Kyauktada Katha

George Orwell's book, "Burmese Days" is centred on a fictional town called Kyauktada 'in Upper Burma'. It is the story of an English timber merchant named John Flory set in the 1920s. Kyauktada is actually a district in Yangon so it seems Orwell drew his inspiration for this story from his stay at a small town called Katha ('story' in many Indian languages), on the banks of the Irrawaddy.

The book brings to life the life and times of the British colonial enterprise in the 1920s, seen through the eyes of a merchant named John Flory. He lives in a small, insular community of Britishers who are already nostalgic about the violence used to bring the natives to heel. In the words of the local administrator, "In my young days, when a butler was disrespectful, one sent him along to the jail with a chit saying 'Please give the bearer fifteen lashes'. Ah well, Eheu fugaces!"

Flory is a misfit at the  British-only club, an oddball in the sense that he is not as disdainful of the locals. An Indian doctor, Veeraswami  - 'very slimly' according to his compatriots - is a good friend with whom him enjoys long conversations. It is in these conversations that Orwell frames his views on  the Empire. Here the roles are reversed, it is Veeraswami is a a loyal subject of the empire, an admirer of all things British, while Flory is the skeptic who thinks he is living a lie -

"But my friend, what lie are you living?' 

"Why, of course, the lie that we're here to uplift or poor black brothers instead of to rob them.. Look at our schools - factories for cheap clerks. We've never taught a single useful manual trade to the Indians..."

This anti-Empire line of thought is expanded through the Veeraswami-Flory conversations:

"What was at the centre of his thoughts now, and what poisoned everything, was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived. For his brain to develop - you cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are absolutely committed to the wrong way of life - he has grasped the truth about the English and the Empire. The Empire is a despotism - benevolent no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object..."

"The real backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the army. Given the Army, the officials and business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets."

"With Indians there must be no loyalty, no real friendship. Affection, even love - yes, English men do often love Indians - native officers, forest rangers, hinters, clerks, servants. Sepoys will weep like children when their colonel retires. Even intimacy is allowable, at the right moments. but alliance, partisanship, never! Even to know the rights and wrongs of a 'native' quarrel is a loss of prestige."

No wonder Orwell was wary of a backlash if the book were to be published first in Britain. He wisely decided to publish this book in USA instead.

I loved the flowing prose in "Burmese Days", and the way he brings out his characters - especially the Burmese ones. One particularly obnoxious one is Ko Po Kyin, "the crocodile" and his wife, Ma Kin Kin...dressed in a guangbaung of pale pink silk, an ingyi of starched muslin and, and a paso of Mandalay silk. Another interesting character is is Ma Hla May, Flory's mistress who aspired to be a bo-kadaw - a white man's wife - but is discarded as soon as Elizabeth, a young lady turns up at Kyauktada. The crocodile uses her to undermine Flory and destroy his rival, Veeraswami. 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned', especially if she turn up at the most unexpected places screaming Pike-san pay-like! Pike-san pay-like ('Give me the money') !

This is only my second Orwell book after Animal Farm many years ago. It is William Dalrymple's podcast on that led me to Burmese Days, so if you don't have the time read books do listen to this particular series on the remarkable life and times of George Orwell.

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LINKS and FURTHER READING

* Orwell and Dalrymple on English Class (2022) - https://quillette.com/2022/05/02/orwell-dalrymple-on-english-class/

* Empire Podcast - Episode 302 - https://youtu.be/s_vrCr3XW8o?si=92s71EOZ5hjpqvh6

Davai, Pustai, Rabota, Skoreye!

 

If there is one word you would catch from the numerous clips from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, it is "Dawai!" Even though it sounds like Hindi for medicine, it simply means "Move!" in Russian. In the videos the soldiers and civilians are urging people to try and get away from the gruesome, drone-dominated warfare that had hits soldiers and civilians in both countries.

This word turned up time and again in a book I just finished reading - "A Woman in Berlin". Written by a then anonymous young lady in Germany, it records the last days of the Third Reich. A time when the tide of war had turned. Hitlers armies that had spread out all over Europe and North Africa have all stalled. In Eastern Europe, a full retreat is in progress with the Russians rolling back the invaders, taking back their lands from the ruins of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), across the vast steppes, all the way to the nerve centre of Germany's war effort - Berlin.

It was a difficult time for the civilians in the city - especially for its women. For years they have been hearing the exploits of their own soldiers returning from the conquered lands. Stories of cities and towns bombed into submission, of women raped and children orphaned. Rumours of concentrations camps into which millions of jews, gypsies and PoWs disappeared. Now, in Berlin, the shoe is on the other foot. Russians are all over the city, and they are settling scores.

This book gives us a glimpse of the horrors faced by women in war-zones. The author  - now we know her as Marta Hillers - who was an educated, well travelled young lady whose boyfriend was away on some battlefront. She had been staying alone in a bombed out neighbourhood, scouring around for food and water.

The constant forecasts of death by starvation, of complete physical annihilation by the enemy were so pervasive that we're stunned by every piece of bread, every indication that we will still be provided for. In that respect Goebbels did a great advance job for the conquerers: any crust of bread from their hands seems like a present to us.

Homo homini lupus (Man is a wolf to man)...It's true everywhere and always, these days even among blood relatives...Hunger brings the wolf out in us. 

It's a blessing to be able to pray easily and unabatedly; amid the oppression and torture, in all our despair and fear...

In a city teeming with Soviet soldiers, single woman are easy prey, and they often spell trouble for the neighbours as well.

The most bitter thing in the life of a single woman is that every time she enters some kind of family life, after a while she ends up causing trouble: she's one too many; someone doesn't like her because someone else does, and in the end they kick her out to preserve the precious peace.

Marta gets raped time and again until she figures that be best way to deal with the situation is to get 'protection' from senior officers. These connections not only help her fend off other soldiers but also improve her access to food, books, and work opportunities, first as a translator, and then at a laundry.

The high-level connections also give her the confidence (Nicht haben Angst - Not to be afraid)  to deal with petty thievery, and the mindspace to dwell on larger issues ;) 

It turns out that Russian men, too, are 'only men' - i.e. presumably they're as susceptible as other men to feminine wiles, so it's possible to keep them in check, to distract them, to shake them off...

