Page 54 - Book Review
Why the President is not a rubber stamp
As brief histories go, this is one of the best that I have ever read in recent years. The author's intent is to explain, to even the lay but intelligent reader, just what it is that we can expect of our President.He succeeds marvellously. His message is clear: The President is not a rubber stamp.The book is smoothly written, the topics are logically selected, the discussion is uncluttered and, by going President-wise in the Appendix, the author has covered the terrain superbly. It is a must read for all educated Indians and one hopes that Indian language editions will be published soon.The problem is an old one: If you follow the British model of constitutional government, in which there is a head of state and a head of government, who is the real boss? Is the former bound to follow the advice of the latter or, if and when the occasion demands, can he or she tell the Prime Minister and the council of ministers to take a walk?Debtoru Chatterjee, who is remarkably silent about himself -
Borderline strategies against jihad
Not War, Not Peace? is a vital read for anyone interested in the protracted India-Pakistan conflict
Behind the US-Iran nuclear deal
A new book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon, The Iran Wars, offers a gripping account of the developments that paved the way to the deal
The art of the sustainable advantage
Saurabh Mukherjea's The Unusual Billionaires is an incisive and detailed exploration of the management traits of seven "great" Indian companies
A US lens on India's world view
The husband-wife duo of Teresita and Howard Schaffer has the right credentials to explore the various drivers of India's foreign policy. In their long careers as US diplomats, they had several stints in India and in neighbouring South Asian countries, accumulating, as they went along, a more nuanced and perceptive understanding of sub-continental politics. But this book is not a memoir. It is an exposition of India's world view, its historical and cultural roots. The authors get their history wrong by placing Ashoka a century before Chandragupta in referring to the Mauryan empire.The Schaffers find the ethos of India's foreign policy in the expansive vision its elite has of "India's role in the world, one that regards India first and foremost as the heir to a great civilisation". This in turn, they claim, leads to a world view, whose "centerpiece has always been the idea of a unique and exceptional India". In the many encounters between India and the US they often see American exceptio
Hinduism and the Hindu Rashtra
The book raises the broad question: If India is a Hindu Rashtra, in which religion and politics overlap, then what is Hinduism?
The derangement of American politics
This is a stranger-than-fiction campaign many of us want to forget. So is it too soon to wallow in the reality of it?That question bedevils Maureen Dowd's book on the 2016 presidential race, The Year of Voting Dangerously, a rolling, roiling collection of her columns - mainly ridiculing the two political figures she, like most of us, loves to loathe: Hillary Clinton and Donald J Trump.Put aside whether cobbling together a bunch of newspaper columns with a small amount of fresh material is too easy a way to publish a "new book." Ms Dowd has spent two decades mining (and mocking) the minds of these two very American, and often tragic, figures. We are living in a raging bull market for a biting New York Times columnist to describe as bull two New York grandparents ensconced in the bubble of the upper .01 per cent while championing the ordinary people they know mostly as staff.Ms Dowd was born to write about this race. And she dissects its main characters with poison in her pen and poetic
The ghosts of Hillary's past
This account of Hillary Clinton's journey from childhood to First Lady, senator, secretary of state and presidential candidate by James D Boys traces the factors that have helped shape Ms Clinton's career, and assesses her chances of becoming the next president of the US
Anatomy of an ideological state
"The Jihad in Kashmir is at a critical stage and cannot be disrupted. We have been covering our tracks so far and will cover them even better in the future. These are empty threats. The United States could not declare Pakistan a terrorist state because of our strategic importance… All we need to do is to buy more time and improve our diplomatic effort. The focus should be on Indian atrocities in Kashmir, not on our support for the Kashmiri resistance."The quote is almost a quarter of a century old (1992) and spoken by Javed Nasir, then chief of Inter-Services Intelligence, as he was explaining to Nawaz Sharif, then prime minister of Pakistan, why the latter should ignore US Secretary of State James Baker's letter complaining about "direct covert Government of Pakistan support" to "Kashmiri and Sikh militants who carry out acts of terrorism".Regular readers of Khaled Ahmed's columns would know how difficult a task it can be to quote from his work - there are just too many stunning sto
