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Ajit Singh - Top-10 Picks for The Best Books of 2013:
Part II

AJIT SINGH

 

 

 

Continued from yesterday …



PART II

 

MANAGEMENT / ECONOMICS

Jean Derez & Amritya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions, Princeton, 2013

Pavan Verma said in Being Indian (Top-10, 2007), “Every statement that is true for India, its exact opposite is also true.”

Verma’s observatory was social, cultural and political, and the book was a light but entertaining read. While being of an entirely different academic league, the book by Jean Derez and Amritya Sen addresses the same underlying contradictions with an economic lens.

Verma’s work was mostly narrative. An Uncertain Glory is narrative, critical, and prescriptive.

The book has been reviewed by writers of such acclaim as Alex von Tunzelman (Indian Summer, Top-10, 2007), and Jyoti Thottam, former South Asia Bureau Chief for Time magazine. I can hardly do justice to the breadth and depth of the work. Having toyed with the idea of moving to India at least three times over the past ten years, my commentary is one from a limited, personal field-of-view.

Let me start with the end.

There are two possible interpretations of the prescriptive element of the book. First – a far-left-leaning approach with extensive spending on social welfare. The second interpretation is a call-for-action to rewrite public policy and investment in public awareness (not necessarily public welfare).

I personally lean towards the latter. Needless to say, public policy without monetary investment will not move the needle on its own. However, the rate-limiting factor is not availability of capital.

Instead, the rate-limiting factor is the corrupt system that allocates and deploys the capital. That’s where public awareness can make a difference.

It is the first interpretation that evoked criticism from the advocates of privatization. The most fierce of these rebuttals comes from Jagdish Bhagvati of Columbia University. However, as Tunzelmann puts it in his review in The Telegraph, “… if the Indian hard-Right means to rebut this book, it will need more than snarky retorts and hysteria. Drèze and Sen’s thesis is built on sober statistical analysis. Their writing is straightforward, brisk, witty in places, and shot through with real passion.”

This brings me back to my personal field-of-view. On the balance, I lean heavily towards market deregulation and liberalization, and am very upbeat on India. My disappointment stems mostly from the apathy and lack of engagement on part of the educated youth. According to a recent MOSPI statistic, with very few exceptions (such as public vigils that followed the gang rape of Nirbhaya last December), the turnout of the 20-something youth at rallies focused on broad-based issues such as corruption is at an abysmal five percent. Likewise, youth involvement in volunteer programs of social good is amongst the lowest anywhere in the world. Concern about safety is the most cited reason for lack of hands-on engagement.

What’s disconcerting, however, is that even in the social media channels, where the concern for safety is all but non-existent, the discourse is dominated by gossip, parties, cricket, Bollywood and upstart consumerism.

In a landmark study by Rachana Bhangaokar and Dulari Mehta, “Youth Civic Engagement in India: A Case in Point” published in Psychology and Developing Societies (2012 24: 35), the authors, after presenting a wide array of statistics, lament, “… it can thus be summarized from the review that groups of civically engaged youth in India are a minority and their numbers are rather limited.”

The eternal optimist in me is still bullish on India, and mostly a subscriber to Derez and Sen’s thesis.


HISTORY / POLITICS

S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamarlane, Princeton University Press, 2013

Growing up in India, I had very limited exposure to American and European history. By contrast, history of the Middle East was covered in ample detail in high school – mostly because of the nearly five hundred years of Middle Eastern influence on India. Outside of school, the first book of Middle-Eastern origin that I remember having read was Shahnama, or The Persian Book of Kings by Firdausi.

I read the mid-1800’s English translation done by James Atkinson during my second year in college (the inspiration was an Iranian classmate of mine in Banaras who had a replica of the 1601 edition in Farsi). Once in the US, I was re-united with this theme in 1986, when I shared an office at Columbia with a Turkish and a Greek graduate student. They introduced me to Peter Mansfield’s Ottoman Empire and Its Successor.

It wasn’t until after September 2001 that my friendship with a Jewish physician inspired a very serious interest in Middle Eastern history. Recommendations for What Went Wrong by Bernard Lewis, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths by Karen Armstrong, and When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World by Hugh Kennedy – all came from her son.

I picked up a copy of Lost Enlightenment just a few months ago while browsing at the Stanford bookstore. It was the preface that drew me in:

“This book was written not because I knew the answers to the questions it poses, or even because I had any particular knowledge of the many subjects and fields it touches upon, but because I wanted to read such a book. It is a book I would have preferred someone else to have written so I could enjoy reading it without the work of authorship. But no one else took the assignment.

“Central Asia as yet has no chronicler comparable to Joseph Needham, the great historian from Clare College, Cambridge, whose magisterial, twenty-seven-volume Science and Civilization in China has no equal for any other people or world region. And so I backed into the task, in the hope that my work might inspire some future Needham from the region or from among scholars abroad.”

During a period of nearly five centuries from early the 800’s to late 1200’s, Central Asia was at the center stage of the world’s advancement in urban planning, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, music, and of course trade and economic development. I learned this in high school, and again when I read Bernard Lewis nearly ten years ago. Starr adds two new dimensions to the story.

