Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 16 Jul 2010 07:21

American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation How Indian Spirituality Has Shaped the West
Philip Goldberg (Author)

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Doubleday Religion; 1 edition (November 2, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385521340
ISBN-13: 978-0385521345

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 16 Jul 2010 07:43

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War
Karl Marlantes (Author)

Hardcover: 592 pages
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (March 23, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 080211928X
ISBN-13: 978-0802119285

A Story Within a Story, Within a Story.....
A review of
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes

"Matterhorn" is centered on the experience of a Waino Mellas, a USMC second lieutenant and infantry officer, during the first three months of his thirteen-month rotation Vietnam. Among the conflicts Mellas is forced to comprehend at a rapid pace (and which Marlantes illustrates with precision, simplicity and unerring accuracy):
-replacements and veterans
-conscripts and careerists
-officers and enlisted
-blacks and whites
-infantry and aviation
-the differing realities of command elements in the rear and maneuver forces in contact with an elusive and determined enemy.
Some of these were unique or amplified in Vietnam, others are enduring issues in any military setting. Marlantes captures them with museum-quality clarity.

Marlantes threads these conflicts and navigates Mellas through three combat patrols as he seeks to understand his own competence as a leader of young men whose lives and limbs -like his own- are subject to the variable qualities of enemy ordnance, the decisions of leaders and their commitment to each other.

Although it's true that Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War isn't your ordinary war novel, it will give the reader an historically accurate and alarming vivid experience of the conflict that took place over 40 years ago in South East Asia. Just like other books of this type, the person who reads this 622 page book will be taken through the lives of teen boy's as they struggle with the reality of becoming a Marine, their painfully rapid acceleration into adulthood and too often their seemingly meaningless demise. As in other stories about war it has all of the usual components like the deep comradery between solders, the sorrow of loss, the intense fear of battle and the excitement of combat. Readers of this genre will not be disappointed. However, author Karl Marlantes has gone above, beyond and far deeper with Matterhorn than the ordinary war novel.

In this book about the Vietnam War, is another book about humanity and humility, and yet another about the complexities of racism. What also immerges within these pages is another story laced with subtle religious symbolism and the effects of a sacrosanct ideology. Even a rendition of a well-known allegorical tales is exquisitely presented as still another story in this winning novel.

The individually unique characters in this book grapple with meaning; the meaning of leadership, the meaning of reason, the meaning of war, the meaning of death and the meaning of life. Human dilemmas such as honor vs. cowardice, morality vs. malice, feminine vs. masculine and belief vs. doubt are painstaking studied and flushed out through the rich personalities portrayed within. It's also important to note Marlantes has captured, as only a combat veteran could, the quick wit and primordial humor present between soldiers during wartime.

The author brings you along as Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, the man character, goes through profound physical, psychological and developmental transformations.
We meet Mellas with a detailed description of his appearance. He's donned in a new flak jacket, embarrassingly shiny new boots and the "...dark green t-shirt and boxer shorts his mother had dyed for him just three weeks ago..." We also join in with his thoughts.

"Forty new names and faces in his platoon alone, close to 200 in the company, and they all look the same, black or white. It overwhelmed him. They all wore the same filthy tattered camouflage, with no rank or insignia, no way of distinguishing them, from the skipper right on down. All of them were too thin, too young and too exhausted."

Another carefully crafted character is Hawke, an older Marine at 22 with a large red moustache who is filled with the kind of wisdom born out of experience.
`
"Hawke had been in-country long enough to be accustomed to being scared and waiting--that came with every operation--but he was not used to being worried, and that worried him".

The relationship between these two men at first tenuous, grows with a need for survival and the kind of respect only shared by those who have endured what many only experience in their worst nightmares.

Some of the other personalities that Marlantes has expertly woven into this human drama are: Lieutenant Colonel Simpson a despicable alcoholic who the reader can't help but pity, Vancouver who has chosen to live life on his own terms, Cassidy the hard and bitter gunny, Doc Fredrickson and senor squid Sheller both who use the minimal medical supplies, their dedication and their compassion to help gravely wounded soldiers, Hippy "... a creature of unknown order, a spirit carried by crippled feat..." and the self assured Lieutenant Karen Elsked, an integral part of the parable within this story of war. These are only a few of the cast of characters superbly developed in Matterhorn.