Icebergs in the start-up ocean
Among the more prominent start-ups, the book has devoted many chapters to Kunal Bahl and Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Truth, libel and dissent
More than half a century after A J Liebling declared that freedom of the press "is guaranteed only to those who own one," the quip seems doubly out of date. For one thing, anyone with access to the internet can now be said to "own one" and to enjoy the freedoms of the First Amendment with abandon. At the same time, the people Liebling had in mind, owners of the press in the more institutional sense, find their guarantee of freedom less than ironclad.The enemies of unfettered journalism in the US these days include prosecutors crying "national security" in hot pursuit of leakers; a presidential candidate who vows, if elected, to "open up" the libel laws so that when journalists offend "we can sue them and win lots of money"; and a vengeful Silicon Valley billionaire bankrolling lawsuits aimed at driving an impertinent website out of business.Many of the questions at the heart of the matter are the same ones that have been asked since before there was a First Amendment: Are opinions prot
Tipu Sultan in the 21st century
Tiger: The Life of Tipu Sultan provides so nuanced a portrait that it probably won't change the terms of the popular debate either
The vultures still feed
As the veteran journalist Josy Joseph argues in his new book, A Feast of Vultures: "India's socialist economy has not really been replaced by laissez-faire in these decades
Bandhan's high-yielding bonds
Bandhan Bank has grown its deposits phenomenally in the first year of its existence, thus continuing in the footsteps of Bandhan Financial Services, which, as a microfinance institution in 2009, took over all the loans on the books of the non-governmental organisation (NGO), Bandhan-Konnagar. If the bank can maintain this deposit growth it will be able to continue to both reduce its lending rate and also keep paying above the market to attract deposits. This will be a killer.The best answer to the question "how does Bandhan do it?" can be found in the history of Bandhan by Tamal Bandyopadhyay, author and leading financial commentator, produced at a pace that has become the hallmark of the organisation and anything it touches. The story of Bandhan Bank is very much the story of its Founder and Chief Executive Officer Chandra Shekhar Ghosh, who, from the humblest of personal beginnings, has created with his drive and vision a robust bank with around 700 branches and 20,000 employees.The
The rise of modern philosophy
The Dream of Reason the first volume in a history of Western philosophy by Anthony Gottlieb, a former executive editor of The Economist, appeared in 2,000, and took us from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance.
Women on a beaten track
All in all, She Walks, She Leads is an uninspired tome, enlivened only in part by some of the exceptional women who inhabit its pages
Tamil Nadu's business guidebook
Surge: Tamil Nadu's Growth Story starts promisingly with a description of how Tamil Nadu's story is the under-reported story of modern Indian business history
One night in 1987
Muzaffarnagar is a shameful episode but it is, sadly, not the worst communal carnage since 1947
The fertility debate
For several years I was a professor of creative writing at an English university, and a native habit of finding metaphors and similes in unlikely places occasionally led me to glimpse a strange half-analogy between the writing student and the woman embarking on in vitro fertilization (IVF).Like the IVF industry, the creative writing business has many critics who deplore the notion that creativity can or should be taught and believe some central mystery of life is being violated therein. Part of the humiliation of being helped to bring forth what should emerge naturally (or, by implication, not at all) is the speed with which the most generous impulse - to create - begins to look like the most selfish.The analogy between creative writing and fertility is not entirely facile: The story of IVF is essentially a female story, and it requires women writers to tell it."The truth," Julia Leigh writes early on in Avalanche, "was that many women had gone before me and found ways to lead a creati
The rise and ruin of 'Mother Merrill'
Catching Lightning in a Bottle describes how Charles Merrill democratised investing by enabling countless middle-class individuals to save and invest
