the country economically. And Hitler believes Germans should unite as a race in order to form a stronger country. Here again, he is very clear on the Race part. In his view, a Government/State exists to maintain the purity and success of a race - especially if it's a noble one like the 'Aryan' race of Germany. Modern institutions like a Parliament, regulatory bodies etc are not an end in themselves. Neither is their purpose the uplift of every individual human in their ambit. But they are to be created by a Race for the safekeeping of themselves as a group, and nothing more. All of this is laid out in another landmark chapter, titled The State. After Hitler has finished blaming one community and argued about the need for Germany to bounce back, he turns towards how this movement can be carried out in practice. What gives intellectual heft to this part of the book can be traced back to many past events of his life. So at this point, more historical context is pertinent. The book came out in the mid 1920's, when the wounds of the War were still fresh and Hitler was seen as an inconsequential local politician in one part of Germany. He had enlisted as a soldier and had been injured multiple times. The war experience probably taught him organization and leadership skills, and possibly added an aura of credibility when he wrote on these topics. When he is writing this in prison, he has already leveraged that experience to take control of a fledgling political party and attempted to overthrow the government of the state of Bavaria, in what historians call The Beer Hall Putsch. He writes about this phase of life in (candid?) detail in two readable chapters called The Beginning of My Political Activities and The German Labour Party. The Nazis Hitler is realistic about the practicalities of running an organization. His thoughts on this are covered in an ever relevant chapter, called Propaganda and Organization. No one will deny that the Nazis were good at both, so it's worth understanding the thinking behind their success. Propaganda should aim to attract as many "followers" as possible. These could be people who accept your message without questioning, or even those who'll agree to it in private but dare not bring it up in polite company. Messages should be simplistic and appeal to the masses. Nuance should be eschewed entirely. The more "followers" the propaganda creates, the easier it makes the rest of the organizational work. His desire to indulge in propaganda is accompanied by an intense hatred of the Press in Germany (which is obviously controlled by Jews as per his logic). A literal search for "Jewish Press" in the text of the book will yield a dozen results, and none of them flattering. With respect to organization, what I found striking is his categorization of political activities into three roles: the theorist, the organizer and the leader (the one who communicates with the masses). While the above attitudes about race, the State and propaganda are probably what Nazis are most remembered for today, Hitler had to expound on many other topics of his day in order to kickstart his movement. In these he was aided by the fact that he was a consummate political and news junkie in his youth. He had taken to reading historical books as a young adult. He read newspapers, pamphlets and other kinds of political content. He even attended parliament sessions in Vienna, an experience which created a lifelong hatred for Parliamentary democracy (again, this could be what he wants you to believe). You can find out about these in the chapter called Political Reflections about his time in Vienna. Two other themes that occupy his mind and political life during the timeline of this book are the nature of Germany's post (First) War foreign policy and the appeal of Marxism to the youth of the country (the Communist revolution in Russia had occurred a few years back). Foreign policy is discussed in detail in a series of chapters at the end, beginning with The German Post-War Policy of Alliances. The fight against Marxism is a running theme. Two chapters that bring out its salience are The First Period of our Struggle, and The Conflict with the Red Forces. Towards Weltanschauung The preceding para was not mere academic summary. Because through these and related chapters, Hitler would have you believe that he and his party are engaged in both a grand battle of historical ideas, and a simultaneous street level fight with lumpen, misguided youth being preyed on by Marxists - with Jews being the "wire pullers" in various capacities. The need to rescue the German race/nation from all these enemies - both within and without - has reached an existential moment. So what is called for is not just a political party, but a movement which is more long lasting and aims to realize their nativist worldview. And there is a German word for it: Weltanschauung. Current institutions and mechanisms of governance are not sacrosanct by themselves but can be used as instruments to make this Weltanschauung a reality. Multiple chapters (Weltanschauung and Party, Weltanschauung and Organization) are devoted to this theme. After you've allowed yourself to float above the grandiose parade of historical ideas, arguments, and racist rhetoric that stretches across this book, it is instructive to pause and reflect on what has not been written about: the plight and suffering of German citizens (of all races), the State's obligations towards them, a gradual but steady improvement of relations between countries, and a strengthening of institutions in response to mistakes of the past. The book sidesteps these problems by treating them as second-order issues that'll get solved trivially once the right kind of people are in power and the new Weltanschauung realized. History tells us this was not the right course of action for post (First) War Germany to have taken. But would we be able to recognize a similar situation if it were to arise today? Is a call for a new order of things / Weltanschauung never justifiable? What about say India's freedom struggle which upended many aspects of society in one go? When placed in such a situation, that generation may have to learn anew how to separate the essential from the accidental. All one hopes for is that knowledge from books like this will prevent them from amplifying those voices which history would wish to never again repeat, nor closely rhyme. ...more |
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Jan 2021
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Jan 09, 2021
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Paperback
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| B011QL01CS
| 3.88
| 130
| Jul 15, 2015
| Jul 15, 2015
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it was ok
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Mindset, by Carol Dweck who is a psychologist at Stanford University, is underwhelming on facts but worthwhile as an exploration to see What If that w
Mindset, by Carol Dweck who is a psychologist at Stanford University, is underwhelming on facts but worthwhile as an exploration to see What If that was true. She claims that studies have shown that people can be grouped into two types: those who believe that their basic qualities (meaning their abilities, skills and aspects of their personality/character) are set in stone, versus those who believe these are things that can be worked on and improved. Just this one belief has a dramatic impact on your views about yourself and what you attempt to do. To elaborate, the Fixed mindset means that you've trained yourself to repeatedly validate your current beliefs about your abilities. So anything that shows you up as failing becomes a harsh judgment call on them and hence best avoided. With a Growth mindset, you are able to separate specific incidents of failure from larger beliefs about yourself. This lets you step out of your comfort zone and attempt ambitious things. I was skeptical that people can bracketed neatly into two types. So I did some additional reading and was not surprised to learn that both her claims (that people can be grouped into two mindsets, and that this is of consequence) are contested by other scientists. Be that as it may, among her numerous examples it's hard to deny that there are some you'd have experienced yourself or recognized in others. So the book does pass the sniff test of human experience even if not the rigor of academic studies and goads you into following the author along. Further, many of her examples concern children and adolescents, when it's quite common for individuals to display aspects of the Fixed mindset due to a variety of reasons (which are thoroughly explored in the book). Dweck has a lot of personal and professional experience to draw from - having done studies, workshops, training sessions and the like over decades. And she is as perceptive as a writer in identifying fleeting emotions or suppressed feelings. In fact I thought the best part of the book was the last few pages of the last chapter, where she identifies common patterns of giving up on things and suggests ways to overcome them. That needs to be called out because there's also a large section in the middle covering corporate life and relationships where the book seems to be skating on thin ice. The chapters on sports and artistic abilities are far more believable, and they do correspond to other books like Peak, or Talent is Overrated. On the whole, I'd say only the first 2-3 chapters and the last are worth a read and the rest can be skimmed. But considering that Dweck is making a fairly strong claim about core aspects of one's identity, I wouldn't fault her too much for trying to pile up as much material as possible in her attempt to persuade. ...more |