The fine and clear word smithing in this novel brings the reader into the jungles of the Quang-Tri Province of Vietnam. You can smell the freshly cut bamboo, feel the sting of ant bites, shiver as the leeches slide under your utility shirt, and see the "...fine faint plume...darker grayish silver cloud hardly distinguishable from the overcast backdrop.." of Agent Orange. As night or rain falls you experience the wet, the cold

Reading Marlantes's vivid words have you feeling the pain of jungle rot, emersion foot, starving hunger, debilitating thirst and the pummeling of mortars.

"Another explosion hit only 15 feet from their hole, followed by four more. They winced with the pain as the concussion slapped against their eardrums. Mellas felt the air rush from his lungs. He felt he was in a heavy black bag being beaten with unseen clubs. Shrapnel hissed overhead and dirt rained down their heads, down their backs, in between their gritted teeth, and caked around their eyes, Smoke replaced oxygen. They couldn't talk. They endured".

Because of the authors' dedication to detail and authenticity words like hooch, squid, fragging and gungy or acronyms like FAC, C-4, or 175's could leave those without a military background lost. Marlantes skillfully handles this problem with creating an easy to use "Glossary of Weapons, Technical Terms, Slangs and Jargon". He also includes a "Chain of Command" flow chart complete with radio call signs.

Marlantes's story telling capabilities evoke emotions not often accessed while reading a novel. Any reader of Matterhorn is advised to allow the story to completely envelope you in order for a true depth of understanding to take place.

Lastly, at the risk of revealing the allegorical tale mentioned earlier, it must be said that Marlantes does an exquisite job of showing the meaning of this tale. One must have compassion and live the honorable life instead of falling prey to evil. So "There it is".

Lorry Kaye, MA, LMHC

Pranav · Post by **Pranav** » 17 Jul 2010 18:15

KASHMIR CRISIS — Unholy Anglo-Pak Nexus: Saroja Sundararajan; Kalpaz Publications, C-30, Satyawati Nagar, New Delhi-110052. Rs. 850.

Kashmir and great power geopolitics
http://www.hindu.com/br/2010/06/29/stor ... 161500.htm

PRAVEEN SWAMI

The book argues that great power geopolitics incentivised and entrenched Pakistani intransigence over J&K

KASHMIR CRISIS — Unholy Anglo-Pak Nexus: Saroja Sundararajan; Kalpaz Publications, C-30, Satyawati Nagar, New Delhi-110052. Rs. 850.

“We have had a thousand years of hostility, you know,” Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told the British Broadcasting Corporation in a 1973 interview. “There has been no confrontation which,” he went on, “is as old as the confrontation between India and Pakistan, neither between Carthage and Rome, between Britain and France, nor between the Russians and Americans, nor between the Arabs and Israelis. Ours is the oldest confrontation.”

West on J&K

For decades, western scholarship on Jammu and Kashmir has — with some honourable exceptions — cast the conflict as the outcome of collisions involving Indian ultra-nationalism, Pakistani existential concerns, and a long-suppressed Kashmiri aspiration to self-determination (mostly seen as untainted by the chauvinist barbarities which scarred the rest of the subcontinent). The United Kingdom and the United States are represented as neutral bystanders, watching south Asia with a concerned but dispassionate eye.

Saroja Sundararajan adds to a growing corpus of Indian scholarship, which challenges the last of these positions — among them, D.N. Panigrahi's Jammu and Kashmir, the Cold War and the West and Chandrashekhar Dasgupta's magisterial work War and Diplomacy in Kashmir: 1947-48. Like Panigrahi and Dasgupta, Sundararajan contends that the intractability of the India-Pakistan conflict over Jammu and Kashmir is founded not on primordial hostility but on great power geopolitics.

