Sunday Posts

I read Erez Manela's The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the Intellectual Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism over the weekend.  As far as Intellectual Histories go, this is quite a gripping read. Focused on a short span of time, primarily between January 1918 when Wilson laid out his fourteen points and June 1919 when the treaty of Versailles was signed, the narrative brings together an extraordinary cast of characters, pettiness and foresight, idealism and intrigue, optimism and disappointment in good measure. Interspersing the biographical narratives of many leading figures of anticolonial nationalism, Saad Zaghloul, Syngman Rhee, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Wellington Koo among them, this is an attempt to present the radicalisation of anticolonial nationalism in four nations - Egypt, India, China and Korea - around the 'Wilsonian Moment', the hopes generated by Wilson's proclamation of Fourteen points and particularly the promise of 's...

I have been reading Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind (New York Review of Books, 2016), which is an insightful portrait of six intellectuals in Politics. Lilla's broad point is that seeking the purity of ideas in the messy practicum of the political world is a hazardous enterprise. This has led - whether inspired by enlightenment reason or by religious passions for a new beginning - to tyranny, or philosophies in the service of tyranny, which Lilla calls 'philotyranny'. In Lilla's vision, the love of ideas, the pure passion, more often than not, turn to ideologies, sacrificing freedom in the quest of a perfection that is both unknowable and unattainable. In this, his ideas are not too far from those of the American pragmatists, John Dewey in particular, for whom ideas turning into ideologies was the cardinal sin of our time. I came away, however, with another thought: That tyranny is somewhat our original condition, basis of our moral thought. Whether we think in...

Or, I could have said - why I can't read business books. At least, not anymore. This may seem inconsequential, but it is not for me. In fact, it is an existential problem that I face now: I can't read business books! It is very necessary for my career - being well-read is one of the advantages I brought to table as a professional - and indeed, crucial to maintain my professional credential as a Chartered Marketer, which I attained with great effort, once upon a time. And, yet, I can't bring myself to read Business Books. This isn't always there. I did read Business Books, quite extensively, until about three years ago. I did maintain a subscription of HBR, bought Strategy & Business and Sloan Management Review regularly at WH Smith, maintained a small collection of business books all the time with books on marketing and innovation prominently featuring on my shopping list. I even had my favourites: I read all of Clayton Christensen, Henry Chesbrough, Micha...

I started 2016 with a surprise discovery: That Bill Gates reads a book a week! I love reading books, yes, the old fashioned paper books, and spend most of my time and money on books. And, yet, I struggle to read as much as I would like to, as life intervenes. The work, the chores, the celebrations and the worries, moments social and the solitary, all present their different challenges inbetween me and an undivided and unwavering commitment to my books. And, yet, here is the man, who earns about $150 every second - if that's one benchmark how valuable his time must be - and who, as Michael Sandel explained, may find stopping and picking up a $50 bill if he spots one lying on the pavement a waste of his time, claiming that he accords highest priority to reading, and even sets aside time when life gets too busy! I know the usual explanation: We are not Bill Gates. Yes, when you earn $150 a second, you do not drive your own car. You can choose who you socialise with. And, indeed,...

I am keeping my reading pledge of completing a book a week. This week, I completed Benn Steils The Battle of Bretton Woods , a fascinating saga of the emergence of the Bretton Woods system, with all the key actors, politics, achievements and disappointments. Not an easy read, it was monetary economics side by side with personal drama and high politics of International relations, it was nevertheless worthwhile the effort.  Aptly titled, the Battle captures the competition between Britain, embroiled in war, and the United States, for global dominance in the post-war world. The story, at the same time, is also of the competition between the old and the new world, that of waspish brilliance of Lord Keynes pitted against the bureaucratic single-mindedness of Harry Dexter White, the clash between imperial hangovers and commercial brutality. Lurking behind the scenes, adequately represented in the story, is the Soviet mechanisation, manipulating the world affairs through plain brib...

I stopped reading The Economist, and that makes my weekends somewhat free. For fifteen years, since the time I first left India and went on to live in Dhaka, fetching it from the shop and reading it from cover to cover was part of my Friday routine. There were early disappointments - such as its blood-curdling advocacy of the Iraq War, which clearly exposed its Western bias - but it was one essential viewpoint that I needed to understand the world.  However, I increasingly found it disagreeable for its fundamentalist approach towards Free Markets. This is not a political left / right thing. Though I am openly delighted by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour leader, who I consider to be a vast improvement over the careerist politicians we see all around (alas, one of my favourite writers, Tristram Hunt, turned out to be one of them), I would like to think that I support free markets if they are really free. These are indeed my points of agreement with The Economist - w...