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not set
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Oct 2020
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Nov 01, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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| 1400069289
| 9781400069286
| 1400069289
| 4.13
| 473,993
| Apr 25, 2012
| Feb 28, 2012
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liked it
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The Power of Habit is a fun ride through a bunch of ideas and events that Pulitzer-winning columnist Charles Duhigg takes a fancy to! Undergirding it
The Power of Habit is a fun ride through a bunch of ideas and events that Pulitzer-winning columnist Charles Duhigg takes a fancy to! Undergirding it is some kind of commitment to uncover how humans form habits, and how we can use that knowledge to improve our lot in life. But by the time you find yourself immersed in the intricacies of the Montgomery bus boycott, and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr's social circles, you'd have long forgotten why you picked this book up! The author alternates between describing scientific research that has gone into understanding habits, and some grand stories regarding Starbucks, Michael Phelps, Alcoholics Anonymous - apart from the one above. In both genres the writing is compelling and you learn something, although it's debatable how much of the latter can be tied back to habits or habit formation. Moreover, the author himself admits he is not going to provide concrete tips in the book. For that I recommend James Clear's Atomic Habits, where the writing is markedly less readable but there is no dearth of practical advice. The book starts with a deep dive into one man's memory problems, and how researchers' study of him led to an understanding of which part of the brain is involved in habit formation. This pattern of getting up close to scientific literature and making it accessible pops up repeatedly in the book, and each time you feel thankful to Duhigg for having put in that effort. The basic idea is that a Habit is a phenomenon that consists of i) a Cue/Trigger, after which ii) you perform a Routine, for which you get iii) some Reward. After this process repeats enough times, the conscious/decision-making part of your brain is no longer involved, but a different part called the basal ganglia takes over. This is also the part that stores and retrieves "muscle memory" tasks (my term) like driving and other routine chores done without paying much attention. If not for it, you'd be exerting the same amount of effort and attention even after learning a skill! Since the brain is indiscriminate, bad behaviour can also get encoded here. For example, you may automatically open Twitter (the Routine) right after you unlock your phone (the Cue) and get a small thrill from reading some tweets (the Reward). In order to thwart any habit like this, you should i) Do away with the cue, or ii) Replace the routine with a less harmful or time consuming one which still delivers some sort of pleasure/reward. That's the crux of how to change a habit; the rest is details. The author calls this the Golden Rule of Habit Change. In contrast to this approach, what we may try instinctively is to rely on willpower and hope it holds up. But habits - if indeed the basal ganglia is involved - are what you do in the absence of conscious thought, so you should try to eliminate all opportunity for decision making at the time of the Cue/Trigger. The author describes in painstaking detail the application of a habit/routine based approach by an American football coach named Tony Dungy. His team would do remarkably well, but forget his techniques at crucial moments (they'd choke). It took a major emotional upheaval of an event for the team to get over this choking issue. Duhigg calls this last bit the implanting of a firm belief that you will stick to the system no matter what. At high-pressure moments, it's easy to fall back to the unreformed version of a habit (jump off the wagon, as the saying goes), or rely again on conscious thought. Only a deep belief in your system - it could even stem from religious faith - can make a difference at such junctures. There is one more concept described in the book. Something called a "Keystone habit": one new habit or change which enables a lot of other good habits (eg: exercise, eating better). This is somewhat related to an idea called "small wins" studied by researchers, where some positive change in an organization that may look small on the surface may lead to/motivate many other associated changes. As I mentioned earlier, the book includes a lot of scientific research and many examples from pop culture and corporate life where the author tries to locate those theories of habit formation. The wider he casts his net, the less appetizing the catch looks. Lastly, I've noticed a puzzling ignorance as I read more self-help books - many of them published in the last 10 years: While they all demonstrably rely on academic research to buttress their claims, it appears they're loathe to even acknowledge each other's existence! For example, isn't any book that spends multiple chapters on high performance athletics but doesn't mention deliberate practice or Gladwell's Outliers even once being a bit disingenuous? ...more |
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not set
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Oct 2020
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Oct 25, 2020
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Hardcover
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| 1591842808
| 9781591842804
| 1591842808
| 4.10
| 200,151
| Oct 29, 2009
| Oct 29, 2009
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it was ok
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The book has some good ideas but is very long and repetitive. I liked his emphasis on figuring out WHY you are starting a new venture, business or org
The book has some good ideas but is very long and repetitive. I liked his emphasis on figuring out WHY you are starting a new venture, business or organization. Not only does that impact HOW you go about things and WHAT business you may run, it also sets the tone for the kind of people who’d like to work with you and the customers you may get. The fact that initial customers for a product or company also tend to be believers in the venture is affirmed in other books like Crossing the Chasm. This book goes on to ascribe the irrational investment of early adopters to biological reasons - it’s the limbic system making that decision and not the neocortex. I don’t know to what extent the biology part is right but this behavior is certainly noticeable. Among the many examples of such founders and companies the author cites the prominent one is Apple, which pops up every few pages in the book to support some or the other argument made. But I felt some of the motives ascribed to Steve Jobs (and Bill Gates too) were overly presumptuous and simplistic. Did Gates really start a company to empower every user, did Jobs really live out his rebellious nature through the company he built? Whatever the truth may be, in the book these are lazily assumed and not argued well. Other broad generalizations are made regarding these companies as well. The author tends to be more persuasive whenever he focuses on the marketing and branding aspects of companies, compared to their origin stories or how they’re run. I did have thought provoking moments when reading other examples like the Wright brothers, Southwest Airlines and Walmart. I agreed with him in that TiVO might have been an opportunity lost in branding it as for people who want control over their lives. The author never tires of repeating his main theses (Start with Why, and the Golden Circles of WHY - HOW - WHAT) throughout the book. I wish he’d spent more time on figuring out the Why (which gets a lone chapter at the end), and more examples of the HOW part as well. Considering the author himself ran a company for a few years, I’m surprised he didn’t dip into any of his own experiences! Overall, worth a light skim. I believe the same content is available from the author in other, shorter formats. Probably one of those should suffice over reading this book end to end. ...more |