Kashmir Crisis argues that great power geopolitics incentivised and entrenched Pakistani intransigence over J&K. She says the U.K. was, from the onset of the first India-Pakistan war of 1947-1948, determined to assist Pakistan.

Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin warned his Prime Minister: “With the Palestine position so critical, we simply could not afford to put Pakistan against us and so have the whole of Islam against us.” British diplomat Philip Noel-Baker went one step further, telling Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah that “he was satisfied that Pakistan had no hand at all in the invasion of Kashmir.”

In 1951, the U.S. and the U.K. moved a resolution calling for, among other things, the deployment of foreign forces in J&K, and two years later the U.S. began to funnel aid into Pakistan. British geostrategic thinking had placed Pakistan, even before its realisation as a state, at the centre of its vision for south Asia.

From the memoirs of Francis Tucker, the last-General Officer-Commanding of the British Indian Eastern Command, we know that the imperial military was “for the introduction of a new Muslim power supported by the science of Britain.”

Fearing that Hinduism, “to a great extent one of superstition and formalism,” would be displaced by “a material philosophy such as Communism,” imperial strategists deemed it “very necessary to place Islam between Russian Communism and Hindustan.”

Weighty responsibility

More work is needed on the cultural genesis of some these ideas. There has long been a British tradition of finding meaning in distant nationalist projects. In his 1908 memoirs, the great imperialist adventurer Francis Younghusband observed: “a weighty responsibility lies also on the British government that it should guide their [the Kashmiris'] destinies aright.”

Last year, former British foreign secretary David Miliband became the latest in a long procession of U.K. politicians to voice this ‘weighty responsibility.' In an article authored on the eve of a visit to New Delhi, Miliband argued that a “resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms.”

A language that would have been wholly familiar to Bevan suffuses modern British commentary on J&K. In 2008, historian William Dalrymple asserted that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai in 2008 “were not poor, madrasah-educated Pakistanis from the villages, brainwashed by mullahs, but angry and well-educated, middle-class kids furious at the gross injustice they perceive being done to Muslims by Israel, the U.S., the U.K., and India in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively.” But the fact is that all of the known attackers were poor, from village backgrounds and, if their own manifesto can be trusted, not especially concerned with these causes.

Sundararajan's work is, without doubt, partisan — as any work responding to a fashionable received wisdom is likely to be — but rich in empirical detail and persuasive in its argument. Given that Jammu and Kashmir has again become an element in global politics — this time, as a prize some in the west imagine will help them placate that great imaginary entity they call “the Muslim world” — her work deserves reading.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 18 Jul 2010 13:49

Believer’s Bazaar

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/books ... ron-t.html

Karmasura · Post by **Karmasura** » 21 Jul 2010 09:24

---Deleted on request---

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 21 Jul 2010 22:03

The above book review does not fit the "look and feel" of this thread. Please post elsewhere.

ramana

Karmasura · Post by **Karmasura** » 22 Jul 2010 05:06

^^ Thanks sir. Post taken back.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 22 Jul 2010 06:06

Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History By Thomas Barfield

Publisher: Princeton University Press 2010 | 400 Pages | ISBN: 0691145687 |

A brilliant book to educate all of us about a country we should know and appreciate. . . . Thomas Barfield's book on Afghanistan is likely to become the first source that serious students turn to as a guide to this complicated country. His comprehensive portrait of Afghanistan is a stunning achievement.
(Joseph Richard Preville Saudi Gazette )

Impressive. . . . Barfield traces much of what Afghanistan is about to its geography and to developments from thousands of years ago, but he also asserts that the decade of Russian occupation changed Afghanistan permanently.
(Harry Eagar Maui News )

Barfield shows how Afghan notions of political legitimacy and social organization are eerily timeless. . . . This book may change the way you think about Afghanistan.
(Brian Kappler Montreal Gazette )

This fascinating survey of Afghanistan is an excellent book for those wanting to go beyond headlines. Written by an expert, with the stylistic flair to be savored by the nonexpert, Afghanistan also has judgments worthy of scholarly reflection. Barfield has captured political, social, and cultural insights of extraordinary importance to the policy arguments of today and tomorrow. Deploying diplomats, soldiers, and aid workers in particular should pay attention.
(Ronald E. Neumann, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, 2005-2007 )

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 22 Jul 2010 23:07

A set of good book reviews from Seminar July 2010

Book Reviews

1)
WAR AND PEACE IN MODERN INDIA: A Strategic History of the Nehru Years by Srinath Raghavan. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2010.