Geoff Colvin's Humans Are Underrated is set to come out in the UK in September and I would look forward to read the book. From the snippet published in Fortune magazine ( Read here ), Colvin seems to make an interesting argument. That it is time to rethink what it means to be human. In the race against the machine, it is futile to try to figure out what the machines can not do. Very smart people have tried and failed before, as the logic of Moores Law caught up with their prediction. With the Arrive-By date of Singularity set in 2029 ( by Ray Kurzweil ), even the tasks we think are beyond technologies, will soon not be. So, the point is not to try to outsmart technologies, but to figure out what really matters. The answers he provides are not dissimilar to the ones we already have had. His list of five big 21st century skills include empathising, collaborating, creating, leading and building relationships. These are similar to what we hear from other people trying to think ab...

Nicholas Carr is counter-intuitive, and therefore, must-read for anyone interested in talking technology. I followed his big ideas since his path-breaking 'Does IT Matter?' which was about Information Technology stop being a strategic tool and more like an utility, like Electricity. One could argue that this prediction did not materialise, as we put our hopes on Big Data etc to change the way business is done. However, the follow-up on this thesis, that IT would be available through a pipe rather than the strong-room like infrastructures in the past, certainly did, and today one could look at the Cloud Computing infrastructure as an utility, rather than a strategic asset. His later work, 'Is Google Making Us Stupid' (and the book that followed, The Shallows), created a whole genre of work exploring the effects of technology on our brain and our capacity to think, which bore out some of his early warnings about changing behaviour. In summary, he excels in making the Te...

I finished reading Kevin Ashton's super-smart How To Fly A Horse , a very readable book on creativity. This is the kind of book I love reading, about new ideas, and what makes people come up with them. While I would not put this one at the top of my favourites list on the category, that will be Steven Johnson's  Where Good Ideas Come From , this is still very good. At this very point of my life, when I am searching for a potential topic that I could do further studies on, this is a feast, a birds-eye view of one of the things I keep reading about - about creation and creators. However, more than just being a good start for me on my project to make my reading more thematic, the book is full of great insights and ideas that will hopefully help me in my work. One of these ideas comes from an inspired passage in the book, which distinguishes Confidence and Certainty. In Mr Ashton's view, Confidence is the belief in yourself whereas Certainty is the belief in your belief. ...

Lani Guinier has written an important book, which is also a pleasure to read, and this is about the concept of Democratic Merit. Part polemic, against the mindless system of SAT-driven education system in the United States, part Education Treatise and partly high minded discourse on how democratic mindsets work, it should be read not just in the US but in other countries and contexts, because education is all too often seen as a technical thing focused on preparing Doctors and Engineers, and divorced from its social role altogether. The argument in Professor Guinier's book hinges upon a definition of merit given by the Nobel-Laureate Economist, Professor Amartya Sen. In Professor Sen's view, merit is an incentive system for the actions the society values. The merit system as defined by SAT (and other tests), an individualistic, context-blind ability and intelligence, this book argues, is out of step with the requirement of a democratic society. Ms Guinier expands her ar...

The new phase in my life has well and truly began. Not that all the bits in the new life has fallen in place yet and some work from my past, mostly assessments related to the teaching works I have done earlier, is still pending, but the shift in my lifestyle is distinct. I am back in the UK for a few days, but in less than a week, I go to Madrid and then on a two week journey to India, Philippines, Singapore and Dubai.  Such opportunity to travel should be fun, but this being the second time in my life, there is less excitement. In fact, I am wiser, with a clear view of what this life entails clearly in my mind. Poverty Jet Set : A group of people given to chronic traveling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone-call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programs at parties. (Douglas Coupland: Generation X) For me, rather, this is an opportunity to ...