Recovering a stolen radio by pretending to be well connected as a translator - "However it appears that most of life's mechanisms rely on little tricks like that - marriages, companies, nation-states, armies.

It is at the laundry that we hear the now familiar words - 

'Davai, pustai, rabota, skoreye!' = 'Move, get on with it, work, faster!'...On the way back I was swinging my bucket gaily, in the spirit of 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger'!.

 Over period 20 April and 22 June 1945, martial law comes into effect. Some semblance of order is restored bringing with it rations, water and electricity supply. 

The memoir ends rather abruptly. The book did not find any takers in Germany and was first published in USA in the mid 1950s. It is only in 2003 that a new generation emerged to look back at the war with a fresh perspective.

This makes you wonder about the condition of women and children in today's war-zones - Sudan, Gaza, Syria, Myanmar, DR Congo, Ukraine and Russia - and the decades it will take for the wounds to heal..

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Vatapi Ganapati

 

"Vatapi Ganapati" is a much loved composition in Carnatic Music, one of the two branches of classical music in India. Composed by the great poet-composer Mutthuswami Dixitar (1775-1885), it is a hymn praising a specific idol of Ganapati,  worshipped in a small shrine in Tiruchenkattankudi Utrapatishwaraswamy Temple, in Thiruvarur district in the Tamil Nadu state of India.

The name of this place may seem long and complicated to those who are unfamiliar with South Indian languages, but so is the distance covered by this Ganapati. Vatapi (present day Badami), is a place located about 1000 km away from this coastal town. According to the g-maps, it would take a brisk walker about 190 hours or a week to cover this distance. 

How did a temple idol get its name from a place so far away? 

Anirudh Kanisetti's answers this question (and many others) through his fascinating new book titled, "Lords of the Deccan". For the vast majority of us who had been brought up on passing references in our history books to this part of this country, Kanisetti's book is a revelation, an eye-opener to the array of kingdoms that had ruled this vast area in central India from 500 to 1200 CE. 

Is is the story of the powerful dynasties that ruled this part of the country before the Islamic invasions - the Chalukyas, Pallavas, Rashtrskutas, and the Cholas. It is also a rather sad commentary on the shortage of written records that tells us about the life and times of those who built some of the massive temples of South India. Among these is the Kailashnatha temple at Ellora that was 'built' top-down by cutting through solid rock on a cliffside, after carefully chipping away more than 200,000 tonnes of granite stone!

Coming back to the story of Vatapi Ganapathi, it turns out that this idol was actually war booty that was brought here more than 1300 years earlier by the Pallava kings of Kanchipuram.  Tiruchenkattankudi was the birthplace of Paranjothi, the commander-in-chief of the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I (reign: 630–668 CE). 

Contrary to the Hindutva tropes about Hindu temples getting destroyed by exclusively by Muslim invaders, it is interesting to know that ever since temple building became a popular symbol of power projection after 500 CE, it was fairly common for Hindu kings to loot and destroy the temples of their rivals. 

Some other nuggets are even more surprising, such as the extent to which foreigners, especially West Asians, were welcomed by the kingdoms of ancient India. Muslim Persians and Arabs, as well as Zoroashtrians, Jews and Christians of diverse ethnicities, had not only settled in large numbers in the port cities but also rose to high positions in the civil and military hierarchies:

One fascinating example is a Persian Muslim known to us a Madhumati, son of Sahiyarahara (a Sanskritised version of Muhammad, son of Shahryar). In the tenth century, Madhumati was appointed the Rashtrakuta governor of the entire region of Sanjan, including much of northern Konkan.

Long before "Globalisation" became a buzzword, the Rashtrakutas, Pallavas and Cholas were already convinced of the strategic, political and economic benefits of encouraging meritocracies that were multi-ethnic, multilingual and cosmopolitan!

Boy Soldier

 

We ran for hours, deeper into the forest. The path had ended, but we kept running until the sky swallowed the sun and gave birth to the moon...

This must be one of the most harrowing real-life stories I have read so far.

It is about a twelve-year-old boy who loves reggae music, dancing, and hanging out with his friends. All of a sudden his world is turned up side down by an armed gang that attacks his village. The villagers scatter and run for their lives, leaving the boy gets separated from his family. While trying to escape a civil war, he ends up getting forced into becoming a combatant himself - part of a gang of teenage boys wielding machetes and AK-47s, marauding villages, killing innocent people as a form of revenge, or simply for fun - the oppressed becoming oppressors themselves.

I stood holding my gun and felt special because I was part of something that took me seriously and  I was not running from anyone, anymore...We were simply told to follow the path until we received instructions on what to do next. We walked for long hours and stopped only to eat sardines and corned beef with fari, sniff cocaine, brown-brown, and take some white pills...

A few years later, while this war of attrition is still dragging on, a UNICEF vehicles roll into their camp. The younger boys are taken away to a rehab centre where most of the children are just not able to adjust to a life without drugs and guns. Most of them revert back to fighting, but one, somehow escapes because of one dedicated, thoughtful nurse. This is is the story of that one boy - Ishmael.

"None of these things are your fault", she would always say sternly at the end of every conversation. Even though I had heard that phrase from every staff member - and frankly I had always hated it - I began that day to believe it...

Ishmael Beah's memoir, "A Long Way Gone", is centred around Siera Leone of the 1990s. A country with a population of just over 8 million, and an area that covers double the size of Kerala. Here the mistrust between various tribes and political factions boils over into a full blown civil war. 

Mourning the dead wasn't part of the business of killing and trying to stay alive...Little did I know that surviving the war that I was in, or any other kind of war, was not a matter of feeling trained or brave...

This is the story of just one among the 300,000 children across 20 countries who end up as soldiers on the frontlines of war. According to the UN, up to 40 percent of these are girls. Come to think of it,  perhaps it is a miracle that even a few of them manage to get back their childhoods, and return some semblance of a normal life.

