Book Review: Words of Freedom: Ideas of a Nation by Bhagat Singh

‘Words of Freedom: Ideas of a Nation’

By: Bhagat Singh

Penguin Books

ISBN 9780143068884

Shaheed Bhagat Singh is an icon of India’s freedom movement. His life-story has inspired thousands to do something worthwhile for their nation and continues to inspire the youth, generation after generation. He was a lion-hearted young man who spent his life, blood and death for the betterment of his nation called Bharat (or India). At the time he was hanged by the British, he was only 23 years old. Penguin has done a great work by compiling some of his writings, letters and revolutionary literature in the form of a small book. Readers get to know Bhagat Singh better and also delve into his “ideas” for our nation.

The book would also serve a very good means of waking us up to the realities of our nation. Have we in all these years proven the sacrifice of our freedom-fighters worth the efforts? Are we doing something for a better future of our nation? Or are we still stuck in the webs of religion, caste or location, which divide us and make us weak? In these pages, Bagat Singh puts his views very strongly. He also challenges those (Congress members) who were apparently soft on the British policies and believed in small incremental gains towards the freedom. His ideas on religion are also very strong and provocative, but well-grounded. Here is a sample of some lines from the first article:

“While we Indians, what are we doing? A branch of a peepal tree is cut and religious feelings of the Hindus are injured. A corner of a paper idol, tazia, of the idol-breaker Mohammedans is broken, and ‘Allah’ gets enraged, who cannot be satisfied with anything less than the blood of the infidel Hindus.” (P-7)

“The conservativeness and orthodoxy of the Hindus, extra-territorialism and fanaticism of the Mohammedans and narrow-mindedness of all the communities in general are always exploited by the foreign enemy.” (P-9)

“We want people who may be prepared to fight without hope, without fear and without hesitation, and who may be willing to die un-honored, unwept and unsung.” (P-10)

(From manifesto of The Naujawan Bharat Sabha, founded by Bhagat Singh in 1926 in Lahore)

(I think his idea of freedom-fighters to be ready to fight even without hope points to the eternal teaching of Lord Krishna in Gita)

Reading Bhagat Singh’s letters and speeches to the British, I couldn’t stay without being in awe of his intellect and brilliance! I think if the British gave him a fair trial, he would have got himself free, given the way he explained the matters and debated in the court. But alas, the British were bent on hanging him and ignored crucial evidence and facts, and went about their own determined ways. Bhagat Singh asked to be shot dead by a gun rather than being hanged, but no surprise that the British didn’t want to grant him his last wish too.

Sardar Bhagat Singh’s story is worth being read, told and sung with all our heart, until each Indian counts one’s nation above one’s other priorities. It also points towards self-reflection to the communities who count some other nations and their foreign beliefs above our nation, or those Indians who harm our nation’s prospects in the name of business and trade.

I find myself lucky to have read this book. Highly recommended to all India-lovers.

- Rahul

Book Review: Recess: the Penguin Book of Schooldays

‘Recess: The Penguin Book of Schooldays’

Edited by: Palash Krishna Mehrotra

Penguin Books

ISBN 9780143100119

Schooldays are something which can’t be compared with anything else in life. Those carefree days, with its own flavors and enigma, can’t be forgotten totally. Here is a refreshing read, taking us to those good old schooldays. It is a collection of memoires from the childhood and schooldays as shared by a diverse set of authors. The diverse set of authors bring with them a very diverse set of experiences; some beautiful and some bitter. We can connect with many of those, and at some others, we may feel good not having come across in our own.

The set of authors include Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Gandhiji, Premchand, Nehruji, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Vijay Lakshmi Pandit, RK Narayan, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Ismat Chugtai, Satyajit Ray, Vikram Seth, PT Usha, and a lot of known and not-so-known names. Swami Dayananda Saraswati’s episode from childhood tells about an incident in the Shiva temple where he witnessed a rat eating the sweets offered to the deity and wondered why the deity couldn’t protect its offerings? Lal Behari Dey talks about his school days in Calcutta and about Duff’s School where the principle was a radical Christian Missionary converting a lot of Bengali youth and how despite this fact, his father sent him in that school keeping “faith in fate”. Fakir Mohan Senapati’s account tells about the domination of Bengali over Oriya language. Rabindranath Tagore tells about his home tuitions. Krupabai Satthianadhan tells a very interesting “The Story of a Conversion”, about how an old teacher, a Christian Missionary, was trying to influence a young South Indian lad who decided to tolerate all because of willingness to learn English; but it couldn’t prevent him from feeling like giving it back to the “old fanatic”. Ismat Chugtai tells the inside story of a girls hostel. Gandhiji’s childhood part is taken from The Story of My Experiments with Truth and talks about the popular portion where he was accused of telling a lie, and on the importance of sports and learning Sanskrit. Premchand’s childhood was influenced by his Big Brother (elder brother) and the way he recollects the events, makes it such a hilarious account.

