Glob: Library

A Manifesto for Reform

In 2007, Ramachandra Guha wrote India After Gandhi, history of the world's largest democracy. In 750 pages, he summarized Indian history which, in Guha's words, "is so rich and complex and yet so imperfectly documented and understood". While Guha's work gave this world the most comprehensive account of India's social and political history ever written, it left a gap in my mind about the economic and policy context that has shaped our country in the same timeline. As an entrepreneur, this gap was cause for much trouble until it was filled quite unexpectedly and pleasantly by Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India. It came as no surprise later, that "the book really began on a wintry evening in Coonoor... in December 2006. Ramachandra Guha, Rohini and I (Nandan Nilekani) were having coffee". Nilekani acknowledges Guha as one of his mentors on this book. In the appendix, the book publishes a timeline of key events starting with the East India Company overthrowing the Newab of Bengal in 1757 through both money and military, to the swapping of the Left with UP's Samajwadi Party by UPA in the wake of the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2008. Nilekani's focus on detail and Indian history sets this book apart from any biography, autobiography or big picture book written by an Indian entrepreneur or bureaucrat painting a big, hairy, audacious vision of tomorrow's India.

Fairyish Tales by Sumit Mullick (New Release)

Transcript of my review speech at the book launch at British Council on Nov 30, 2009

He was born in Bengal, worked with the Indian government for many years, discovered himself as a writer, wrote a first novel based on his personal experiences in the administration and expressed in the form of fiction, and then wrote another book with the original title "a fairy story", which is a satire on human folly, a fantasy fable, a hatred of all major ideas of utopia, and arguably the greatest criticism of the world order and state of humanity. Can anyone guess who I am talking about?

No, it's not Sumit Mullick. I am talking about George Orwell.

The year is 1945 and the month is August, the time when capitalism and communism joined hands to introduce the world to the atomic bomb and changed the course of history. That same month, political expression and artistic expression joined hands in the mid reaches of the mind of George Orwell to introduce the world to Animal Farm and changed the way we understand the course of history. Orwell was creating his work almost in parallel with the Manhattan project, and his book release in the month of the bombing must have given Orwell a sense of sad, ironic satisfaction. The jury is still out on which is mightier, the pen or the sword.

Today, the violence of humanity probably consumes as many lives everyday that the atomic bomb consumed since Aug 1945. Yet, the world continues to live oblivious to this violence, why even accelerates it further by inflicting it behind several facades. Fairyish Tales is an expression of this violence inflicted by humanity, upon humanity and upon civilization and upon earth and upon the universe. Mullick removes this facade in the form of 8 fairyish stories, 8 satires of fantasy, questioning our every notion of a perfect civilization.

Why India is an overdeveloped country

Quoting Shashi Tharoor from one of his columns in Sunday Times from about a year ago. "Underdevelopment used to be the condition erroneously ascribed to India by economic theoreticians, who looked at some of our labour-intensive agricultural techniques and promptly concluded that we were primitive. In fact, everything in India is overdeveloped, particularly the social structure, the bureaucracy, the political process, the monetary system, the university network, the industrial base and (as Galbraith tactlessly observed) the women. Given its economic and imperial history in a number of previous Golden Ages under Ashoka, Vikramaditya and Akbar, India is not underdeveloped at all; it is, as I argued in The Great Indian Novel, a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay." Read the novel with this one idea and satisfaction is guaranteed.

Tharoor takes the mythological Indian epic whose early texts date as early as 8th Century B.C. while later ones date as late as 4th Century A.D. and juxtaposes the multi-generation story upon the recent history of India's independence dating early 20th Century A.D. The result is a phenomenal convergence of wit, liberalism, history and satire. Tharoor's grasp of characters from both stories is quite deep, and it shows in every page where his pearls of wisdom and genius are leniently scattered. I would not ruin the surprise by mapping the key characters for you, but discovering that is compelling enough to pick up the book. Like every good book, this has several layers of depth and the better your understanding of the Mahabharata and modern Indian history, more the gratification. If you can forgive the occasional incoherency and chronological flaws that come with the premise of the book, you will find a convincing illustration of India's "advance state of decay".

Fooled by Probabilities

The ideas in this book have created more controversy than they deserve, and it might have something to do with the title of the book. Given the number of people who equate "random" with "equiprobable", "Fooled by Probabilities" would have been a more appropriate title for the book, though not as provocative as "Fooled by Randomness". There is a finite chance that there is a black cat in every dark room, but when you switch the light on, there is no black cat in the room. Both are correct statements - mathematically and practically. This book must be read in the same light.

It seems to me that the transition from an average to good investor (probabilistically speaking) happens as soon as you internalize the concept of expected values and invest by it. My favorite story from the book is where Taleb is asked which way the market is expected to go next week, and he says slightly up with a high probability (70%). Then someone intervened that Taleb had just made a big bet on the S&P going down next week, and he said that indeed he did. The one lesson this book teaches is that the two statements are not inconsistent with each other. 70% chance of a +1% change and 30% chance of a -10% change sums upto -2.3, a strongly negative expected value. Good investors always shadow the expected value (trend and magnitude), although market sentiments are always driven by either the expected trend of upward or downward movement, or expected magnitude of upward and downward movement.