This book is a small but vital window opening into a world we do not know much about. A place where brutality is on a loop, and where peace is an aberration, an abnormal state of affairs. 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* UNICEF - Children recruited by armed forces or armed groups - https://www.unicef.org/protection/children-recruited-by-armed-forces

* Sierra Leone on the CIA World Factbook - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/static/b0a107fb587d45dbfc17e74a6dd39c4f/SL-summary.pdf

* HRW - Child Soldiers -  https://www.hrw.org/topic/childrens-rights/child-soldiers

* UN -  https://www.un.org/youthenvoy/2015/02/4-10-child-soldiers-girls/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone

Nutmeg & Mace

 

On the banks of Manimala river in Tiruvalla, Kerala, there is a place called Thottabhagom. Perhaps the area gets it name (~ 'garden areas') from its exceptionally fertile soil, enriched by the occasional flooding of the river. 

One of the common trees on these fertile river banks is the Jathi-ka Maram, better known as the Nutmeg tree (Myristica fragrans), the source of two important spices - Mace, and, of course, Nutmeg. During the summer months, hundreds of fruits can be found strewn under the tree, often hidden under tufts of grass and dried leaves. The ones that are found get carefully laid out on straw mats, its fleshy portions are cut away revealing a seed that looks like a piece of art, with its deep red pericarp delicately covering a large oval seed like a lace glove. 

As children we did not think much of this tree because there were others that offered instant gratification - mangos, guavas,  rose-apples, tamarind and mangosteens. It is only much later that we learnt just how much these spice seeds meant to people in far away places, of how thousands had been killed, and sold into slavery so that a few europeans could enjoy trade monopolies, and enrich their own cities.

The greed for nutmeg and mace brought the Dutch to the Banda Islands south the Malaccas in the 14th century. Here they first tried to get exclusive deals from the local traders, and when that failed, they decided to solve the problem with their won version of the "final solution" - by exterminating the entire population of these two islands. Then for about a century they ensured that all the nutmeg trees were uprooted and destroyed on the nearby islands. This ensured that they could enjoy profits of over 400 percent of the investments for each voyage.

This story, and its wider ecological and economic impact has been brought out in the latest book written by Amitav Ghosh - "The Nutmeg's Curse - Parables for a Planet in Crisis". As with Ghosh's earlier books this too weaves a narrative based on extensive research of the origins of global trade in these spices, the depredations of the colonial period, of how it shaped capitalism as we know it today which sees the earth as a resource to be exploited at will.

The fruit itself becomes a metaphor for the larger picture - 

...Taking the nutmeg out of its fruit is like unearthing a tiny planet...Like  a planet, the nutmeg is encased within a series of expanding spheres. There is, first of all, the fruit's matt-brown skin, a kind of exosphere. Then there is the pale, perfumed flesh, growing denser towards the core, like a planet's outer atmosphere. And when all the flesh is stripped away, you have in your hand a ball wrapped in what could be a stratosphere of fiery, crimson clouds..."

One question that this books leaves unanswered is on the Dutch monopoly. For a tree that grew widely in South India, with records in the Sanskrit texts going back at least to the 6th century, how could the Dutch establish a monopoly in the first place?  

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* https://penguin.co.in/book/the-nutmegs-curse/

* https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/food/the-wonders-of-nutmeg-fruit/article19369859.ece

* WebMD - https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-788/nutmeg-and-mace

The Sense of Smell

Remember this post about 'The Most Translated Books of the World'? 

Well, a few days ago, I decided to pick one of the few European books that I had not read in that collection - the most translated book from Germany -   Patrick Süskind's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer', which apparently has been translated into no less than 49 languages.

It seemed to deal with an interesting topic - the sense of smell - which is perhaps the most evocative of our sense perceptions, and one that often triggers a flood of memories. There is a certain agarbatti fragrance that instantly takes me back to my wonder years in Hyderabad, a childhood filled with sunny days squinting at floating kites, of playing and wandering about without a care in the world; The smell of musty books takes me to my grandfather's library in Kerala, of hours spent flipping through books I had been explicitly banned from reading (was that a trick to get me interested in books?). A couple of years ago when I landed up for my first UN assignment in Afghanistan, I kept wondering why buildings at Green Village reminded me so much of Tsukuba University in Japan, until it struck me that they were using a floor cleaner with the exact same fragrance! 

This book tells us the story of an orphan named Grenouille who was born in the 1700s and promptly discarded  in an offal heap at a slaughterhouse in Paris. The child grows up to discover that he has an unusual talent, an obsession for smells and odours as well as the ability to recreate them.  He first starts earning his keep as an apprentice at a tannery, then wheedles into a becoming an assistant to a leading perfumer in Paris, before becoming a serial killer who ultimately never gets punished for his crimes.

As expected, the narrative serves dollops of gyan on the art of making perfumes, but then goes overboard over their power to influence human behaviour: 

"Odours have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions or will. The persuasive power of an odour cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fill us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it... for people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving sounds. But they cannot escape scent. For scent is the brother of breath...

"There are scents that linger for decades. A cupboard rubbed with musk, a piece of leather drenched with cinnamon oil, a glob of ambergris, a cedar chest - they all possess virtual eternal olfactory life. While other things like lime oil, bergamot, jonquil and tuberose extracts, and many floral scents -- evaporate within a few hours if they are exposed to the air in a pure, unbound form."

The book itself is fast-paced and describes Paris and France in a way that is not very different from Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables". In this storyline you travel from Paris southwards to the barren hills of Plomb du Cantal,  Montpellier, Grenoble and then to Grasse, north of Cannes.  

Yet, unlike Hugo's classic it descends into incredulous levels, like a pet peeve that has run amok, taking the story to a point where you just wonder - Why would anybody want to translate this book into so many languages? Is this really the most translatable book that German language has to offer? 

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REFERENCES

* Book - Süskind, Patrick (1985): "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer "

* The Smell of Evolution (NatGeo)

Experts vs. Dart-Throwing Monkeys

 

Statistics was never one of my favourite subjects. When faced with grades at the wrong end of the bell-curve, I would console myself with a quote attributed to Mark Twain - "There is lies, damn lies, and statistics"!

However, over the years, I have warmed-up to the subject - thanks largely to the stunning visualisations of Hans Rosling, and books like Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow". This post is about the latter. 