The childhood stories are diverse and bring with them all sort of tastes. There are also some controversial ones. I feel if the editor had decided to keep the controversial and bitter ones out; the book would have been absolutely delightful. But like our childhood is full of good and bad experiences, I think the different shades of the stories give this book a unique depth and gravity.

Highly recommended to all.

- Rahul

Book Review: Games Indians Play

Games Indians Play: Why we are the way we are’

By V. Raghunathan

(Forward by N.R. Narayana Murthy)

Penguin Portfolio

Dr. V. Raghunathan is a man of many credits. He has been a professor of finance at IIM Ahmedabad from 1982-2001; then worked as President of ING Vysya Bank and later as MD of GMR Industries. He is author of 9 books, has been on many companies’ boards, and esteemed panels. He is also a popular columnist in newspapers; and is involved in CSR roles as of now. You can check his LinkedIn profile here; or can go to his website. When such a man writes something, readers have better take him seriously. 

The purpose of this book is to analyze and understand why Indians are ‘like this only’. Now what is meant by ‘like this’ has often negative connotations. Dr. Raghunathan says that the root cause is that Indians are one of the most intelligent lots in this world. He says he has visited many places and understood many people – but never has he found such an intelligent population, as we are in India. Yet, he says our intelligence results in us taking rational decisions ‘individually’ in situations, but leading to our ‘collective’ failure. He calls us “Privately smart and publicly dumb”: 

When I jump a queue or a red light, or throw that garbage on the sidewalk, I am taking a rational ‘squeal’ decision, since it seems to get me ahead of others or make life easier for me. Here I am privately smart. But then, as others are no less rational, intelligent and smart, they too start squealing for the same reasons, and before we know it, we have unruly traffic, filthy streets and stinking urinals. So collectively we are all worse off. And then we complain about a dirty country, a polluted city and appalling traffic. In short, publicly we emerge dumb. (P 42)

To show how whatever is in our achievement kitty fails to match up to the best in the world, glance this portion: 

Impressive as the completion of the Konkan Railway or the Delhi Metro Railway have been, they pale in comparison to the Chinese projects, especially where implementation skills and political will are concerned. Consider the statistics. It took seven to ten years to complete the 760 km Konkan Railway. As for the Delhi Metro, between 1950 and 1990, some thirty feasibility studies were carried out by various bodies to evaluate an alternatice transportation system for Delhi. The final go-ahead came in 1990. Delhi Metro Rail Corp Ltd was established in 1995 and first phase of eleven kms was completed in 2004. The eighteen km Calcutta Metro took a good 24 years to complete, from 1971 to 1995. 

China completed the final section of the pan-Himalaya Golmud-Lhasa railway - 1956 kms – at 5072 meters above the sea level. It had 550 km frozen belt, with snow alternately melting and freezing in summer and winter. Workers had to breathe bottled oxygen to cope up with high altitude (no single death due to this though). This stretch of 1142 kms was completed in a mere 4 years. (P13-14)

The best part of the book is the analysis. Dr. Raghunathan uses Game Theory and Behavioral Economics to analyze the situation. Though in the process, he ignores many factors. For example, he discarded the impact of colonization (by foreigners, for a thousand years) on our present behavior, in a one line sentence. Here, I didn’t agree with him. But seeing that history is not his area, and the tools taken up by him for analysis are powerful enough, I didn’t bother much. He explains the Prisoner’s Dilemma in the beginning and by the end he tries to reach a conclusion. Now I found that the Game Theory part could be applied to any case, not only to Indians or India. He worries that in a Prisoner’s dilemma situation, if everyone tries to take best rational decision benefitting oneself, in the end it harms all. So what was the way out? Now this was the most important part. I have typewritten a portion from his last chapters, though this is selective and not exhaustive enough: 

Karmany evadhikaras te ma phalesu kadacana

Ma karma-phala-hetur bur ma te sango‘stv akarmani

(Bhagawat Gita, Chapter II, Verse 47)

Meaning: You have right only to the action and never to the fruit of the action. Fruit of action should not be your motivation, nor should you be driven by attachment to action.

For most of my youth and a little beyond, I always found these words innocuous and naïve. Taking this bit of verse as a random sample of what the Gita is all about, I thought I understood why we weren’t result-driven people. You see, innocence can lead to such quick generalizations.

Meanwhile, a good Samaritan presented me a copy of the Gita, which I did read now and then, though rarely pausing to contemplate seriously on its contents. 

It was only when I started getting interested in game theory and immersed myself in it that the whole import of the Gita hit me like a truck.