2)
INDIA’S NUCLEAR DEBATE: Exceptionalism and the Bomb by Priyanjali Malik. Routledge, New Delhi, 2010.

...
In the next two chapters, Malik further explains how the nuclear debate struggled due to lack of coherent official nuclear weapons policy, and merely remained a simple dichotomous debate on whether or not India should test a nuclear device. She provocatively yet convincingly contends that ‘India might well have continued to coast with the obfuscations of the "option" had not developments beyond the country’s borders (e.g. 1995 NPT RevCon) forced a change in internal attitudes towards the nuclear question.’ In this context, external developments led India to decide for itself what its strategic interests should be – establishing the sovereignty attribute of the nuclear debate. Between 1990 and 1996, the turbulence of domestic Indian economy and a growing recognition of nuclear weapons in India’s neighbourhood underscored the need to prove that New Delhi would not be vulnerable to international pressures on nuclear matters....

3)
DANGEROUS DETERRENT by S. Paul Kapur. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2009.

Rony · Post by **Rony** » 28 Jul 2010 12:15

Hinduism & its Military Ethos

by Air Marshal (retd) R K Nehra

Reviews by Claude Arpi and Ramananda Sengupta respectively

A bogus preoccupation with the ideals of ahimsa, shanti and satya is at the root of the culture of unreasoning acquiescence that characterises Indian diplomacy. Air Marshal RK Nehra’s book, Hinduism and its Military Ethos, mourns the erosion of Hinduism’s lost ‘warrior mindset’

Que sera sera — whatever will be, will be.” Thus ends a fascinating book, Hinduism and its Military Ethos written by Air Marshal RK Nehra. According to the retired Indian Air Force officer, it could be the motto of India: The future is already written, we can’t do anything about it!

At the level of an individual or a nation, the blind acceptance of the present, as it is, and the future, as it will be, can have critical consequences. Air Marshal Nehra relates one by one the battles that the Indian nation has gone through for the past 2,300 years and shows that the loss of the ‘warrior’ mindset by the country’s leadership has often resulted in slavery.

He explains: “It is equally baffling to see the ease with which Hindus accepted their slavery. They adjusted to it with remarkable alacrity, almost as a duck takes to water. There was no great national upsurge, no fightback, even no major signs of resentment.”

According to him, the problem is that India is “stuck in the bhool-bhulayas (labyrinths) of ahimsa (non-violence), shanti (peace) and satya (truth)”.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with these great Indian virtues which have been the ideals of every Indian for millennia, but the problem seems to be rather that instead of being the final goal, the ultimate objective of a civilisation, they have become the means to achieve this end. Mixing up the goals and the means is the tragedy of India.

Chanting shanti, shanti or speaking of ahimsa on a battlefield (or on the parleys table) does not help to achieve shanti or remove the violent instincts in the opponent, especially when one faces a rogue one. Though Air Marshal Nehra restricts himself to military matters, the mindset described by him also exists in other fields, particularly in diplomacy.

Take the example of the recent ‘Islamabad talks’. I was shocked to read the comment of an ‘eminent’ analyst who said that ‘India shone’ in Islamabad. Why? Because India did not respond to the insults received.

One can understand that the Indian Prime Minister wants to leave some trace of his passage at Race Course Road and is ready to take some risk for that, but why silently accept insults? When Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi compared Home Secretary GK Pillai to Jamaat-ud-Dawa’h chief Hafiz Saeed and complained that his Indian counterpart Mr SM Krishna took telephonic instructions from Delhi, the Indian side only feebly protested. The next day, the Indian Foreign Secretary even said that the talks were on. Que sera sera!