The nudge for this came about ten days ago when a friend posted a book recommendation with a quote by Richard Feynman - "The first rule in science is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool". The book in question was - "The power and paradox of self-deception" by Shankar Vedantam.

The first question that came to my mind was - Is this any different from the ideas described so well in Kahneman's book?  I went back to the book and found that he discussed not only all sorts of cognitive biases but also ways in which the intuitions of subject experts can be built into robust decision-making models.

What I like about Kahneman is that he is a practitioner who moved to academia. Unlike most ivory tower theorists, he served in the fledgeling Israeli Army in the 1950s, setting SoPs (still in use) for officer selection before moving to a university in USA, and winning the first Nobel prize for psychology/economics in 2002. 

Two of my key takeaways from this book were on Subjective Confidence and Intuitions vs. Formulas. Here are two quotes from the book on the topics which are perhaps best described in the author's own words. 

First, Subjective Confidence.

Facts that challenge...basic assumptions - and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self esteem - are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide base rate information that people generally ignore when it clashes with their personal impressions

We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers

In other words, people who spend their time, and earn their living, studying a particular topic produce poorer predictions than dart-throwing monkeys who would have distributed their choices evenly over the options. Even in the region they knew best, experts were not significantly better than non-specialists...The reason is that a person who acquired more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident. 

...Using an analogy from Isaish Berlin's essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" -

Hedgehogs "know one big thing" and have a theory about the world; they account for particular events within a coherent framework, bristle with impatience towards those who do not see things their way, and are confident about their forecasts. They are also especially reluctant to admit error. For hedgehogs, a failed prediction is almost always "off only on timing", or "very nearly right". They are opinionated and clear, which is exactly what televisions producers like to see on their programs. Two hedgehogs on different sides of an issue, each attacking the idiotic ideas of the adversary, make a good show.

Foxes, on the other hand, are complex thinkers. They don't believe that one big thing drives the march of history. Instead the foxes recognise that reality emerges from the interactions of many different agents and forces, including blind luck, often producing large and unpredictable outcomes....Foxes are less likely to to be invited to participate in television debates.

On Intuitions vs. Formulas

Paul Meehl's book - "Clinical vs. Statistical prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of Evidence"...This 'disturbing little book' presented the results of 20 studies to examine whether Clinical Predictions based on the subjective impressions of trained professionals were more accurate than statistical predictions made by combining a few scores or ratings according to a rule... The formula was more accurate than 11 or 14 counsellors! It was proven again in other studies on violations of payroll, success in pilot training and criminal recidivism.

Princetown economist and wine lover Orley Ashenfelter shows us the compelling power of the power of simple statistics to outdo world renowned experts. Ashenfelter predicted the future value of Bordeaux wines based on info available the year they were made - he converted conventional knowledge into a statistical formula that predicts the price of wine based on three features of the weather - average temp over the summer growing months, the amount of rain at harvest, and the total rainfall during the previous winter.

A key conclusion... to maximise predictive accuracy, final decisions should be left to formulas, especially in low-validity environments

Does Vedanam's new book present any new ideas? I don't know yet. It does seem to me that path-breaking ideas presented in "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" may now be getting repackaged in newer books. Perhaps I am suffering from an anchoring bias, but I do believe Kahneman's book is something you need to have on your nearest bookshelf, as a constant reminder that there is more to this world than meets the eye, that intuitions can be trusted - but only to a certain extent. 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Cognitive Biases - https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-cognitive-bias-2794963

* Animated book summary - https://youtu.be/uqXVAo7dVRU

* The hedgehog and the fox - http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9981.pdf

* How Big Data can predict the wine of the century - https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2014/04/30/how-big-data-can-predict-the-wine-of-the-century/?sh=5f2c35c531a9

White House, Black President, Grey Matter

A big fat book by a lanky ex-President. I have been seeing it in our bookshops for a year now but being innately suspicious of politicians - especially slick ones - I had flipped through the tome, and put it back on the rack. It did not seem worthwhile to spend time reading about the intrigues of a distant country. 

This attitude changed a couple of weeks ago when I came across an audio version of the book narrated by the author himself. Instead of sitting down with a fat book, now I had the option of listening to it while getting other things done. Now, after seven+ hours of listening I must admit that I am not at all disappointed.

Like any other accomplished politician, Barack Obama too is a great communicator who has mastered the skill of walking a tightrope - at striking a balance between what needs to be revealed to maintain a certain image, and what to leave unsaid.

Rather than a dry, clinical account of his first term as the president of the United States, the book deftly switches back and forth between two lives - the personal and the professional. He starts with the people who inspired him - writers, philosophers, labor organisers, and of course, family members starting with the values he learnt from his mother - "...how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up".

Along the way you also learn about the peculiarities of the US electoral system - of caucuses, electoral colleges, the tussles between the GoP/Reps and the Dems; the "institutionalised procedural mischief—the Senate filibuster—which...would prove to be the most chronic political headache" of his presidency while lamenting the difficulties of getting bipartisan support in the face of "egregious pork-barreling, logrolling, and patronage-dispensing tactics Senate leaders had traditionally used to get big, controversial bills like the Civil Rights Act or Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act, or a package like the New Deal, passed".

Yet what caught my attention was the way in which Obama describes the compulsions of domestic politics spilling over to distant corners of the world with devastating effect. The pressures of not wanting to be perceived as a "weak" president, the consequences of displeasing certain interest groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful bipartisan lobbying organisation dedicated to ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel.

Also while lending context to the way in which top generals try to box in POTUS, Obama refers to the long history of West Point, and, in retrospect, the not-so-glorious line of military brass who led the country into a bigger mess - 

"It was impossible not to be humbled and moved by the tradition those men represented, the service and sacrifice that had helped forge a nation, defeat fascism, and halt the march of totalitarianism. Just as it was necessary to recall that Lee had led a Confederate Army intent on preserving slavery and Grant had overseen the slaughter of Indian tribes; that MacArthur had defied Truman’s orders in Korea to disastrous effect and Westmoreland had helped orchestrate an escalation in Vietnam that would scar a generation. Glory and tragedy, courage and stupidity—one set of truths didn’t negate the other. For war was contradiction, as was the history of America." 