One, he chronicles the lives of the people whose achievements led this period of enlightenment.

Second, he explores the many competing theories about the cause of the eventual demise of this era, drawing upon evidence from contemporary accounts and triangulating between writers from different regions within Central Asia.

While I use Middle-East and Central Asia interchangeably in this note, I do so because of the cultural influence of one over the other, the origins of the personalities covered in the book, as well as the fact that most of the original sources that Starr draws upon were written in Arabic.

A great companion to this book is From the Ruins of the Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia, by Pankaj Mishra, also published in 2013.


Charles Krauthammer, Things that Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics, Crown Forum, 2013

I am very ambivalent on whether I should like Charles Krauthammer.

When I moved to the US in 1985, Reagan was “in power,” and Krauthammer began writing a syndicated column for the Washington Post. Not having even a cursory understanding of the U.S. Politics then, I enjoyed reading his commentaries.

In late 1989, I was staying in Berlin with two journalists, when his essay The Unipolar Moment, encapsulating his view of the US as the sole superpower got published. This was shortly after the Berlin Wall came down. You can find a copy at: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20044692?uid=3739560&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103184078697

For ten years, I was hooked to his essays. Then, he started his tenure as a political analyst and commentator for Fox News. I had an ideological problem in following his work.

I re-engaged, when in a 2003 column, Krauthammer coined the term Bush Derangement Syndrome to describe "…the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush." (As an aside, Krauthammer was a board certified psychiatrist before he jumped into journalism full time).

Krauthammer is decidedly one of the most powerful voices in American conservatism. Things that Matter brings the best of Krauthammer’s wit and opinion in a single volume, and covers issues as wide ranging as US foreign policy, feminism, evolution, death penalty, and bio-ethics, to name a few.

His far-right-leaning views notwithstanding, he speaks his mind freely, and his line-of-sight is frequently at odds with conventional wisdom. Almost as frequently, it is the latter that yields.

All said, the book is worth reading, cover to cover.

For a quick introduction to his style and patterns of thinking, there are two videos that I find interesting. The titles are self-explanatory.

a)   http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/22/krauthammer-i-dont-believe-in-god-but-i-
fear-him-greatly-video/

b)   http://video.foxnews.com/v/2842776815001/charles-krauthammer-on-the-
collapse-of-obamacare/


SCIENCE

Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, Basic, 2013.

This is by no means a new topic. Much has been written on the subject by authors of very diverse trainings and backgrounds. There were three reasons for me to pick this book.

First, I don’t believe I have reviewed any work of Australian origin; Suddendorf was born and brought up in Germany, but he teaches at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Second, this is the most “integrated” view I have come across – bringing together findings from studies in development psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.

Finally, the table of contents is very inviting:

i    The Last Humans
ii    Remaining Relatives
iii   Minds Comparing Minds
iv   Talking Apes
v    Time Travelers
vi   Mind Readers
vii  Smarter Apes
viii  A New Heritage
ix   Right and Wrong
x   Mind the Gap
xi  The Real Middle Earth
xii  Quo Vadis?

He takes an inductive approach. He first studies those traits that are merely amplified (actually, significantly amplified) in humans compared to other animals. He then highlights two traits where the human mind is very distinct – the ability to imagine scenarios, and the drive to connect with other minds.

If you are unsure, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLBfJYnXFU4. This TEDx talk is likely to draw you in. If you end up reading the book, there are two very interesting supplementary reads that you should also consider: Henry Gee’s The Accidental Species, and Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them.

Continued tomorrow …

 

December 30, 2013

Conversation about this article

1: Amarjit Singh Chandan (London, United Kingdom), December 30, 2013, 10:36 AM.

Sardar Ajit Singh ne saal 2013 vich Punjabi di koi chungee kitab nahi(n) parrhi?

2: G Singh (Sutton Coldfield, United Kingdom), December 30, 2013, 6:02 PM.

How ironic, Amarjit ji, to find you on here this evening when I had just googled you an hour ago (I have previously been aware of you, of course). I was chatting with Dr Gurnam Singh about the link between the Punjabi revolutionaries of the 70s with those of the 80s and I remembered Baba Bujha Singh, so I started to read about him (I have a prominent ex-naxalite in the family) and the link ended up with you! And here you are! Koi changi Punjabi di kitab koi ajkal nikali vi ya ja nahi(n)?

3: Dr Birinder Singh Ahluwalia (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), January 05, 2014, 7:26 PM.

I will only comment upon Charles Krauthammer being dubbed as one of the most powerful conservative voices. In many ways, in my viewpoint, he is currently a paid commentator and analyst who falls within the same category as the likes of Netanyahu, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the O'Reilly Factor ... (we have a few of the same ilk in Canada too) who have very little to contribute or make a constructive contribution to further humanity in a better way. Re: India and it's prospects for a bright future - I would like to wish all Indians a happy and prosperous (for ALL) New Year and good luck to sculpt their future in a better way. I know they can do it ...

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Part II"









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