The Illusion of Incomprehension

Amartya Sen's ideas and opinions in this book are eminently agreeable. However, this book comes across as either a hard-selling rebuttal to the nay-sayers to Sen's theories about identity, or repetitive professing to a reader who doesn't get it.

If I eat a peanut every time Sen criticizes Samuel Huntington and the Civilization theory, I will weigh a thousand pounds. With this book and the repeated attempts to nullify Civilization theory, Sen makes it much more important than it will or should be.

Amartya Sen continues to educate and continues to make smart and rational arguments that question conventional conservative wisdom. If this is your first Amartya Sen book, you will definitely get the party line in the signature format. However, if you are looking for more insights than what you have already received from the author, this book may not be the right one to spend time on.

The only thing worse than anarchy is government

Review of the book Seducing Pain by Sumit Mullick (Image not available)

Sumit Mullick and George Orwell have many things in common, both were born in Bengal, both have fatalistic views of the establishment of their times, both served in the administrative and civil services before discovering themselves as writer. Orwell started his writing career as a reviewer, and his 1940 essay of Charles Dickens reflects his own personality within the review. "When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer." He goes on to say "...He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all  the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls." I cannot use better words to describe Sumit Mullick and therefore I plagiarize, with some discretion.

AS A S(O)ONNET, TELL

Seth can write, for better or verse,
A novel with a novel rhyme scheme.
His metaphors and tropes are terse,
It reads just like as in a dream.
From acknowledgments, dedication and contents
To punctuations, italics and indents,
From back to back, and cover to cover,
From estranged friends to hopeless lovers,
You can sing along. Seth does expose,
Six hundred ninety and three times
How well it reads, how much it rhymes,
Manifesting the very cons of prose.
As if the rhyme-scheme were a trifle,
It's spelled out in this review title.

How on earth can one man write
A story of San Francisco thus,
So credible in its setting, one might
Doubt (and why, really make a fuss),
That he also wrote with as much joy
The Indian story of A Suitable Boy.
The best things come in packages small,
These sonnets will please one and all
Despite the Friscan liberal bent,
Global warming, anti-war and peace,
Same-sex love and pets saving trees,
It's musical would compete with Rent.
So buy this book before you sleep
Because this one is one to keep.

And thus he spake...

My favorite part of the book is the last third. By that time Hitchens has made his arguments about how Religion Poisons Everything and is now rebutting the best intellectual arguments against his thesis. What would become of human decency, morality and ethics without religion? How do you address the inherent human need to believe in something and take comfort in a higher power? What are the god-less alternatives and aren't those institutions as bad or worse? Doesn't religion provide stability to society by pacifying individuals in times of darkness and uncertainty? It is hard to sum things up and provide sound bytes about something as complex as religion, but my take-away from this book is that any religion (by design) has the ingredients of becoming totalitarian, when successful; and totalitarianism of any kind leads to ultimate power corruption.

Hitchens makes his arguments and rebuts the best counter-arguments with passion and panache. If you are amongst the majority of people in the world - believers - his irreverent sense of humor may lead you to immediately brush him off as a partisan hack; while the unbelievers will get a kick out of each of the thousands of punchlines that Hitchens artfully mumbles. However, if you belong to the third category - an intellectual who chooses to look beyond a bi-polar view of the world when it comes to religion - I would urge patience with Hitchens' indulgence as a genius linguist (when you have it, it is hard not to flaunt it!) and you will find this book extremely rewarding and will not go un-satiated. If you are seriously debating the merits and demerits of religion as an institution in the society we live in, you have glanced at the perfect place, no matter what your affiliations.

Imperial grand strategy explained

What I love about the way professors write books is that they go the extra mile to get their facts right. Their sourcing is solid and they quote heavily as they write. In this case, it's a certain professor of linguistics and philosophy who turns out to be as well read in US foreign policy as they come.

It is beyond doubt that foreign policies of nations is based on self-interest, and not on moral, ethical or fairness grounds. And history has also taught us that power corrupts, and more power corrupts more. The combination of power and self-interest is a lethal one, and the unambiguously stated US ambition to achieve permanent global dominance should come as no surprise, therefore. If Chomsky was trying to reverse this fundamental human behavior, it would be worthy of criticism. However, I feel that Chomsky makes some passionate arguments in this book to make US weild their power more responsibly when it comes to foreign policy.

Would be a top resource, when USA is no more sole superpower

The American super power status may be unthreatened in the near future, but the decline in its global favor has begun and is inevitable. There are lots of skeletons in the US closet and Chomsky gives us a peep into it. This book touches upon several aspects of US policy (abroad and at home) that explain the weakening position of the US as a world power.

A friend of mine once said that Chomsky does not have an agency. That may be the reason that he can reveal the truth openly and rant endlessly. However, having read Hegemony and now Failed States, Chomsky does have an agency. Although moral and ethical responsibilities take precedence for him over nationalism and hollow patriotism, I do believe that Chomsky is recommending a change in US foreign and domestic policy for the same long-term self-interest that its current policies endanger. His agency is American well-being within a world that is more stable and prosperous.