In what way did MacArthur and Westmoreland escalate the crisis in Korea and Vietnam? I don't know yet. If the current situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is anything to go by, one can be sure that the art creating a global mess out of regional conflicts continues to be a US speciality.

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LINKS & REFERENCES

Obama, Barack (2019): A Promised Land - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55361205-a-promised-land

Life in the Altiplanos

 

This is a book unlike any I have read so far - simple, direct, brutal. 

It lends voice to many who were never heard before - the vanquished, the defeated, enslaved, and colonised; those who try to articulate themselves in the languages of their conquerors. The author won the Nobel Peace Prize of 1992, and being unlettered, dictated her life's story to Elizabeth Burgos who, in turn, edited and transcribed it as a first person account.

The book narrates a type of exploitation that has many facets, many layers. You can see within it glimpses of the caste system that was the hallmark of India's social structure for centuries,  the maoist movement which plagues parts of eastern-central India, all the way to the way we engage with our own domestic servants everyday.

Rigoberta Menchú is a Mayan from el Quiché province of Guatemala. When the Spanish conquered and colonised the Mayans a few centuries ago, hers is one of the numerous communities that were driven into the remote forests - the altiplanos. Descendants of the conquistadors now come in the form of white  or ladino landlords who try to push them off their land, further and further into the forests. 

Life is tough, food is scarce. So entire families end up as migrant labourers, working in the finca's along the coast, plucking coffee, harvesting sugarcane. Young girls are forced to work as servants in the cities, getting paid a pittance, being treated worse than dogs, and getting fired for refusing to 'initiate' their master's son's into sex... many end up as prostitutes. Those trying to seek justice are hounded, tortured and killed. Judges are bribed to ensure that protesters rot in jail. 

While reading Rigoberta's account you wonder how many millions more have suffered such horrors and privations. One of her brother's died of starvation, another was publicly tortured and burnt alive; her father was among the 38 who were burned to death during peasant uprising of 1980 and the consequent  burning of the Spanish embassy in Guatemala city. 

I saw in Rigoberta's stories the face of ShimaPolayan. A short, dark, muscular man who used to stay on my grandfather's land with his family, and labour in the paddy fields and estates. Perhaps his ancestors owned the area before it was forcibly taken over by newcomers who perhaps saw themselves as more civilised and entitled. Over the centuries, these people lost the confidence to fend for themselves and instead ended up at the bottom of the social pyramid, living in huts with their families and serving the 'upper castes' all their lives. 

ShimaPolayan lived in Southern Kerala and died maybe forty years ago, but during his lifetime he saw his children growing up in a more equitable world - going to school, learning the power of voting rights, and discovering that there was a better world beyond the endless toil in paddy fields.

Perhaps during his lifetime he realised that those whom he served were also slaves of a colonial power. That they may have spoken English with the correct accent, fought their master's bloody wars in lands far afield as Mesopotamia and the Flanders, and had conditioned themselves to believe that they were inferior to the white man.

The old pecking order of white-man, brown-man and black-man began crumbing after India became independent. Thanks to high literacy and democratic norms the ShimaPolayan's of the Kerala disappeared decades ago. 

On the opposite site of the world in South America the struggle still continues. How many more will it be before Rigoberta's people get back their land, and rebuild their communities?

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigoberta_Mench%C3%BA 

* I, Rigoberta Menchu - Nobel laureate, 1992 - https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1992/tum/facts/

Across the Waters

 The Suez was in the news last month. A single, massive ship passing through the canal got blown by the winds and ended up getting wedged across the canal, blocking traffic for a week. During this period it effectively blocked the passage of about 400 ships and prevented an estimated USD 9.6 billion worth of trade!

How did we end up getting so completely dependent on the Suez and Panama canals? What is it that drives us to make bigger and bigger ships that need wider, deeper shipping docks and canals that cut across continents? The simple and obvious answer is global trade, and the economy of scales that drive it. If simple answers do not satisfy you, the book you need to read is David Abulafia's "The Boundless Sea".

This book is a serious piece of work - over 800 pages of which nearly half is references and citations! And yet, it is eminently readable, especially in the e-book format where the act of picking up a book of this size does not remind you of visits to the gym :)

The book covers a wide canvas. Starting from the oldest records of those who ventured out to explore the seas and oceans, all the way to the obsessive search for trading opportunities and power-play between countries that marks our relations with the not-so-boundless seas today.

I particularly enjoyed reading the sections on Polynesian navigators and explorers, trade during the Harappan period; the spread of Buddhism by sea; the Cholas, and the spread of Omanis deep into southern coasts of Africa. Towards the end, details of the arrival of the Europeans on the scene, and their depredations in Africa, the Americas and Asia makes for depressing reading. 

At the end one has to admit that if it were not for the bloody competition between the European powers that completely transformed the world through slave-trading and migrations, the world would have been a completely different place. 

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* 2021 Suez Obstruction - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Suez_Canal_obstruction

* 

A Disjointed War

 

A few years ago, an old Afghan friend turned up and Delhi and we decided to meet at Lajpat Nagar. "This is AK", he said introducing a compatriot, "He is a Tajik but we are still good friends." 

I knew that my friend was a Pathan but the introduction left me baffled. There I was, a South Indian, born and brought up in the north, sitting in a bustling market built from scratch by punjabis displaced by the partition...but I just could not imagine introducing a friend from UP, Mizoram or Gujarat, or anywhere else in India, in this way.

It is only later, after serving two UN assignments in Afghanistan that I began to understand that the caveat 'still good friends' was actually an achievement in itself. In Kabul I had found a city that was struggling to recover from years of war and strife, a city divided along ethnic lines, where communities sought the safety of numbers.

Once while driving from Jemal Mena and Kabul University towards Sevom Aqrab, we got stuck in a traffic jam. A colleague pointed to the traffic junction and reminisced, "When I was in school this was a dangerous crossing...on this side were the Tajiks, on the other, the Uzbeks and across the road, the Hazaras...all suspicious of each other, trying to keep the Taliban out of their neighbourhoods...there were dead bodies all over the place...you could get killed simply for responding to a casual greeting with the wrong accent of Dari or Pashto.."