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not set
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Oct 12, 2020
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Oct 13, 2020
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Hardcover
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| B07D23CFGR
| 4.38
| 634,965
| Oct 18, 2018
| Oct 16, 2018
|
liked it
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This book has valuable information about how habits form and a plethora of practical tips. But it is very repetitive and occasionally long winded. I d
This book has valuable information about how habits form and a plethora of practical tips. But it is very repetitive and occasionally long winded. I dived into this thinking it’s a short book but it isn’t. It starts off in a disjointed fashion and then gradually builds up a four-pronged approach for creating habits: make it obvious, easy, attractive and satisfying. On the whole, I think the suggestions in the book are sound and the ideas workable, even if the author’s attempts to wrap a veneer of science around them don’t always come out looking good. There is a second part which talks briefly about talent, genetics, deliberate practice and career planning. I found that completely superfluous and irrelevant for this book. Two topics I wish he had covered are procrastination and will power fatigue. They both have a role in determining whether you come up with a sustainable plan of action. Since the book is necessarily targeted at a general audience, I’d also be interested to know if there exists specialized content for say students, academics, writers, programmers, athletes etc which build on its ideas. The rest of this review is a summary of my notes from the book: - Power of compounding: doing a little each day goes a long way. Sometimes results only show up dramatically after you cross a certain threshold. - Start by imagining an identity around the new habit. Eg: I am a non-smoker. I am a fitness freak. The mistake people do is that they start with Outcomes instead [I don’t agree with this]. - Habit formation can broken down into 4 steps: Cue, Craving, Response, Reward. Cue is the external trigger (something you see or smell. Or could be just a time and place). Cue sets off a Craving, which is a desire to change the internal state of the mind. Response is what you do next. And Reward the actual change of feeling that you experience. The reward reinforces the craving the next time the cue is noticed. Repeated enough times, this entire process becomes automatic and uses up little conscious thought. That is when a habit is said to be formed. - You should make the cue explicit and clear. Even better, write down precisely what you intend to do and try to tack it on to an already existing habit of yours. Eg: After I drink my coffee in the morning (using existing habit as the cue), I will do ten push ups. Writing lessens the burden on the conscious part of the brain, and makes clear exactly what you need to do. A more extreme version of this is to sandwich your new desired habit *between* two activities that you already know you’ll do (something the author calls temptation bundling). - You could also alter your environment suitably for the cue/trigger. Hide distractions and make them less accessible. Keep healthy foods at reach and visible. Have dedicated spaces for work, entertainment and sleep. Even separate devices if you can! If you’re stuck in a rut, go to a totally new place and start forming the habit, as that place won’t have any previous connotations for your subconscious. - Modifying the environment may also mean changing who you associate with. Humans have a strong urge to fit in with those around them, or they imitate high status individuals. If your new habit is likely to make you stick out, then change company. - Remove friction and initiate the Two Minute Rule: As our brains are lazy and take the path of least resistance, remove every hurdle that could come b/w you and the habit, esp in moments of weakness. If necessary, create a ritual to do away with decision making. And then perform the habit for just two minutes to start with - read one page, do two pushups...whatever. The point is to show up and not miss a day. The Cue-Craving-Response-Reward cycle is strengthened by how often you repeat something so repetition is key. - Know the difference between Motion and Action. Motion is just busywork or procrastination and gives you a (misleading) feeling of progress. Action is followed by measurable outcome. - Increase friction to make bad habits harder. Keep distractions in an other room, use smaller plates for food, use software to lock out social media etc. An extreme example is a person who had configured the power supply to automatically stop at 10 pm so that he’d go to bed. Once the mind gets accustomed to the deprivation it gradually loses the unhealthy craving. - For habits which show benefits only after some time (exercise, dieting etc), it’s a good idea to reward yourself for sticking with them at first. But don’t let the reward reinforce the opposite of what the habit tries to achieve! When you manage to work out for a week, reward yourself in any way other than binge-eating. One more way to keep going is tracking or logging your progress. There’s visceral pleasure in adding one more entry to a log or crossing off a day on the calendar. Use that to enhance a feeling of immediate gratification. On the flip side, keep an accountability partner who will keep you on your toes and force you to stick to a routine. ...more |
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not set
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Jul 2020
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Jul 12, 2020
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0060833459
| 9780060833459
| 0060833459
| 4.08
| 34,226
| 1966
| Jan 03, 2006
|
really liked it
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This is a crisp booklet by the famous management consultant Peter Drucker. It focuses on a few time tested general practices and hammers them home nic
This is a crisp booklet by the famous management consultant Peter Drucker. It focuses on a few time tested general practices and hammers them home nicely rather than getting lost in the weeds. It draws upon decades of the author's practice and probably due to that, I was delighted to find subtle gems of practical insight tucked away in otherwise routine paras where I was least expecting them. The book starts off by saying that “effectiveness" can be learned as a habit (a collection of practices) and need not be seen as a personality trait. Well, there would be no need to write this book otherwise, wouldn’t it? ;) The book was probably written at a time when knowledge/intellectual work had only just become the predominant way to a middle class lifestyle and hence would have been pioneering. There’s a quaint bit about how American executives are known to rise from the ranks and rarely have advanced management degrees! The author breaks down the Effectiveness habit into five parts: making decisions, managing time, figuring out how to contribute, building on people’s strengths and sorting out priorities. As the book delves into each of these, it strikes a good balance between abstract philosophy and concrete examples. The examples are drawn from the US’s heydays as an industrial and intellectual powerhouse - General Motors, Bell Labs, WW2 commanders, Roosevelt, Robert McNamara etc. Decision making is a large part of an executive's responsibilities and there are two substantial chapters about it, albeit towards the end. There are four steps outlined for how to arrive at effective decisions. But I sensed an undercurrent of reactivity in this section. The examples given are “problems” an executive is trying to solve rather than the framework of "How can I Contribute", which was brought up earlier. It doesn’t help that the author chooses the one time heads of Bell Technologies and General Motors as exemplars, making the situations hard to relate to. The subsequent chapter on "effective decisions" has some contrarian insights. Decisions don't flow from a consensus on facts. Instead, the executive begins by soliciting opinions and stoking disagreement. These are basically necessary to get a sense of what is at stake, and what the decision is really all about. Without opinions about the nature of the decision needed, you don't even know what are the relevant facts that need to be brought into the picture! These opinions are then tested against reality, and the decision making process continues. The chapter on focusing on your (and your subordinate’s) strengths is the