In many ways, the Gita, in a quintessential form, lays down what one may call the absolute truth for most aspects of our lives, the dharma. To amplify this statement further: for years, my idea of right and wrong was largely intuitive. Yet somewhere deep down, I could never see any reasonable evidence to believe that there existed absolute truths outside physical sciences which one could ‘measure and prove’.

My argument was: If this is a world of ‘selfish genes’ and therefore selfish people, what makes it ‘wrong’ to shaft somebody, as long as you found it worth your while? Religions may proscribe shafting somebody, pronouncing such action as a sin. But the question is: ‘Why is it a sin?’ Who is to say that a wrong has happened, given that each individual is selfish and each one’s actions are supposed to be in the best interests of oneself? Similarly, the Gita might say that it is wrong to be driven by desires. But why is it wrong? Again, if I see a child begging for alms and risk reinforcing the system, or desist and risk the child going hungry? Which is the lesser evil?

For questions such as these and other social dilemmas, there don’t seem to be answers that are right or wrong. Or so I had believed for a long time. I was enlightened when I found game theory capable of answering many questions such as these unambiguously. But what really captured my imagination was that most answers which a game-theoric situation such as prisoner’s dilemma yielded were consistent with what Krishna had to say to Arjuna in the Bhagawat Gita! I discovered that modern game theory and associated experiments and games seem to validate what Krishna had placed before Arjuna in a nutshell. Clearly, it took thousands of years of management science to validate the Gita (even if unwittingly), much as presend day experiments on the outer reaches of space continue to validate Albert Einstein. 

Consider our simple prisoner’s dilemma situation of Chapter 4. ……. If everyone followed the path of the karmayogi stipulated by the Gita, C-C is the only outcome and that leads to the “highest good”….. 

That is why we must not ‘defect’; that is why those who do not follow the path of dharma ought to be punished; that is why it is one’s dharma to be provoked by the adharmi and retaliate, and yet show compassion and forgiveness in the conduct of one’s actions, just as the Tit for Tat strategy guides us.

This is what game theory tells us, and this is what the Gita tells us as well. It is just that Gita is simplified and made-easy or ready-to-serve version of actions that the game theory plods through to demonstrate. It is interesting that some sage, aeons ago, thought of the right courses of action for humanity at a large in a variety of situations that can stand the test of proof of present-day tools and techniques, including computer simulations. 

My intention in writing this chapter was merely to share my own personal awakening to many aspects of the Gita. What is strange is that we should be witnessing so much of defect-defect behavior in the very land that gave us the Gita. Clearly, while the West, using its cumbersome vehicle of game theory, has covered a lot of ground in collective cooperative behavior, we seem to have made very little headway in that direction, notwithstanding our heritage of the Gita.

(P142-148)

This review won’t be complete if you missed the last two paragraphs in the above quoted text. And any review can’t be replacement for the ultimate joy of reading a book. 

The book is not long, the language used is simple, the scientific inquiry (e.g. game theory) is not too complex to understand, and this book deserves to be read by one and all. I highly recommend it to all my readers. 

- Rahul

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Book Review: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

“The Inheritance of Loss”

By Kiran Desai

Penguin Books

‘The Inheritance of Loss’ is Kiran Desai’s second novel, which had won her ‘Man Booker Prize, 2006’. 

The story is set in a small North East Indian town at the border of Nepal. The characters are a retired judge Jemubhai Patel, his dog Mutt, his cook (and the cook’s son Biju) his orphaned granddaughter, Sai and her maths tutor Gyan. The story flips through the present and then goes back in time when Jemubhai recollects memories from his days spend in England as a young Gujarati man out of a small town. The storyline in the present touches Sai’s love/crush with Gyan. Later on Gyan gets lost in a political movement to get separate country called Gorkhaland for people from Nepali origins. (the novel presents an interesting and learned background to the separatist Gorkhaland movement; also on how the movement had digressed into lootings and robbery). A parallel storyline runs through Baiju’s life (the cook’s son) who had gone to the US to earn some money, but when he returns, he is looted in a tragic manner and left with nothing but in a woman’s attire. 

I think the judge’s character has been developed most. To me he had grown into a loathsome individual, harassing his wife when young, and then exploiting his cook, but at the same time he would do anything in love for his dog Mutt. Biju’s character, though not developed much, shows a stark reality of pitiful trap of poverty. This “political sense” in my opinion/insight is a unique and amazing side of this book and the author. 

Many of the characters in the book appear “helpless” and “weak”, but when we think about the circumstances and political and social environment, the context is saddening. The story is also a pointer of how poverty, extremist movements, political apathy, all these miseries trap our world. 

The literary style of Kiran Desai is unique. Especially in the beginning I was amazed at the minuteness of details that she commented on. Even a body movement was captured in her humorous style. But at times the minute level descriptions became too much for me. What I really loved was the political sense. The story line traversed touching shades of migration, multi-culturist society, separatist movements and terrorism, class differences, poverty, human sensibilities and what not.. Overall, it was an enlightening read and I recommend it to all. 