It is a difficult world to explain or understand. Steve Coll's latest book, "Directorate S", tries to give you a bird-eye (or blimp) view of the other side of the story. One that enfolds after 9/11 and the arrival of USA into this tinderbox, seeking Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden, and revenge for the attack on USA. 

An ultimatum was given to Mulla Omar and the Taliban leadership - surrender your guests OBL, and his AQ minions, or else. Bound a code of honour, and, perhaps, by naiveté, they refused and opted for the 'or else'. That autumn US-led coalition dropped about 12,000 bombs on Afghanistan...about 40% were "dumb", unguided resulting in thousands of civilian deaths. 

The Soviet invasion of 1989 had claimed an estimated one to two million lives, or up to 10% of the population. This US invasion also caused about 140,000 deaths directly by the end of NATOs formal combat role in 2014. While the US-led allies spent about $60 billion a year in men, materials and 'humanitarian aid' in Afghanistan, the Taliban found refuge in Pakistan and managed with an estimated budget o $100 million annually. from Arab donations, drug dealing, protection rackets, local taxation, extortion and kidnapping.

Now what about the title of the book, 'Directorate S'? Well the author does not have much to offer other than patchy details about ISI and its machinations. The focus of the book is on allied generals, ambassadors, assorted dictators, dubiously 'elected' leaders and diplomats. 

Steve Coll's latest book reads like a thriller but it leaves you disappointed because the book is essentially about short-sighted Americans, not the Afghans, ISI or a way out of this mess. It describes two decades of disjointed war which has turned out to be as effective as most of the allied bombs - dumb.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

Coll, Steve (2018): DIRECTORATE S - The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Kabul's All Seeing Blimps - https://www.wired.com/2011/01/all-seeing-blimp/

On Farmers

 

This book has been on my bucket list for a long time. In the midst of the ongoing farmer-agitation on the borders of Delhi, mainly by the farmers of Punjab and Haryana, a friend kept referring to this book, urging us to read it to understand better the dilemma being faced by the farmers.

The first thing that strikes you is that for a book written nearly 50 years ago, it continues to be quite relevant today. The poorest farmers in undeveloped countries continue to be exploited, countries continue to chase policies that prioritise cultivation and export of foods consumed by rich countries, leaving their own people to grow less for their own consumption, and a dependence on the  processed foods, which, in turn are produced by MNCs.

The question raised at the outset is this: 

"Why would the North concede anything when the Third World could make no credible threats and had little to do give in exchange except a clearer conscience?"

The book might be a bit dated but it presents a range of eye-opening examples - of how soyabeansOn came to dominate farms in Brazil; of how MNCs teamed up with Rockefeller and Ford Foundation to promote Green Revolution and build a market for their own fertiliser-pesticide-seed companies; of the opaque ways of Cargill, a family-held company that dominated the food value-chains;  of companies like Massey-Ferguson funded research studies on farm mechanisation while promoting their own tractors, and the ways in which USAs Food for Peace Law (PL 480) vastly increased US commercial markets for food abroad.

Susan George is quite scathing on the Green Revolution:

What is GR doing to research? Since most agronomic research takes place in the developed countries...an inordinate amount of research is devoted (a) to high carbohydrate HYVs, (b) to the climatic zones where they can be grown, and (c) to fertiliser-sensitise plants that can be protected from disease only by chemicals.

I was also struck by the description of some individuals - especially Frantz Fanon, the black psychiatrist and Matinique who put himself to the service of the Algerian freedom struggle.  Then there are stark facts - there are 80,000 known edible plant species - but a mere 50 of them provide 90 percent of our food. 

In the context of the ongoing farm protests in India, its interesting to know that George had warned - back in the 1970s! - about the implications of Punjabi farmers (among the 'small privileged stratum of larger landowners') shifting away from a wide range of crops to focus on wheat and rice. 

Now the Punjabi chickens have come home to roost. Grandchildren of the farmers who wholeheartedly accepted the changes brought in by the Green Revolution are now blocking the streets, demanding not only a continuation of government support and subsidies, but also a buyback at 'minimum support prices' that are way above the the global prices of foodgrains! 

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REFERENCES & LINKS:

* George, Susan (1976): HOW THE OTHER HALF DIES - The Real Reasons for World Hunger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Other_Half_Dies

A Birdsong for Tunnel-rats

"Letting a canary go free in a tunnel is an automatic court-martial"

This is perhaps the only reference to a bird in the much acclaimed book, Birdsong by Sabastien Faulks.

The book is a love story woven into the horrors of tunnel and trench warfare in central France during World War-I. It takes you to places that sound distant and vaguely familiar - Amiens, Vimy, Messines and Ypres. Distant frontlines in a distant war which claimed more than 62,000 Indian lives. There is, of course, no reference to Indian fighting units in this book, or of Expeditionary Force A on the Ypres salient. It is mostly about British miners who had been brought in to support the infantry units by building trenches and tunnels, and to set off explosions which aimed to push back the Germans.

Along the way you learn about the Camouflet - "an artificial tavern created underground by an explosion...it was originally used by a fort's defenders to prevent undermining of a fortress wall during a siege". In a cat-and-mouse game taking place some thirty feet underground, defenders would dig a tunnel under the attackers' tunnel. An explosive charge would be detonated to create a camouflet that would collapse the attackers' tunnel. The fate of those unlucky enough to survive such explosions in narrow tunnels, can only be imagined.

With so many human lives at stake you are left wondering why on earth were soldiers getting court-martialled for losing canaries in such tunnels?

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References & Links
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdsong_(novel)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_La_Bass%C3%A9e

Black Sheep and Deccan History

I love the way history is being re-examined and re-written by a new band of writers. Until a few years ago I only knew of William Darlymple as a somebody who could tranform meticulous research into narratives that appealed to a wider audience. I often wished we had Indians writers who could go beyond the colonial period and breathe some life into it.

In this context I was glad to see Sanjeev Sanyal's "Land of Seven Rivers", and Manu Pillai's "Ivory Throne".

My first book this year was the much acclaimed second book by Manu Pillai -  "Rebel Sultans". This one chronicles the deep linkages South India once had with what is now called the Middle East - especially Iran, Iraq and Arabia.

