Book Excerpt: The Dollar Trap

The American Dollar is the international currency of reserve. It is the most accepted global currency and the most sought after investment, especially in times of global economic downturn. 

How did the American Dollar come to occupy such an exalted position? 

The Dollar Trap, written by Eswar S. Prasad, seeks to answer this important question. It is a fascinating account of the the pivotal role played by the American Dollar in the global economy and how it has tightened its grip on global finance.

Title: The Dollar Trap

Author: Eswar S. Prasad
Publisher: Portfolio Penguin
Pages featured here: 16-21

Note: All copyrights/trademarks belong to the owners of the publication/author(s). It is not my intention to profit from their work. In fact, I just wish that the readers of this blog are encouraged to buy/read the works represented here.

 Happy Reading!

Book Excerpt: The Discovery of India

Jawaharlal Nehru wore many hats: freedom fighter, Fabian socialist, politician, chronicler of India's past and present, and prime minister.

Of his many works, two stand out: The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History. 

The Discovery of India detailed a sweeping look at India's hoary past and an uncertain future under the British. While chronicling the story of India, Nehru dwells on an assortment of subjects - religion and its evolution over the centuries, culture and sub-cultures, development of science over the centuries, political philosophies, especially under British rule.

Glimpses of World History is actually built through letters that Nehru wrote to his daughter, Indira Priyadarshini (later Gandhi). The work lends a panoramic view of major global events—from Greek and other ancient civilisations to the turn of the 20th century—that have shaped the story of mankind. 

While Nehru was not a professional historian, his vast knowledge and mastery of the English language makes reading these two works a great joy.

The Discovery of India was also made into a popular television series, Bharat Ek Khoj.

Kindly ignore the pen markings (like underlines); these scans are taken from my personal copy, which I bought and read in 1990.

Title: The Discovery of India

Author: Jawaharlal Nehru
Publisher: OUP
Pages featured here: 74-76

Note: All copyrights/trademarks belong to the owners of the publication/author(s). It is not my intention to profit from their work. In fact, I just wish that the readers of this blog are encouraged to buy/read the works represented here.

Book Excerpt: Crusader or Conspirator?

The Coal Block Allocation Scam, or the CoalGate as it has come to be nicknamed, relates to the allocation of coal blocks to certain favored parties without following the bidding system. 

The Comptroller and Auditor-General of India (CAG) reported that this process of allocation of coal blocks without inviting open bidding led to a massive loss of Rs1,86,000 crore (Rupees One Lakh Eighty Six Thousand Crore) to the central and state governments. 

The UPA Government dismissed the huge loss figure as a figment of imagination.

Later,the Supreme Court struck down the allocation of 204 coal blocks.

The new central government, i.e., NDA under Narendra Modi, went in for e-bidding to bring in transparency in the allocation system. Till yesterday, the allocation of just 33 (out of 204) coal blocks has brought in nearly Rs2 lakh crore!! 

Tomorrow I shall share more on this scam; right now, let me share three pages from the work of P. C. Parakh, former secretary in the Ministry of Coal, Government of India. While a court had earlier absolved Mr Parakh of any wrong doing, a special CBI court has just issued summons to him.  Government of India. 

Title: Crusader or Conspirator?

Author: P. C. Parakh
Publisher: Manas
Pages featured here: 115-117

Note: All copyrights/trademarks belong to the owners of the publication/author(s). It is not my intention to profit from their work. In fact, I just wish that the readers of this blog are encouraged to buy/read the works represented here.

Book Excerpt: Have Pen, Will Travel

A travelogue is personal in nature as it reflects the writer-traveler's perspective—a kind of personal take—on the world around her/him. I like travelogues as they lend us a peep into the mind of the writer.

M. J. Akbar's Have Pen, Will Travel is a brilliant, humorous collection of his observations as a globetrotter. This book was a gift from my dear friend, Sudharsan Ramalingam, a civil servant with the Government of India. 

M. J. Akbar is one of India's finest journalists; he worked as the Editor-in-Chief of Deccan Chronicle and Asian Age. He is also the author of some serious works, like The Shade of Swords and India: The Siege Within. A former Congress MP, currently he is a spokesperson of the BJP.

I am sure you will greatly enjoy this travelogue diary, which is in fact a series of short pieces written over several years. Go ahead, immerse yourself in this brilliant work. 

Title: Have Pen, Will Travel

Author: M. J. Akbar
Publisher: Lotus Roli
Pages featured here: 160-165

Note: All copyrights/trademarks belong to the owners of the publication/author(s). It is not my intention to profit from their work. In fact, I just wish that the readers of this blog are encouraged to buy/read the works represented here.