most thought provoking. The author marshals examples from the Civil War to the World Wars and some corporate cases to prove that organizations should maximize a person’s strengths and not unduly emphasize or penalize their weaknesses. People with great abilities may come with great weaknesses (not sure how this will fly in today’s politically correct world!), or just simply the time commitment needed to gain mastery may result in not having a well rounded set of skills. So the organization’s goal should be to extract the unique value out of the person while managing their shortcomings. The author doesn’t go into much detail on how to figure out your strengths (probably enough other books exist for that). But for a taste of what he’s considering: are you a people-person or prefer to be by yourself, are you a listener or a reader, do you like pithy summaries or long explanations, morning person or not ... etc. At one point he remarks that everyone has figured out these things by the time they’re an adult - something I thought was too rooted in a fixed mindset. Figuring out what to contribute is an interesting chapter. This is a must read for entry level managers who may otherwise remain glorified foot soldiers and inter-departmental messengers. The author exhorts executives to focus proactively on what will keep stakeholders/customers happy. A beneficial side effect of this is that you become outward focused (results and customer satisfaction) rather than inward focussed (efforts, processes, efficiencies). I liked this way of framing the issue. Although it’s seldom easy for people low in the corporate hierarchy to get their own ideas implemented, it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye out for opportunities. Time management gets a lot of treatment upfront. The key principle is to block out large chunks of uninterrupted time for quality work on things of the highest priority. If an executive can’t manage this, he will necessarily miss accomplishing the most important things and his effectiveness drops down. Since the nature of the role means there’s always an enormous demand on an executive’s time, conscious and periodic review of one’s time expenditure is key. Or else you’ll be just constantly reacting to events around you. He does get into a few techniques to address this, but as with many things in this book, he assumes the reader is intelligent enough to figure out what works for them. The book ends with a flourish, with the conclusive chapter trying to situate executives within the entire post War society of the West. Since more and more people are getting involved in knowledge work, the author claims that executive effectiveness can determine a good part of the success of modern societies. While that is a bit too dramatic, the author still manages to tie together all the earlier strands beautifully, and offers some poignant glimpses of the inner life of a modern knowledge worker. This chapter alone was enough to convince me that Drucker is both an expert and a great exponent of management ideas. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Jun 2020
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Jun 12, 2020
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Paperback
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| 0062874780
| 9780062874788
| 0062874780
| 4.01
| 12,023
| Oct 02, 2018
| Oct 02, 2018
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it was ok
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I found the book underwhelming. While the authors advocate a specific approach to running companies and building software, they base it all on the suc
I found the book underwhelming. While the authors advocate a specific approach to running companies and building software, they base it all on the success of just their one company (Basecamp). They do not explain how companies of different kinds (or their employees) can adopt these practices if their operating contexts happen to be very different. Some of the more easily adoptable ideas are Library Rules within offices, providing generous vacation time as perks, preferring fixed pay to bonuses and a few others. The book is a quick and easy read and hence I recommend it, at least to get a sense of this alternate universe of software development! If someone is indeed able to run a company along these lines, more power to them! The rest of my review is just a list of points I noted down as I read the book: - The book talks about not being ambitious, not being delusional about changing the world. - The advice is preachy and not backed by evidence. Perhaps it assumes you are already well aware of Basecamp’s product and the reputation its founders enjoy? There is not even a passing reference to other companies who may be operating like this. - Just saying that 5 days is enough, 40 hours is enough does not help people who find themselves working longer hours due to issues beyond their control. - Emphasis on not breaking up the workday into small chunks and interruptions is good to see. - Office hours is an example of a concrete practice at Basecamp. Another one is not having calendars public which would make it easy for other office workers to slice up an individual’s day. Another: no chat and status messages. Expect people to eventually respond. - The company is not a family. There is good advice for leadership to walk the talk on these things. - Do not scatter the employees efforts through casual suggestions or assuming some low hanging fruit exists. - How Basecamp thinks about compensation: salaries are comparable to the top 10% of Bay Area no matter where the employee works from. There are no bonuses and stock options, but there is a profit sharing scheme. - Basecamp’s approach to benefits is progressive. None of their perks involve the office space itself or having to stay there. They provide generous vacations, 4 day workweeks in the summer, money towards learning - There’s an essay about writing detailed articles for an idea instead of a slide deck or a short document to pitch for it. And readers are expected to ponder and respond in depth rather than give off the cuff reactions. This approach may work well to hash out implementation details or summarize a concept that’s already been discussed. But I think it’s a very expensive way to validate an idea. The more time someone has put into the document the less pleased they’ll be to find big flaws in it. - The chapters on the s/w engg process are very interesting. They advocate a minimalist and cautious approach towards features: set a deadline but be open to reducing scope, learn how to say no, do not go overboard if the customer is already happy, know when to sacrifice some quality in order to finish tasks, keep teams small, avoid meetings .. etc. - Their decision to offer their product at a flat fee to their customers irrespective of how many user accounts they need is mind blowing. They’ve chosen to walk away from possibly good chunks of money by not chasing large corporate accounts. A great example of walking the talk. - Similar is their decision to provide three parallel versions of their software(!), so that customers who signed up long back can continue using the old version. ...more |
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Jun 07, 2020
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| 938622898X
| 4.33
| 2,511
| Dec 2018
| Dec 18, 2018
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really liked it
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“The Early Indians” is one of the most informative and engaging books I’ve read. In a brief couple of hundred pages journalist and author Tony Joseph