Earlier this year, I decided to postpone my ambitions to pursue Doctoral studies, primarily for financial reasons, and drew up instead a plan for self development which does not cost much. The plan included working diligently on this blog, with a certain number of posts every month and more meaningful ones, and reading a certain number of books every month: Six months on, I failed on both counts, though this made blog postings more frequent (but more diverse) and I am indeed reading more books cover to cover now than I did last year. This commitment, however, is the reason why I ended up making the endeavour of reading Ben Franklin's biography, 500 pages and all. I love biographies, but haven't read one from cover to cover in a while, primarily owing to their usual lengths compared to a 200 page book otherwise. Franklin's biography was sitting on my bookshelf and my To-Read list for a while, and I am glad I finally made the effort and finished it within a reasonable t...

I have now finished reading Pankaj Mishra's From The Ruins of the Empire, a fascinating tale of the idea of Asia in the time of European conquests. This is a colonial history in the reverse, a sensitive, balanced tale of interactions, tensions and ideas around the lives of men who made it. The story is structured around the lives of two central figures, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838 - 97) and Liang Qichao (1873 - 1929), and their many contemporaries who debated and developed the idea of the new Asia in the face of the advances and adventures of the newly industrialised Europe. Other prominent Asians, men like Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi, Rashid Rida, Sun Yet Sen, Lu Xun, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, leading men of Japan leading the Meiji restoration and imperial Japan, the young Ottomans and European Socialists all make an appearance, all in stark contrast with the old world colonialists such Lord Elgin, the Czar, David Lloyd George etc alongside a rhetoric-obsessed, duplicitous Woodr...

I have just finished reading Simon Winchester's magnificent The Man Who Loved China, a biography of Joseph Needham and the story of his magnum opus, The Science and Civilisation in China. I came across this book originally through the recommendation of Fareed Zakaria on his Fareed Zakaria GPS, several years ago, and it was only now I managed to read the book from cover to cover. This is a fascinating tale which presents three entwined narratives: One of a Cambridge Academic, who lived and died in Gonville and Caius College, surrounded by an environ befitting such a person; but parallel to this runs a very unorthodox narrative of a man, his love and his interests, of Dorothy his wife and of Lu his muse, and of Socialism, Internationalism and of innumerable friendships and collaborations that made this project possible; and finally, one of international politics, intrigue and power, of imperial trickery and pretension, of the horrors of the modern war and the glory of the anc...

This does not happen often, so this is special. I read a book from cover to cover in a flight. The flight was late, by an hour, as the SpiceJet workmen hovered around looking lost for a long time before my flight to Bangalore departed from Kolkata. But that's not the reason I could read: It was one of those books which I could have a conversation with, that kept me awake and busy, despite an early start in the morning. This is a book about coming back to India. Written by Shobha Narayan, whose writing I have not read before, but could easily connect with her crisp, well-honed, journalistic style. Indeed, I should have been disappointed: This was an impulse purchase for reading during the flight, but I expected a story of what happened when one returned to India. Instead, this is an immigrant's chronicle of deciding to move back, the doubts, the debates and the challenges. In a way, this was better, closer to my lived experience, and not just an empirical list of disappoint...

A little survey on my favourite research cohort - students - and everyone tells me that they don't read books anymore. I am not delusional - I already expected that - but I am still sad: It is as if no one cared about the death of my old friend. But there is more than that: I am also puzzled how to teach a Postgraduate qualification without books interfering. Some younger friends tell me that this is a Generation X problem though, something like dementia, people successfully complete research degrees without reading books, which may very well be true. However, this is a personal problem: I live surrounded by books, I spend most of my money on them and my greatest regret in life is about being separated from the collection I built up over the years but had to leave behind in India when I migrated. So, I talk in books - my teaching is often walking through the ideas etched on paper, and my efforts in the classroom are mostly focused on making students discover the joy of that secret...

I am already a fan of Open Utopia , an experiment in social reading. I met this with a pure deja vu feeling: First, an article by Jennifer Howard on the project, and then, coincidentally, an email from a Linkedin contact complaining about how rough Amazon and the various self-publishing organisations treat the authors, set me up for this. If I was feeling despondent about books and more so, about creativity, here is the answer. Indeed, I am talking about the idea rather than the specific project. Open Utopia is an experiment, carefully crafted, though I think Utopia is rather an unfortunate choice. This experiment could have been easily crafted on some other book, one, I may hope, that had a world-changing impact, and by implication, showed a deeper confidence in the way the future will indeed play out. Open Utopia, I would like to believe, is not an utopia, but more a precursor of an excitingly creative future. Printed books have to change. Those of us in love with paper, with...