Book Excerpt: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

For several years now, relations between between the West and Islamic World have been marked by deep antipathy
This deep mistrust is a legacy of growing radicalism in the Muslim World and is characterised by a marked hatred of the West. It does not help that the foreign policies of the Western nations are guided by their narrow economic and strategic interests, often in the Middle East.

Samuel Huntington, former editor of Foreign Affairs, is the author of the ground-breaking work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. In his magnum opus, Huntington argues that the 21st century will be marked by clashes between civilisations - Islam versus the West, Islam versus Sinic (China), Islam versus Hindu, Russia versus Sinic, Russia versus Islam, among others.

Title: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order

Author: Samuel Huntington
Publisher: Penguin
Pages featured here: 23-25

Note: All copyrights/trademarks belong to the owners of the publication/author(s). It is not my intention to profit from their work. In fact, I just wish that the readers of this blog are encouraged to buy/read the works represented here.

Book Excerpt: Globalization and Its Discontents

Globalization has come to define our world. Today, goods, ideas, technology, and capital seamlessly move between nations. In his seminal work, Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist at the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics 2001, explores the anger behind the rising tide against globalization.

Title: Globalization and Its Discontents

Author: Joseph Stiglitz
Publisher: Penguin
Pages featured here: 23-25

Note: All copyrights/trademarks belong to the owners of the publication/author(s). It is not my intention to profit from their work. In fact, I just wish that the readers of this blog are encouraged to buy/read the works represented here.

Book Excerpt: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness is a deeply philosophical novel about the complexities that layer human nature. Joseph Conrad explores the prejudices, especially of the racial kind, of the Whites/Europeans that 'coloured' their attitude and behaviour toward the Blacks/Africans throughout the age of colonization of the Dark Continent.

Though a short novel (109 pages in this edition), Heart of Darkness raises profound and disturbing questions about colonialism, imperialism and a false sense of racial superiority.

Title: Heart of Darkness 

Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: UBSPD
Pages featured here: 18-20

First read: 1997
Note: All copyrights/trademarks belong to the owners of the publication/author(s). It is not my intention to profit from their work. In fact, I just wish that the readers of this blog are encouraged to buy/read the works represented here.

Book Excerpt: Nizam of Hyderabad, from Freedom at Midnight

Starting this Friday, this space will feature an excerpt from a book. The idea is to share knowledge and of course, spread the idea of reading. 

Note: All copyrights/trademarks belong to the owners of the publication/author(s). It is not my intention to profit from their work. In fact, I just wish that the readers of this blog are encouraged to buy/read the works represented here. 

I start with an excerpt from Freedom at Midnight, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. This brilliant book relates the story of India's struggle for freedom and more importantly, what led to the partition of India. 

In a chapter titled, Palaces and Tigers, Elephants and Jewels, the two terrific authors mesmerize the reader with their tales of the eccentricities of the Rajas and Nawabs of India's numerous princely states.

Here's an excerpt that relates a story about the Nizam of Hyderabad.

I request you to not buy pirated versions of any book, including Freedom at Midnight. Buy original titles and keep learning!

Man versus Machine

Are machines equal to human beings? Can machines replace the human mind? These pertinent questions are as old as the Industrial Revolution itself. The Matrix Trilogy brilliantly encapsulates this eternal battle between the human mind and machines. 

The New York Times has a brilliant piece on the idea of man versus machine. Here's an excerpt:

"... computers are increasingly going to be able to perform important parts of even mostly cognitive jobs, like picking stocks, diagnosing diseases and granting parole.

As this happens, certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.

But what human skills will be more valuable?" (End of excerpt)

If you have an opinion on this issue, please leave it in the comments section. 

Books I have Read in the Last 12 Months

As a teacher, I have often been asked about my book list, i.e., what do I read. The list below is the answer!

Please note that this is a partial list only.

• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

• The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

• Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (Reread after almost a decade!)

• Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie

• And Thereby Hangs a Tale by Jeffery Archer

• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

• Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour by Michael Lewis

• Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

• End of World by Ken Follett

• Winter of the World by Ken Follett

• Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata by Devdutt Pattanaik

• Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

• The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

• Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven 

• River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

• Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and The Future of American Power by Robert Kaplan

• In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul

• Ashoka by Charles Allen

• The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad

• Manto: Selected Short Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto

• Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto

• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by by Daniyal Muneeuddin

• A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

Apart from these, I am a great lover of comics, like Tinkle and the huge collections of Amar Chitra Katha.

If you wish to share your reading list, post the list in the comments section. 

Douglas Adams' perspective on the World & Us

Douglas Adams is the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Here's an excerpt from a tribute article published in the Times. 

I remember him telling me once of something that, he said, had just happened to him at the railway station. He was early for a train, so he bought The Guardian, a cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits, and sat down at a table, putting the folded newspaper down so he could do the crossword. The packet of biscuits was in the middle of the table.