“The Early Indians” is one of the most informative and engaging books I’ve read. In a brief couple of hundred pages journalist and author Tony Joseph explains how the Indian subcontinent came to be populated by humans (homo sapiens to be precise) over tens of thousands of years and how civilization took root here. What make this book stand out are its reliance on recent academic research (esp. DNA analyses of humans both living and dead) and Joseph’s painstaking effort to convey the essence of this research to laypeople. If you’re an Indian, I recommend dropping whatever else it is you’re doing and reading this book first. So what are the key results according to this book? 1. A group of homo sapiens hunter-gatherer populations reached India from Africa around 65,000 years ago, as the population expanded on a route that passes through today’s Ethiopia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Note that due to different climatic conditions prevailing at that time, the Red Sea would have been frozen, Arabia may not have been the desert that it is now, and so on. 2. These homo sapiens had spread over most of the Indian subcontinent by 35,000 years ago, in the process wiping out other “hominid” species that were present here from hundreds of thousands of years ago. These homo sapiens (henceforth First Indians) form the bulk of the ancestry for an overwhelming majority of Indians living here today. Some time during this phase, another spread of population - this time into India’s North-East - happened from today’s China. They were also descendants of the original out-of-Africa migrants. 3. Around 7000 years ago, agricultural practices from Zagros mountains in Western Iran made their way eastward into nearby regions of Pakistan-India. 4. This was key to the future establishment of the Indus Valley civilization (IVC) in this region, which reached its peak b/w 2500 BC and 1900 BC. It was the largest civilization of its time with an area equivalent to one-third of today’s India. It was also fairly advanced and they had cities, public baths, private toilets, water disposal systems, standardized weights and measures, extensive trade networks with Mesopotamian civilization and so on. The language they used hasn’t been understood yet (more on this later). 5. Around 2000 BC, many groups of “pastoralists” (cattle grazers and nomads) moved out from a long, contiguous grassland region that runs through today’s Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and so on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasia...). One such group moved south into the area of the Indus Valley civilization. By then this civilization was already on the wane (along with Mesopotamia. Greece, Egypt) due to prolonged drought. The people of the Indus valley had already started moving eastwards and southwards. The incoming pastoralists mixed with the existing population of India, and over time traces of their ancestry are found in people across many parts of India today. These Steppe immigrants correspond to “Aryans” in loose popular parlance. But only loosely, because when they reached India, two of the main achievements of the Aryans - the Vedas and the Sanskrit language - were yet to be formulated. That was to be the work of their (and their First Indian) descendants. To sum up, modern Indians are largely the descendants of the out-of-Africa movement of 65,000 years ago, with later additions from China and the Eurasian Steppes. Culturally, today’s Indians have inherited from the Indus Valley (the Indian toilet, houses built around a central courtyard, worship of the phallus, sanctity of the pipal tree, usage of bangles), and of course a lot from the descendants of the Indus Valley + Steppe migrants. What is the nature of the evidence that backs up these claims? I won’t link to specific research papers in this review but the evidence is of 4 types: archaeological, genetic, linguistic, and climatic. Of these, significant breakthroughs have occurred in recent years in genetic analysis and understanding of pre-historic climatic conditions (one of which is the drought mentioned earlier - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meghalayan). The genetic evidence is of 4 types: 1. All humans inherit their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) unchanged from their mother. Or to be precise, even though there are alterations to it, it’s possible to figure out if two people had a common maternal ancestor and how long ago that was. 2. Similarly, all male humans inherit a part of their sex chromosome (Y-DNA) unchanged from their father. 3. “Whole genome sequencing” - Which is a process of determining all the molecules that constitute the DNA of a person’s chromosomes. Doing this over a representative sample of a population helps in understanding the population’s genetic mix and its similarities with other populations who may be geographically far away but genetically similar. 4. Analysis of DNA found in ancient human skeletons Among these, the latter two (whole genome sequencing and DNA analysis of skeletons) became possible only in the last few years and hence have contributed significantly to the key results presented in the book. Marshalling the evidence From my review so far it may seem as though all the evidence lines up neatly and the conclusions fall out automatically. But in the book it’s anything but. Firstly, it’s not easy to tie these different strands of evidence together, and secondly they are not always conclusive. Hence the author expends a lot of effort to examine alternative hypotheses, and at times has to leave things unresolved. Since the book draws from leading academics in places like Harvard, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Deccan College, Archaeological Survey of India, Banaras Hindu University and so on, I assume the underlying papers do the same. Even if every piece of evidence presented in this book gets upturned in some future, the book will remain a good demonstration of how modern research methods enhance knowledge at a specific point in time. For example, the author discusses 4 possible routes from Africa into India, and has to draw upon multiple pieces of evidence to show that only one of these routes likely led to a successful movement in the timespan of interest (65,000 years ago). This is where multidisciplinarity can help (or hinder!). A recurring theme in the book is the direction of population movement: Africa-India or vice-versa, Iran-Indus or vice-versa, Steppe-Indus or vice-versa. Each one is handled in depth. Often genetics helps seal the case. The genetic mix of Indians are a mutation of a particular type found among Africans today, with whom we have commonality if we examine it beyond 65,000 years. Similarly, certain Indians of the Brahmin caste have Y-DNA in common with people in the Steppes, but no First Indian DNA (either mtDNA or Y-DNA) is to be found in Steppe people. Here, linguistic and archaeological evidence buttress the argument. Parts of the Rigveda (the oldest) describe how a man should be buried with a dead horse whose legs are chopped off, and such burial sites are to be found in a place called Sintashta which is in the Steppes in Russia. The book leaves open as to what happened after the Indus Valley civilization ended, and to what extent conflict ensued between the people who moved in from the Steppes and the declining - or decimated - Indus Valley civilization descendants. A fascinating part is how the underlying research is not specific to India, but is piecing together population migration into the rest of West Asia and Europe as well. Thus, the evidence supporting the key results I’ve mentioned at the top forms a coherent base that is explaining European population history as well. Fertile lines of inquiry Considering the newness of the material and of the topics presented, the book should offer many fascinating nuggets of information and lines of inquiry to every reader. For example, is it possible that Dravidian languages are related to a language that was used in Elam region of Iran thousands of years ago? Or, what happened in the period from 1000BC - 100 AD after which endogamy (marrying within one’s own community) appears to have taken root according to genetic analyses of Indian population? These and other questions may keep you thinking - and reading - about the ideas presented in this book long after you’ve put it down. Regarding the presentation, the book would have benefitted from a more extensive Table of Contents (especially a way to look up maps), timeline graphs, ancestry trees and anything else to make it easier to digest the vast array of facts within it. ...more |
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Oct 31, 2019
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| 0465082319
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| 3.86
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Jan 10, 2019
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Jan 01, 2019
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| 1846142679
| 9781846142673
| 1846142679
| 4.50
| 610
| Oct 02, 2018
| Sep 27, 2018
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really liked it
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In the long first half of the 20th Century, when mainstream political practice in the West lagged far behind their own enlightened thought and imperia
