governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
BOOK REVIEW Work 3.0 By Avik Chanda and Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay Penguin Business 2023 466 pages Rs 524 The central concern of the authors is how to retain human-centric workplaces in the face of the expected tech onslaught increasingly making machines central to the design, implementation and monitoring of most functional tasks catering to human needs. […]
Read More Cyborg WorkplacesBOOK REVIEW India’s Finance Ministers A K Bhattacharya Penguin (Business)2023 435 pages, Rs 999/- Finance Ministers (FMs), despite their dour calling, do not always follow the bland, understated credo expected of them. This is one message in this carefully packaged, extensively researched tome on eleven, post-Independence, Indian FMs, till the Emergency in 1977. Three themes […]
Read More Finance ministers who ruled early, Post Independence IndiaBook 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 resilient
Opinion India 