Some random excerpts from the novel, said by different characters in different situations, type written by me:

Mrs. Sen, “More Muslims in India than in Pakistan. They prefer to multiply here. You know, that Jinnah, he ate bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning and drank whiskey every evening. What sort of Muslim nation they have? And five times a day bums up to God. Mind you, with that Koran, who can be surprised? They have no option but to be two-faced. The reasoning formed a central pillar of Hindu belief and it went like this: so strict was the Koran that its teachings were beyond human capacity. Therefore, Muslims were forced to pretend one thing, do another; they drank, smoked, ate pork, visited prostitutes, and then denied it. Unlike Hindus, who needn’t deny…. Muslims also came from somewhere else, Babar and all… And stayed here to breed. Not that it is the fault of the women – poor things – it is the men – marrying three, four wives – no shame. They have nothing better to do, you know. Without TV and electricity, there will always be this problem-”. (P130)

“Rule of nature: Imagine if we were sitting around saying, “So-and-so-score years ago, Neanderthals came out of the woods, attacked my family with a big dinosaur bone, and now you give back.” (P134)

“Half awed I was by the writing, but half I was bewildered by these Christian ideas of confession and forgiveness – they place the burden of the crime on the victim! If nothing can undo the misdeed, then why should sin be undone? The whole system seemed to favor, in fact, the criminal over the righteous. You could behave badly, say you were sorry, you would get extra fun and be reinstated in the same position as the one who had done nothing, who now had both to suffer the crime and the difficulty of forgiving, with no goodies in addition at all. And of course you would feel freer than ever to sin if you were aware of such a safety net; sorry, sorry, of so so sorry.” (P200)

“Immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your own wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by journey.” (P299)

- Rahul

Book Review: Freakonomics

Freakonomics: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
By: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Penguin Books

I had heard about this book when in b-school but couldn’t lay my hands on it. Now that I got it, I started with enthusiasm. The front cover carries Malcolm Gladwell’s comment on it: “Prepare to be dazzled”. And WSJ says, “If Indiana Jones were an economist, he’d be Steven Levitt”. After reading it, I found that the book lived up to the hype!

It is an amazing book which doesn’t feel like trading on economics. It is common sense, in the most uncommon form. The book is an eye opener and I am sure all of us would learn so much new from it no matter how much we knew from before. It teaches us how to see the hidden side of everything.

I would reproduce portions from the front cover flip:

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their mothers? Why do prostitutes earn more than architects?

One of today’s most original thinkers turns our view of the world upside down…

Life can be baffling and chaotic, and sometimes it’s hard to make sense of it all. The answer, explains groundbreaking thinker Steven Levitt, lies in economics. Not ordinary economics but Freakonomics. It is at the heart of everything we see and do and the subjects that bedevil us daily: from parenting to crime, sports to politics, health to education, fear to traffic jams.

In Freakonomics Levitt turns conventional economics on its head, stripping away the jargon and calculations of the experts to explore the riddles of everyday life and examine topics such as: how chips are more likely to kill you than a terrorist attack; why sportsmen cheat and how fraud can be spotted; why violent crime can be linked not to gun laws, policing or poverty, but to abortion; why a road is more efficient when everyone travels at 20mph; how the name you gave your child can give him an advantage in later life; and what really causes obesity epidemics. Ultimately, he shows us that economics is all about how people get what they want, and what makes them do it.

I would always remember this book for telling me, “If morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.” And for proving to me how legalising abortion can help reduce crime rates…

A perfect treat for a reader like me. I highly recommend this book to all….

- Rahul

Book - Case of the Bonsai Manager

‘The Case of the Bonsai Manager – Lessons from nature on growing’
R. Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director, Tata Sons
Penguin Books; Amazon [A], Rediff Books [R]

Recently one of our marketing professors made a very good point: that Western authors in management haven’t and can’t know the pulse of India and hence we can’t learn marketing by reading Kotlar and other Western authors alone. In the same arena, a question arises: how much valuable contribution Indian authors have made in the management writing? This book is also a part of the answer.

The author loves and watches nature and uses his experiences to pill off the intricacies of business leadership in a manner not found quite often. By giving examples of animals and creatures from snails to elephants, and then from the plant life, this book tries to reach out at the biggest problem from a different angle – what causes managers to get their growth restricted or shunted and hence they are reduced to being a Bonsai Manager….

The book has a slow pace and examples, though all Indians, are at places personal and couldn’t be seen without creating a good/bad impression about the organisations they deal with. Overall, here is a great book for managers and managers-would-be, and also is a brilliant book for nature lovers who want to see how their knowledge and experience can be converted (read marketed) into such a beautiful read.