In the long first half of the 20th Century, when mainstream political practice in the West lagged far behind their own enlightened thought and imperial ambitions still reigned, it is not surprising - in hindsight - that the great powers of the time hadn’t realized the harm they could inflict on one another thanks to newly available technological means. It took two World Wars and their associated damage to move past naked imperialism into a new regime. Whenever one reads accounts of that era, those of us who’ve only seen more peaceful, democratic times may find it hard to comprehend what leaders of the time were thinking when they embarked on some their more foolish ventures. Being a colony of England, India wasn’t immune to these global currents and had to negotiate them while it was simultaneously trying to imbibe the best of these Western ideas into its lived experience. Therefore it’s not entirely inappropriate that such a bewildering age threw up an equally bewildering - but great - man like Gandhi. Albert Einstein’s famous tribute to him - that generations to come will scarce believe that such as a man as this walked upon the earth - shall remain true because Gandhi had dedicated himself entirely to resolving the great contradictions of his time, in the process devising extremely unorthodox approaches that miraculously seemed apt and had their desired effect. A true sui generis. Thus, a first step to appreciating Gandhi is to engage with his life and ideas in their full diversity and not try to box him into categories of the 21st Century like politician, academic, activist, spiritual guru and so on. I am happy to report that Guha’s new book, “Gandhi - the years that changed the world” succeeds in helping the reader do that. As Gandhi himself writes somewhere, he wants his life to be viewed as an indivisible whole, and the various problems he applied himself to sprang from his lifelong quest for truth. Gandhi was no static ideologue either, and his positions on issues changed during his long life of political and social activism. Even though the changes were incremental, over fifty-odd years they add up to a dramatic degree. At the same time, Guha is a sensitive historian. So you get to see Gandhi’s warts, missteps and mistakes in sufficient detail too. Which were the problems that animated Gandhi? India’s political independence being the most well known, the others were: Hindu-Muslim harmony, the abolition of untouchability, and economic self-reliance (especially at the village level). Gandhi claimed that he wouldn’t prize any of these over the other, and thus in this biography you see that he works on all of them throughout his lifetime, often concurrently. His efforts in the freedom struggle start alongside the First World War, when he joins the Muslims of India in trying to keep the Ottoman Empire intact. By the time the Second World War kicks off thirty years later, Gandhi has become the preeminent leader in this struggle and has launched many political movements in the interim. This part of the book describes well known events like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the non-cooperation movement, the Dandi march, the Round Table conference(s) in London, the Quit India movement, his repeated imprisonments and so on. His non-violent approach enables great masses of people across the country to participate. Guha adds sufficient context to these events and intersperses them with the other problems Gandhi is working on, so you find a new appreciation for his abilities. But don’t mistake this for a record of the overall freedom movement itself, as that’d need to cover far more than just what Gandhi was doing. What is striking about his political life is how Gandhi keeps his personal relationships with British officials separate from his political differences with them. Another aspect is that he’d always give them sufficient notice of any agitation he planned to undertake. He’d build up anticipation among his supporters and gradually escalate the intensity of his actions until the opponent is forced to react. The Dandi March is a perfect example of this - and of his political acumen in general. Guha’s account of how this march came to be is one of the highlights of the book. Where Gandhi damages his relationship with the British irretrievably is, perhaps, the Quit India movement that came at a time when Britain was fighting for its own survival during the Second World War. A contradiction of British ideal and practice that was far too pertinent for Gandhi and other Indian leaders to ignore, but their objections were going to lead to unavoidable tragedy a few years later. The distressing, tragic event that slowly unfolds is of course, the partition of India along religious lines. One follows this thread with a sense of dread, knowing full well that all of Gandhi’s efforts are going to be in vain. How Jinnah managed to muster so much popular support in a relatively brief period is not something Guha explores in depth and would make for fascinating reading. But by the end of the Second World War, it is his party (the Muslim League) which has won most of the seats reserved for Muslims in elections conducted by the British (for the quasi-democratic set up they have created in India). The Congress valiantly claims to represent all Indians, but is rebuffed by both Jinnah and the British - who are probably still smarting from the Quit India movement. Gandhi’s desperate pleas to prevent Partition, his long series of one-on-one talks with Jinnah, and then his fasts to bring back communal harmony after rampant violence in Calcutta, Bihar, Punjab and even Delhi make for poignant reading. There are some references to the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha here. They mirrored - and probably exceeded - Jinnah in conceiving India to be for Hindus alone - an idea so repulsive and outlandishly impractical that it shouldn’t have survived a minute of rational discussion. A moral exists here for us today: to not take social harmony for granted in a country where religious passions run high and rifts take decades to heal. It took someone with Gandhi’s moral authority having to nearly starve himself to death before people came to their senses in the aftermath of Partition. The one area where I learnt much was Gandhi’s efforts to abolish untouchability. I was not aware that he spent years dedicated exclusively to this task, and travelled around the country giving speeches and raising money for the cause. Again, it’s incomprehensible to us today that people of many castes were not even allowed in many prominent Hindu temples (like the one in Madurai or Guruvayur), not allowed to use the same wells and so on. This is also where Gandhi was clearly the reactionary for a better part of his life, the tone always being set by the precocious Ambedkar. The younger leader - and erudite scholar - had experienced first hand the atrocities of being an untouchable and was in a tearing hurry to rid India of it, and was not averse to throwing out Hinduism altogether if it came in the way of his mission. The lifelong battle of political wills between Gandhi and Ambedkar is quite famous (and historically significant), and receives ample treatment in the book. You see Gandhi move from being a defender of the caste system to becoming a paternalistic advocate of change, to finally accepting that there is no reason for Indians to not marry each other citing caste (and religion) as barrier. Whether the primacy he affords to this problem was deserved is something one doesn’t know, if one were to view his entire life as a preamble to the 15th of August, 1947 as many of us are wont to do. But for someone in his position - who of course had no idea when the British would actually vacate India - this glaring blot in India’s society was not something he could ignore, and there is something so organic and appealing about his approach to the world. While no civilized society should tolerate even a single instance of such a practice, I’d have liked the historian in Guha to provide more data. How widespread was the problem? How many people were classified as untouchables? This would inform the reader about the scale of the problem Gandhi and other social reformers of the time were dealing with. What we do learn is that while Ambedkar was a genuine radical, Gandhi was progressive compared to the bulk of the Hindu establishment, which had no interest in removing this barbaric practice. Of course, the place where his immersive, organic approach to problem solving found the fullest expression was in the various communes - or “Ashrams” - he created. Having already practiced such communal living in South Africa where he could practice the change that he wanted to preach, he kept pushing his experiments in India further. In these ashrams there was no discrimination on caste, religion or gender. Responsibilities were shared equally. Here Gandhi was always engaged in that other - quaint? - quest, namely village self-reliance. People who lived in the Ashram were required to wear khadi and spin yarn. Gandhi’s idea of self sufficient villages that work on the back of cottage industries never made sense to me, and it is a mystery to me why he wasn’t disabused of this notion by his numerous friends. Nehru, with his fixation on large scale industry and progress based on science and technology, argued with Gandhi on this, but apparently not enough to talk him out of it I guess. Another intriguing question is how Gandhi managed to maintain the friendship and patronage of big industrialists like G D Birla and Jamnalal Bajaj while being engaged in these experiments. What did they have to say about all this? It is also in these ashrams that Gandhi keeps trying his dietary experiments, his