Page 55 - Book Review

Nationalism and its instant discontents

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

Naguib Mahfouz's trivial pursuits

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

A tower of Trump books

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

Manchester City's last blue moon

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

Modern India, traditional remedies

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

Plain tales from the UPA

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

The case for euro reform

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

Remembering the Nazi hunters

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

Shallow dive in the Indian Ocean

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

Game, set and yawn

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

Shah of Iran's heavenly legacy

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

The real story of the China miracle

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

Civil society and its discontents

The idea of public policy has gained credence in recent years while discussing democratic institutions and political processes

Despatches from the conflict zone

There is a grand narrative about the way areas impacted by Maoist insurgency operate. Maoist rebels are painted as villains of the worst kind. The people sympathetic to them, either by choice or under compulsion, are considered anti-development. Government servants are seen as helpless spectators unable to do much to make some breakthrough. And corporate houses willing to invest are perceived as saviours because they want to use money to bring some development in such neglected regions. Any deviation from this narrative is seen as a betrayal of the cause of development.The story, unfortunately, has no place for victims who suffer silently because of their refusal to take sides. They are bound to suffer because their only interest is survival. After all, they are the ones who allowed the dreaded Maoists to flourish in their midst in the first place.The book under review, however, questions this grand narrative and does so fairly persuasively. The author is a professor at a leading busin

Zika's long jump

Since Mr McNeil's book was finished on June 1, numerous new findings have offered further cause for concern about Zika's arrival in the United States

Women on the balancing beam

As more Indian women enter the workforce, two recent books examine the tenuous balance that women struggle to achieve between professionalism and their gender-based roles. One is written by an award-winning journalist/author Pallavi Aiyar, who calls herself an elite-in-a-developing-country kind of brat; the other studies inter-generational changes in attitudes towards women's work through case studies of respondents who have been the first women in their family to seek jobs.Author Alice W Clark has observed the strategies that have enabled modern Indian women to work in spite of the limitations placed upon them and concludes that familial support is one of the most important facilitators of women's careers. Whether in large cities or small towns, the extent of a girl's education (which determines her employability and her attitude towards work) is most often determined by her family, especially by the father, and post-marriage, by her husband's attitudes. Ms Clark writes about Lilawati

A Promethean project

An internationally famed cellist, also the best friend of a ruthless politician, serving as the clandestine owner of shady companies that help the elite in his country siphon away public funds; corrupt officials selling off broadcasting rights for major sporting events to a private media company for a pittance; a "banana republic" in Central America offering a tax haven; and at the centre of it, the mysterious son of a former Waffen-SS officer assisting drug lords, gun runners and autocrats conceal their ill-gotten wealth... Sounds like the plot of an Alistair McLean pot boiler?On the contrary: It's the true story of the greatest data leak ever. And, the international journalists who dug through the unimaginable mountains of data to focus the light of day on a shadow financial system that aids the rich and powerful conceal their wealth, and maintain the status quo of inequality. Now, the world knows of the leak as "Panama Papers" - the 1.5 million documents of the Panamanian law firm M

Syria's forgotten war

As Henri De Wailly's book, rigged wars are by no means the prerogative of the 21st century powers

Deep thinking about immigration

From Hobbes and Hegel to John Stuart Mill and John Rawls, the seminal figures of Western political theory are united in their almost complete neglect of immigration. No doubt they have their reasons. Who among them witnessed anything like the global refugee crisis of 2015? Or the anxieties about national identity that it inflamed? Be that as it may, with hostility toward immigrants and refugees fueling the "Brexit" movement and the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, we could use some deep thinking about the relationship between the state and its citizens.On the case is the political philosopher David Miller. His book Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration aims to be the first to combine such an abstract approach to the topic with such a strong dose of realism. Make no mistake: Mr Miller is a humane, social democratic Oxford University professor. But comes down in favour of a state's right - except when human rights are threatened - to close its borders to o

India's unofficial apartheid

Being the Other: The Muslim in India explores the continuing marginalisation of Muslims in India in the post-partition years