Despite the fact that I grew up in Hyderabad, I knew practically nothing about Deccan history. I was aware of a few names and places,  of the fabulous collections at the Salar Jung Museum, vaguely remembered visiting the Golkonda Fort a couple of times, and often noticed the Falaknuma Palace from the school playgrounds.  But until I read this book I never knew that Nizams who built all this -  the Quli dynasty -  traced its origins to a family that once ruled the Levant - the House of Black Sheep, also known as the Black Sheep Turkmans.

Who were the Black Sheep Turkmans?  It was aparently a title - "Kara Koyunlu" - of a monarchy that ruled over vast areas of present-day Iran, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan from 1394 to 1498. After more than a century of rule this ruling family was ousted by a rival clan known as the House of the White Sheep. Ousting a royal family in the Middle Ages usually meant only two things - death or blinding of all the male heirs. A young boy from the House of Black Sheep ran away to India to escape this fate. He first enlisted as a mercenary in the Deccan Bahmani Sultanate, and then went on to set up his own feifdom at Golkonda in present-day Hyderabad.

The "Rebel Sultans" is also a window into the colorful history of the rest of the Deccan. It tells you how Aurangabad was originally the city of Khirki by an Ethiopian-born military leader named Malik Ambar. It tells you that contrary to popular narratives, the Battle of Talikota was not a war between a Hindu kingdom and a coalition of perfidious Muslim warlords. The kingdom of Vijayanagara which was utterly destroyed after this war had its own share of double-dealings, political miscalculations and hubris.

The book also has many tantalising threads that need to be knitted together. It leaves me with a wish to know more about Timur the Lame, the Turkman raider who later inspired his clansman Babur, to raid India for its riches after having been beaten out of Samarkand. I want to know more about the Kakathiyas who were perhaps the most egalitarian rulers in medieval India, and I need to  have a better understanding of philosophy and preachings of Eknath, who, like Kabir, bridged differences across castes and religions.

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LINKS

- Amazon - "Rebel Sultans"

Young India - Unsatisfied, Unscrupulous, Unstoppable

"Where you stand depends on where you sit" - Mile's Law

Over the past two weeks I have come across two views on where India is headed, both seem to contradict each other but at the same time, pointing to a common direction while reiterating Mile's Law.

The first was an Explained session organised by the Indian Express at New Delhi where Manish Sabharwal, the chairman of TeamLease spoke of great business opportunities in the India, while the second one was book by Snigdha Poonam titled, "Dreamers".

Sabharwal was amazingly optimistic and eloquent on the direction in which India was headed. Where most liberals saw clouds of doom and gloom, he saw opportunties etched in the sliver linings. Sample these facts and figures -

- Good Times Ahead: 50% of India's labor force is engaged in agriculture which contributes just 13% of GDP, while 0.7% of the workforce is into ITES which contributes 9% of GDP! With more than 600 international companies setting up captive IT centres in India, the workforce of 3.5 million in ITES is set to double over the next 10 years.
- "Cascading Regime Change": We are already seeing the synergystic impact of recent reforms (GST + RERA + DeMo). Before GST there were only 7 million enterprises registered for indirect tax. Now there are 10.5 million -- a 50% increase in just eight months!

Sabharwal's optimism as the leader of one of the largest employers in India contrasted with that of the journalist Snigdha Poonam who saw the great mismatch between aspirations of millions of young Indians, and harsh ground realities.

If you saw a pop-up on your screen warning you of an IRS investigation in USA or a virus in your laptop/PC/mobile, chances are that you are about to be scammed by an Indian. It seems there are hundreds of call centers in the obscure byelanes of urban India, using desperate job-seekers to con the most vulnerable people across the world --  elderly pensioners, single mothers struggling to make ends meet and all those who are already intimidated by technology.

According to Poonam: "Like it or not, young India is what it is - unsatisfied, unscrupulous, unstoppable. Few young Indians had a clear sense of right and wrong: fewer gave a damn about it. 

The idea of personal benefit over public good isn't owned by them, however. It is at the core of India's value system. Sure, some young Indians will cheat their way to their dreams, but they don't see how they are different from anyone in the news - politicians, businessmen, celebreties..."

Sabharwal's TeamLease claims to have hired someone for every 5 minutes in the last few years and provided employment to more than 1.2 million since 2002. And yet, he also admits that his hiring funnel is very narrow - out of every hundred applicants, less than 5 are hired, trained and placed in various companies.

So there you are - the desperation and angst Poonam sees in the 95 who got rejected is quite different from the optimism of those who did. The way you look at the future depends completely on where you stand.

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LINKS & REFERENCES:

* Explained by Indian Express - http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/manish-sabharwal-problem-is-wages-not-jobs-minimum-salary-unemployment-indian-gdp-5106348/

* Reviews: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/books/hope-against-hope

https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai-news/thane-call-centre-scam-mastermind-who-gifted-girlfriend-rs-2-5-cr-audi-arrested-in-mumbai/story-kiKLnuAVy6gNVlkPhHYEAM.html

An Era of Darkness

A book launch was held yesterday at the former residence of the Commander-in-Chief of British India, now called Teen Murti Bhavan. At an estate that placed symbolically behind the imposing Viceregal Lodge, two Indians sat on the stage to launch a book, and to demolish the notion that 200 years British rule was "good" for India.

The venue at Teen Murti Bhavan - NMML auditorium - was packed. Folks who lingered outside to tuck in a few more chai-pakora's had to stand by the doorway as the author, Shashi Tharoor and historian R. Mukherjee too the stage to discuss the book, "An Era of Darkness - The British Empire in India".

The discussion took on a predictable course with Tharoor outlining the reasons why he thought a such book was necessary; the realization that most of his countrymen were blissfully unaware of the methods used by the British to systematically reduce the country from an global economic heavyweight to a basket-case, and of contemporary notions of nationalism.

One point that stuck in my mind came up in the Q&A session. An elderly person sitting on the front row asked, "Throughout history, why is it that we were betrayed by our own people?"

Tharoor skirted this question, and restricted his answer to the usual suspects - the Mir Kasim's and Mir Jaffer's - of the British Era. In introduction to his book he tosses the ball back to the other court by saying, "...when a marauder destroys your home and takes away your cash and jewelry, his responsibility for his actions far exceeds that of the servant who opened the door for him, whether hout of fear, cupidity or because he simply didn't know any better".

