I can’t recommend this book enough, I am on my third reading. I will go a step further and encourage anyone who can to actually adopt the concepts in their daily lives. The book is rigorous, and also has some brilliant quotes. For example:
Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us. Taleb, Skin in the Game
People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.
The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.
And my favorite:
Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.
I had listened to the audiobook a few years ago and loved it. So, I decided to get a Kindle edition. Although, I realized that I should have bought the paper version. Some of the charts and illustrations come out better on paper. I would highly recommend this one by Devdutt Pattanaik. The notes that are associated with the story, after a few pages, are very insightful and so is the commentary woven into the stories.
To understand Bharat (India), you have to read the Mahabharat. Multiple times.
My Gita
This can perhaps be renamed to “Gita for the Curious Manager”: some of the text and diagrams feel like they have been designed for PowerPoints. This is another of Devdutt Pattanaik’s very engaging interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita.
I borrowed it from the public library. This could have easily been two separate books, but how many more Churchill biographies can one read, especially after the memoirs Churchill has written himself. The connection of the themes was interesting.
This book was recommended to me by my friend Shomdip Dutta. It felt like the Indian version of Robert Kaplan’s Monsoon, and equally engaging. I felt it floundered a bit when it came to reporting the events of the 20th century, but it is an interesting read.
Another one by Sanjeev Sanyal, it turned out to be a good refresher of Indian history, but with the focus on geography and trade. He also tries to connect other parts of Asia to India through mythology. I did feel that this was directed more towards the local Indian reader.
I love Ayesha Jalal’s books, and this one was no exception. The creation of Pakistan and the separation of Bengal and Punjab has always fascinated me, and Ayesha Jalal has walked the reader through the details of the pre-partition politics as well as the recent history up to 2013. It just ends on a depressing note:
The sobering fact is that the magnitude and range of problems besieging Pakistan are so enormous that even the best efforts on the part of a competent elected government may not be enough to steady the course. Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan
This feels like the part 2 of Yuval Noah Harari’s earlier book, Sapiens, but with more philosophical references and constructs. But as Yogi Berra said, “It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Napoleon: A Life
I listened to the audiobook version, and it turned out to be a great refresher on Napoleon’s life and French and European politics.
This is Ambassador Michael McFaul’s memoirs of his time in the Obama administration. This gave me some insight on what went wrong with the US–Russian relations after that (in)famous (and failed) “reset.” And strangely, it made me see the Russian point of view.
Lord Curzon is the bête noire of Indian historians and politicians. But this book gave me a perspective of him as a statesman and a competent administrator, something I suspected all along. He also played a big role in restoring historical buildings all over India that had fallen into disrepair. From one of his speeches:
Art and beauty, and the reverence that is owing to all that has evoked human genius or has inspired human faith, are independent of creeds. … What is beautiful, what is historic, what tears the mask off the face of the past, and helps us read its riddles, and to look it in the eyes, these, and not the dogmas of a combative theology, are the principal criteria to which we must look. Lord Curzon
But he wasn’t without his flaws.
I got introduced to Mark Blyth’s ideas through my friend Egil Kvaleberg, who had me watch his lecture titled “Why People Vote for Those Who Work Against Their Best Interests” (spoiler: they don’t). That lecture intrigued me enough to buy this book, which is a very well written and well argued historical narrative on why government austerity is a bad idea, especially when the economy isn’t doing well. I think his next book will be about “Global Trumpism.”
A very depressing narrative of what has happened to Delhi in the last 30 years since economic liberalization, by Rana Dasgupta.
Recommended by my journalist friend, Saibal Sen, it is an interesting account of the most powerful woman in the world in the early 17th century.