governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
Book Review The Connections World: The future of Asian Capitalism Author: Simon Commander & Saul Estrin Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pages: 253 Price: £74.99 The “Asia” that this book addresses spreads northwards across the Pacific Ocean from Indonesia till the borders of China, North Korea and Japan and westwards to Pakistan on the Indian Ocean, […]
Read More Saving Asia from Stalling GrowthMcKinsey, the storied global management consulting firm, will be celebrating its centenary in 2026. Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, both journalists with the New York Times, use their considerable investigative skills, to craft an evidenced, albeit selectively curated, assault to expose the rot behind McKinsey’s public image. It makes for a riveting read but fails […]
Read More When McKinsey Comes To Town- Book ReviewLike him, deride him, the one thing you have to admit about Ben Mezrich is that he has a yen for timing. His book is staged in three Acts – convenient for a future film script- around the angst between Mark Zuckerberg, and Tyler and Charles Winklevoss, the latter being mirror twins, code named Winklevii. […]
Read More Book Review – Bitcoin BillionairesThis book will jolt you awake, quicken your heartbeat and embed niggling worms of anxiety in even the most sanguine of persons. The author is a gifted, American, climate journalist. He grabs your attention in the very first paragraph and keeps it for the next 231 pages of text followed by 66 pages of notes, […]
Read More Lest we err and waste our planetDeepak Gupta’s book is not a quickie, neither to read, nor would it appear, to write, from the diligent research that has gone into it. The best read book in this genre has been Phillip Mason’s The Men Who Ruled India (1954) — a racy account of the British administration in India, by one of […]
Read More Book Review : Keeping the barbarians at bay“The Great Smog of India”, Siddharth Singh’s book, is in the genre of everything-the-intelligent-person should know about air pollution in India. It’s attractively written with an easy, breezy style. It instantly sets the reader at ease that she is not about to be inundated with complicated scientific models and graphs about climate change. The author […]
Read More Book Review: North India’s smoggy futureIndia is a young nation. Three fourths of us probably have no recollection of the ravages of the Emergency period from January 1975 to March 1977. This book was first published in 1977, just after the national elections, called by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi – in a bout of self-delusion as a referendum on the […]
Read More Book Review: For Reasons of StateThe great Mughals (16th to 18th century) found it more difficult to manage their extended zenanas than to conquer fractious Hindustani kingdoms. The insidious politicking and power struggles of the women in purdah are well known. Less well appreciated are the strength, stability and support that the zenana afforded to the emperor, as a […]
Read More India’s elite bureaucrats – unshakably resilientThree themes undergird the author’s exhaustive narrative of the politics around foreign aid in India between 1950 and 1975, during the early years of the Cold War — the people who made key decisions; the domestic context and, finally, the geopolitical incentives that shaped donor responses. The deal makers Indian officials come across as being surprisingly […]
Read More Book Review: Paying the price for aidBimal Jalan exercises the writer’s privilege to box his reflections between three inflection points. The first is 1980, ostensibly because 1977-79 was the first time the Congress lost power at the Centre. The second is 2000, being the start of a new millennium. And 2014 is the bookend when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National […]
Read More Bimal Jalan reflects
Opinion India 