There was another man already sitting at the table and this man now leant calmly across, tore open the packet of biscuits and ate one. Douglas said he went into a sort of state of shock, but — determined not to show any reaction — he equally calmly leant forward and took the second biscuit. A few minutes later, the man took the third and ate it. Douglas then took the fourth and tried his best not to glare at the man.

The man then stood up and wandered off as if nothing had happened, at which point Douglas’s train was announced. So he hurriedly finished his coffee and picked up his belongings, only to find his packet of biscuits under the newspaper.

It’s actually a profoundly philosophical story. With one slight adjustment of the furniture, the victim becomes the aggressor and the aggressor the victim, and one is left with the untold story of the true victim hanging in the air. It’s exactly the sort of shift in perspective that fascinated Douglas — as a way of not just telling stories but also of looking at ideas. (End of excerpt.)

The Times link is not working; so I linked this piece to another site, which has a copy. Go read the complete piece here. 

Book Reco: A Fine Balance

A few readers of this blog suggested that I recommend books that I find interesting / inspiring / useful or all of these.

In my first book reco, I will review Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. I have read all of Mistry's works, like Such a Long Journey, Family Matters, and Tales from Firozsha Baag. 

Mistry was born in India in 1952 but emigrated to Canada in 1975. A recipient of several international awards, he recently was bestowed with the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature (for 2012).

A Fine Balance is Mistry's best work. Rarely have I come across a work which deals in with a myriad of human emotions with such profound intensity and care. Mistry writes of a India in chaos — of a country that is caught in the maelstrom of political emergency, social decadence, and economic deprivation.

The story revolves around the lives and travails of four characters: Dina, a Parsi widow, Maneck, a student, and the uncle-nephew tailor duo of Om and Ishvar. The story, set in the politically charged atmosphere of the 1970s, enthralls us with the varied emotions that colour every aspect of the lives of these four characters.

As an Indian,I could easily identify with each of Mistry's characters. I think Mistry's characters are universal — for emotions like happiness and suffering, love and hate, trust and betrayal, success and failure are universal. 

Mistry has hewn his characters not just with words but with soul and I think that is the biggest asset of this work. Go ahead and invest in this work; I say invest because the returns by way of happiness will be life-long. 

After reading this work, I am sure you would agree with me that Rohinton Mistry is a master at work.

Sunday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

Four highly varied and interesting reads for your Sunday. 

• The French government wants to tone my vagina. (Slate)

Shortly after my husband and I moved to Paris, I became pregnant, which was a relief, because I would get fat for a legitimate biological reason, not just because of all the pain au chocolat. When I gave birth to our daughter last November, my husband and I spent five government-sponsored days in the maternity ward at Clinique Leonardo Da Vinci, where we learned that French hospital meals come with a cheese course and that as part of my postpartum treatment I would be prescribed 10 to 20 sessions of la rééducation périnéale. This is a kind of physical therapy designed to retrain the muscles of the pelvic floor, including the vagina, and is one of the cornerstones of French postnatal care. Two months after our daughter was born, I summoned the courage to teach my vagina some new tricks.

• The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith. (Harper's Magazine)

... two theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science. 

• Why is Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet so popular? (BBC)

Gibran on marriage: "Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup." 

• Decadence and the IPL, by Mukul Kesavan. (ToI)

... is not just exasperating but decadent is that the people who run the IPL and the journalists who cover it, seem to positively celebrate the fact that IPL teams are playthings of the rich and famous. One could argue that Chelsea is a toy for Abramovitch, but no commentator, no television camera pays him any attention in the course of live action. Whereas Vijay Mallya and his son and Mukesh Ambani and his family are as much a part of the IPL's action as Chris Gayle or Sachin Tendulkar. When purse-strings become visible in and around the field of play, you know that a sport is in trouble because it isn't lit only by its own brilliance, it's now also lit by the reflected glare of money.   

Source: The Economic Times

Bertrand Russell's 10 Commandments for Teachers

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher, mathematician, and much more. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. 

A prolific writer, he authored several ground-breaking works, like Principia Mathematica (with A. N. Whitehead), Why I am not a Christian, On Denoting, and The Analysis of Mind.

Russell described himself both as an agnostic and an atheist. For most of his adult life Russell maintained that religion is little more than superstition and, despite any positive effects that religion might have, it is largely harmful to people. He believed religion and the religious outlook (he considered communism and other systematic ideologies to be forms of religion) serve to impede knowledge, foster fear and dependency, and are responsible for much of the war, oppression, and misery that have beset the world (This paragraph is taken from Wikipedia).

On the Brainpickings Website, I found this set of Ten Commandments for Teachers that Russell outlined: 


1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

My favourite ones are the first and ninth commandments; While I do not agree with all, especially the fifth commandment, the list still works as a defining set of guidelines for teachers.