It is difficult to imagine that the grand quislings in our history were acting out of fear, cupidity or ignorance. The Mir's of Bengal seemed to be driven primarily by ambition, greed and self-interest. Ditto for Jaichand, the king of Kannauj, who allied with Mohammad of Ghor, to settle a personal insult, or political score with the Chauhan ruler of Delhi.

Clearly, there is something more basic at work in our minds. In a country that has always been a slow-cooking melting pot of different races, languages and habits, almost every ruler would have sought out existing fissures, divisions and rivalries to consolidate their own power-base. It is a trend that continues to this day.

Greed and self-interest was also apparent in the manner in which the audience jostled around Tharoor, doggedly ignoring all pleas to come in an orderly line. A singular lack of concern for others that was also being played out at the traffic roundabout outside where vehicles refused to give way, and slowing themselves in the process; along the footpaths where bikes and scooters rushed into a space that belonged to pedestrians, and, finally in the metro trains where perfectly healthy men squatted on the train floor, while others struggled to find space to stand upright.

Clearly, the era of darkness is yet to disappear into our history books.

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LINKS

* BL review - http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/books/uday-balakrishnan-reviews-an-era-of-darkness-by-shashi-tharoor/article9391768.ece

* IE review - http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/shashi-tharoor-book-an-era-of-darkness-british-colonialism-in-india-3741446/

Our Genes

In the Mahabharata epic, there is a poignant exchange that takes place after the Great War, between the eldest of the Pandava princes, Yudhistira, and a forest spirit. A quiz in metaphysics is the price demanded by the Spirit for reviving Yudhistira's siblings who have died of thirst and poisoning.

One of the questions is: 'What is the greatest wonder in the world?'
And Yudhistira's reply is : "People die everyday and those who are alive go on as though they will live for ever!"

Siddhartha Mukherjee's books seems to capture this profound irony in his first book, "Emperor of All Maladies" and then again, in his latest book, "The Gene". A 'normal' healthy body and mind is something most of us take for granted - even as an entitlement - until something happens to us, or to our own close friends or relatives that brings us face to face with the fragility of life itself.

The great advances in science & technology lull us into a false sense of security - until raconteurs like Mukherjee tell us about the heroic efforts, pain and serendipity that underpin each and every invention that mark our progress, as well as the huge lacunae in our own understanding of the world around us, and within us.

Here are a couple of shockers that hit me while reading "The Gene"

There are more than 2500 different genetic defects that have been recorded to date. Most of them are like simple spelling mistakes that end up destroying lives, across generations.

Take the case of Sickle Cell Anemia. It is the result of a single change in one triplet in our DNA. The sequence GAG gets changed to GTG. This results in the substitution of one amino acid for another: glutamate gets switched to valine, thus altering the folding of the hemoglobin protein chain. As a result protein debris gets accumulated in string like clumps in our red cells; they are unable to glide smoothly through our blood capillaries, and get jammed into microscopic clots throughout the body, interrupting the flow of blood, and resulting in excruciating pain, like corkscrews being drilled into our bones.

Then there is Huntington's Chorea. It is the "opposite of a dance, a joyless pathological caricature, the ominous manifestation of dysregulated brain function".

In 1992 researchers tracked the disease down to one gene called “interesting transcript 15” (IT15). This gene was found to encode an enormous protein - a biochemical behemoth containing 3,144 amino acids, larger than any protein in the human body (insulin has a mere 51 amino acids). And yet, beyond the fact that this protein is found is our neurons and testicular tissue, we know nothing about its actual role in our bodies, let alone why it causes a debilitating disease...

The Gene puts the Spirit's question and Yudhistira's answer into completely new perspectives.

India-Japan: Poised for Partnership and Waiting...

If there is a code that needs to be cracked, it is the enigma of India-Japan relations.

In a recent discussion with a retired Indian diplomat, one angle of this enigma was articulated - "For more than three decades now, there has been no doubt in the Japanese government about where they want the India-Japan relations to go, and they have almost always stood by us: Construction of Bombay High, 1991 Forex Rescue, Maruti-Suzuki, and Delhi Metro...Somehow, we Indians seem to have always fallen short of our own expectations."

So, as with a cart which has one one wheel moving faster than the other, we seem to be going round and round, in slow, large circles.

Over the years, there has been no dearth of grand promises -- A network of 12 Japan Industrial Townships across India; A Dedicated Freight Corridor flanked on either side by smart new industrial cities stretching all the way from New Delhi to Mumbai; There has been talk of greater defence cooperation, including the supply of Japanese amphibious aircraft (US2), to the Indian Navy; A deal paving the way to "clean" N-power; ...and yet, for all those bilateral declarations, and lofty commitments, there is precious little to show on the ground.

What explains this yawning gap between intent and action?

A recent book by Rohan Mukherjee and Anthony Yazaki (Oxford, 2016), titled "Poised for Partnership", seems to be analysing some of these issues.with the seriousness it deserves.

Mukherjee and Yazaki see a recurrent pattern where "lofty commitments of increased cooperation were often not matched by sufficient attention to the minutiae of how such promises would be turned into reality."

The reviews look good but the pricetag seems rather forbidding. I wonder in which library I could get my hands on a copy of this book.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Book Review - Business Standard India - http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/india-japan-poised-for-a-great-leap-forward-116041301148_1.html
* Anthony Yazaki -  http://cpr.unu.edu/author/yazaki
* Rohan Mukherjee - http://scholar.princeton.edu/rmukherj/home
* Chapter-I - https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/rmukherj/files/mukherjee_and_yazaki_-_poised_for_partnership_-_chapter_1_introduction_0.pdf 

* http://www.vccircle.com/news/finance/2016/04/08/india-looks-japan-achieve-its-disinvestment-targets
* Fitzpatrick, Michael (2015):  Why is hi-tech Japan using cassette tapes and faxes? BBC Business, URL - http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34667380
* http://dinakarr.blogspot.in/2014/01/india-japan-looking-into-hazy-skies.html
* http://dinakarr.blogspot.in/2010/09/rare-earths-vs-common-sense.html grin emoticon