experiments in alternative medicines etc. Apart from publishing on political and social topics in his long running journals, Gandhi also corresponds with people across the world on all kinds of topics, often giving them advice on specific aspects of their personal lives. Guha takes occasional breaks from larger themes to talk about these, so that we see how unusual this makes him compared to any other political leader of his time. There are also the bizarre experiments regarding celibacy which would have ended the public life of greater men in today’s era (or maybe not?). Guha doesn’t shy away from discussing these, but places them in their proper context and significance in the larger scheme of how Gandhi goes about his life. There is a credible account of the one romantic entanglement he got into that nearly threatened his marriage. The woman involved was called Sarala Devi Chaudhurani. She was a well educated relative of Tagore and was married to a journalist in Punjab. Though the book doesn’t make a big deal of it, you can’t help notice that Gandhi surrounded himself with people of intellect and industry. Apart from prominent political leaders like Nehru, Rajaji and Patel, in his ashram he had people like C F Andrews, Mahadev Desai, Sarojini Naidu, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay - each of whom probably ranked as a thinker and reformer in their own right. Intellectually he enjoyed engaging with Tagore, and Ambedkar of course forced him to re-examine and change his beliefs. He continued to correspond with the British and European friends he had picked up during his satyagraha-s in South Africa. (Noticeably he did not have any actual African friends, which shows that he was still a racist back then, a fact that doesn’t escape him in later life). While you can accuse the political leaders of clinging to him due to his ability to appeal to the masses, these other educated folks had no such agenda and should have altogether made for a lively bunch in spite of all the hardships they had to endure. With all this going on, something has to give. And invariably that turns out to be Gandhi’s personal life. His relationship with Kasturba is shown to be very patriarchal for a good part of their lives, one of his four sons has a falling out with the father and they remain estranged ever after. Even his extremely humble, self-effacing secretary Mahadev Desai is driven to exasperation after an argument and writes, “To be with a saint in heaven is bliss and glory, but to be with a saint on earth is a different story”. This latest book from Guha is a great - and timely - opportunity for all of us to engage with such a “saint”. Considering the sheer breadth of his life, it is no surprise that the book runs to over 900 pages. And you will be yearning to follow up on some of its threads after you’re done with it. I’ve often wondered why this long, fascinating period in Indian history hasn’t lent itself to a high quality adaptation on screen. The sheer number and variety of characters, the complexity of the intrigue, the scale of challenges and what’s at stake at the end of it all would make it a game of thrones like no other we’ve seen so far. But for now, books like this will have to suffice. To Guha’s credit - much like how Gandhi relentlessly refined his techniques over time - his prose has been refined over decades of writing and you will find yourself deep into the book before you realize it. So I highly recommend giving this one a try. ...more |
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Oct 03, 2018
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Oct 02, 2018
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| unknown
| 3.38
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| Nov 07, 2016
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it was ok
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really liked it
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“Dreamers” is a riveting and disturbing read. Author and journalist Snigdha Poonam has spent considerable time with young Indians in the country’s sma
“Dreamers” is a riveting and disturbing read. Author and journalist Snigdha Poonam has spent considerable time with young Indians in the country’s small towns and documented their hopes, fears and frustrations through a series of intimate personality profiles. The book is a bit thin on analysis and also errs by relying too much on the subjects’ own versions of their lives, but its flaws are more than compensated for by Poonam’s compelling narration which lends a tense, documentary like touch to the whole endeavour. For instance there’s the moment when a Bajrang Dal activist in Meerut scans nearby couples in a cafe on Valentine’s Day like a tiger eyeing his prey, or the day Richa Singh rides into Allahabad University with an entourage and becomes the first woman ever to run for President of its student union (a position with more power and prestige than you might imagine). Where she isn’t intending to be dramatic, her matter-of-fact observations hit hard too. Like how Aadhar’s biometrics fail an old woman at a center whose owner she’s profiling. Or how the winner of a Mr. Jharkhand contest in Ranchi has no way to get home because the prize came with no money attached. Such images from this book might haunt you long after you’ve put it down, even if, like me, you end up finishing the whole thing in one sitting. The book’s point of departure is the dire life prospects of India’s youth. A 100 million of them are competing over the next 10 years for the country’s meagre educational and employment resources. Statistics such as 1.7 million people applying for 1500 job openings in a bank have been reported. Desperation and resentment are already visible. Poonam felt that the higher virulence of government-job related violence was just one indication and decided this is a story worth digging deeper. After all, with both strength of numbers and time on their side, it’s a certainty that India’s institutions will be shaped by the collective sensibilities of today’s youth. What struck her immediately was their intensity of desire compared to generations prior. Thanks to global connectivity, it’s no longer possible to be ignorant of how life is lived in more developed parts of the world. And when lived experience shows no signs of matching the imagined, frustration follows. She believes she can find shades of it in the unusual ways some youth are trying to carve an identity for themselves as they recoil from the hopelessness of the mainstream. Like the Gau Rakshak in Karnal whose ID card bearing that title accords him instant respect in his part of town, or others who spend hours every day spreading political memes on Whatsapp or swarming on social media to attack opposing viewpoints. But there are quite a few who are able to channel their desperation constructively. Like Moin Khan in Ranchi who had to milk cows overtime for many months in order to muster up fees for the Spoken English course that he now teaches himself. At the end of the book, irony comes full circle as scammed job seekers turn scammers themselves, as Poonam personally finds out via enrolling as a call center employee in Delhi. Most of these profiles are easily months of work, and some even span years of contact. While Poonam takes great pains to make her subjects come across as thinking-and-feeling rational human beings, she could have used some of that time to probe their immediate family and friends to get around the veil of self-deception that is humanly unavoidable. One of the best pieces in the book is the one about the earlier mentioned Richa Singh who took on the muscle power and masculinity within Allahabad University and emerged victorious. Her story could have benefited with more insights from her close campaign co-ordinators. The book may well chafe at times for readers who are advocates of Hindutva or supporters of BJP-allied organisations like the Bajrang Dal or VHP. Lastly, she could have spread her wings around some more. Ranchi features prominently because it is Poonam’s hometown. And while she ventures into Meerut, Delhi, Allahabad and Karnal, I am not sure I saw profiles from much of the rest of the country. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to ignore this earnest and stupendous effort by a talented, young journalist based on partisan considerations. Highly recommended. ...more |
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Mar 2018
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Mar 25, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1416562591
| 9781416562597
| 1416562591
| 3.76
| 185,807
| Apr 22, 2008
| 2008
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liked it
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Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger hasn’t aged well, for no fault of his. This Booker winning novel’s focus on India’s poor might have stood out 10 years
Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger hasn’t aged well, for no fault of his. This Booker winning novel’s focus on India’s poor might have stood out 10 years ago when it first came out - before the Great Recession, mind you! - in a general atmosphere of optimism about India’s prospects. But what made it edgy then has since become part of mainstream conversation, thanks also to India’s raucous politics. Adiga uses the character of a witty, acerbic driver to offer a series of clever takes on the country. Issues which feature are people being stuck in feudal servitude in the hinterlands, their desperation to make a life in the big cities working as drivers, security guards, cooks etc, and the wide gulf between the rich and the poor which makes relationships that bridge the gap near impossible to foster. Notably, the book also predates the recent trend of daily outrage on social media, so you can be excused for not feeling pierced enough by its sharpness today. But even if its themes might have been somewhat played out, it will always be worth reading for its humor, and for the excellent plotting in which tiny details add up to a meaningful whole at regular intervals throughout the book. The idea of the rags-to-riches protagonist writing letters to a visiting Chinese Prime Minister is a masterful literary device to frame the plot in, but Adiga leans on it too hard. When I finished the book I realized with a tinge of disappointment that in the back of my mind I’d been expecting the ruse fo fall apart midway and the tempo to change drastically. But such flaws can’t destroy this debut novel and I look forward to reading more - hopefully well rounded - content from the author. There are places where the narrator can be mistaken for an overexcited novice reporter, which betrays Adiga’s own journalistic background. The protagonist Balram Halwai says he looks like pretty much any other guy from the “Darkness”, which is his way of referring to the kind of India he comes from. For now it doesn’t matter exactly what it’s named, since his backward village is just like many others in the country. Similarly, his oppressors - and future employers - go by the names of Mongoose, Stork etc since they could be replaced with their equivalents from elsewhere in India. Just when he’s being recognized as an attentive student at school his poor family pulls him out to work in a tea shop. They’re in debt after arranging for his sister’s wedding and every hand counts. His father passes away due to tuberculosis that goes untreated in a decrepit, corrupt government hospital. In the hands of a less skilful writer this tale of woe could have overwhelmed the reader by this point and lost them forever, but Balram’s matter-of-fact narration makes you burst out laughing every so often and then shudder as you grasp all that went unsaid. Such dark humour is sprinkled throughout the book, and at times I felt as though I was going through a macabre but equally scintillating version of the Malgudi Days. Balram continues to be a keen listener and also has bigger ambitions than his elder brother. He soon discovers that there is more money to be made as a driver, and hustles his way into driving for his village landlord’s family in a nearby town. There he gets his first close look at the lives of people who are far richer and more powerful than he’ll ever be. He also catches a glimpse of even more power up in the country’s capital, through visits from politicians and the politically connected business deals of his master. By now Balram is used to having his wits about him. He’s become shrewd and observant, and his opinions sound reasonable given the limited education he’s had. You get funny, fly-on-the-wall descriptions of the homes of the rich from the eyes of the servant class: the clothes rich women wear(!), how the New York-returned son can’t grease his way through the political system with the same adeptness of his Dad, and most hilarious of all, the petty power struggles among the many household servants themselves! It takes one such act of intrigue by Balram to oust the family’s preferred driver - and one who taught Balram himself much about cars - and get himself designated to drive the landlord’s son Ashok around Delhi to help expand their coal business. Just as before, Balram is only motivated by the sheer increase in salary from such a move. But Delhi changes him irrevocably, and brings out the “White Tiger” in him. The relationship between master and servant gets tested under the city’s corrupting influence. It doesn’t even need anyone else meddling from the outside. Balram expounds at length about his love-hate relationship with his master in a series of fascinating soliloquies (all ostensibly addressed to the Chinese Prime Minister of course). He needs his master to be happy to keep his own salary flowing. The master cares only for his loyalty since he routinely puts his belongings and life in the hands of servants like Balram. What keeps this balance from breaking is the feudal ties in their village back home. One misstep from Balram and his entire family’s lives will be in jeopardy. Balram believe that this fear of backlash is the only reason for peace in the country, and that India will be awash in violent revolution if the poor choose to rebel against the rich without caring for what happens to their families as a result. Poignantly, that is the only way the “half-baked” village lad Balram can make sense of his place in the world and his need to be servile to his masters in spite of all the indignities heaped on him, and the inequality and injustice that he sees around him each day. Unsurprisingly, such simplistic thinking leads him to take extreme steps. He justifies his act of breaking all social norms by calling himself a social “entrepreneur”, which is his word for reformer. The last few chapters of the book make sudden leaps in the storyline as Adiga tries - a little too hard - to not leave any loose ends. Which is a shame, because Balram’s situation is one that millions of Indians continue to find themselves in even today, and while the unbridled optimism of the aughts is no longer in vogue, we ought to take every chance we get to ponder the unanswered questions that such lives raise. ...more |
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| 1598878735
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Apr 08, 2021
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it was ok
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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Feb 18, 2021
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Jan 09, 2021
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it was ok
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Nov 01, 2020
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| 4.13
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Oct 25, 2020
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| 4.10
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it was ok
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Oct 13, 2020
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| 4.38
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Jul 2020
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Jul 12, 2020
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| 4.08
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really liked it
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it was ok
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Jun 2020
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Jun 07, 2020
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really liked it
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Oct 31, 2019
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really liked it
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Oct 02, 2018
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| 3.38
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it was ok
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not set
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Mar 26, 2018
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| 4.11
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really liked it
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Mar 2018
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Mar 25, 2018
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| 3.76
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liked it
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Jan 2018
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Jan 28, 2018
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really liked it
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Jan 06, 2018
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liked it
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Jan 06, 2018
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