The worst is that Mr Pillai was punished for standing by ‘satya’, he had just confirmed that the ISI had been involved “from beginning to end” in the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks: The Ministry of Home Affairs has now appointed a new spokesperson. Indian diplomatic blunders would take pages and pages just to list. One of the biggest, according to me, was the Panchsheel Agreement through which India unilaterally surrendered its rights in Tibet, without getting even a proper demarcation of its frontier in return. The Machiavellian Chinese Premier, Mr Zhou Enlai, enigmatically declared that all the issues “ripe for settlement” had been solved. Nobody reacted till several years later when it was too late (the Chinese had already built a road through Indian territory in the Aksai Chin area of Ladakh).

Air Marshal Nehra’s theory is that there is something wrong with the ‘Hindu’ mindset. He writes: “Out of the recorded Hindu history of around 2,300 years, Bharat was under jackboots of slavery for some 1,300 years — a dubious record.” He tries to analyse: “It is baffling to see the great Hindu civilisation going under with such extraordinary ease. It would appear that reasons for Hindu slavery lay in their mind, rather than in their muscle. The ancient Hindus were a set of martial people who lived by the sword. Somewhere along the line, Hindus lost their way and their martial spirit.”

One of his conclusions is that “Hindus developed a deluded sense of dharma under influence of Buddhism; that was the main reason for their downfall.”

Here, I differ with his view. There are many examples of Buddhist ‘warriors’, defending the highest Indian values. Even in modern India, without the Nubra Guards of Colonel Chhewang Rinchen, who received twice the Mahavir Chakra, Ladakh would today be under Pakistani occupation. One could also cite the role of the Ladakh Scouts during the Kargil conflict or on the Siachen glacier and the Tibetan Special Frontier Forces who participated in the Liberation of Bangladesh in 1971 and several other battles.

For Buddhism (as well as for Hinduism), a tradition of defending the highest dharma has existed; Air Marshal Nehra himself quotes the Bhagvad Gita: Hatova prapsyasi swargam jitva bhoksyase mahim (Slain in battle, you attain heaven, gaining victory, you enjoy the earth).

But Air Marshal Nehra is probably right when he says: “Hindus suffer from bouts of phony morality and bogus sense of self-righteousness… All these are un-military-like attributes, which must be shunned.”

He speaks at length of India’s military campaigns and India’s lost chances to send back the invading forces to their Penates. One of the first ‘blunders’ of Independent India occurred in January 1948; suddenly the Indian forces stopped their advances in Kashmir and the raiders were not pushed back to Pakistan. If one studies history, one discovers that Indian defeats have always been the result of wrong interpretation of the Indic spiritual tradition.

However, some Indian leaders did see things differently. When Hindus were butchered in East Pakistan during the first months of 1950, the Government first contemplated strong steps, then the Prime Minister of Pakistan came to India and Nehru melted; he signed a pact with Pakistan; at that time, Sri Aurobindo argued: “The massacres in East Bengal still seemed to make war inevitable and the Indian Government had just before Nehru’s attempt to patch up a compromise made ready to march its Army over the East Bengal borders once a few preliminaries had been arranged and war in Kashmir would have inevitably followed. America and Britain would not have been able to support Pakistan and (they) had already intimated their inability to prevent the Indian Government from taking the only possible course open to it in face of the massacre. In the circumstances the end of Pakistan would have been the certain consequence of war… Now all this has changed. After the conclusion of the pact… no outbreak of war can take place at least for some time to come, and, unless the pact fails, it may not take place. That may mean in certain contingencies the indefinite perpetuation of the existence of Pakistan and the indefinite postponement of the prospect of any unification of India.”

Sixty years later, India is perhaps ‘shining’, but losing battles. At the end of the day, is it not a problem of leadership? India has unfortunately only had leaders who sing: “The future’s not ours to see! Que sera sera!”

Superpower in waiting. That’s how many of us would like to describe India. An economic juggernaut, a state with nuclear weapons, waiting to take its rightful place at the world’s top table.
Air Marshal (retd) RK Nehra believes that wait is likely to be a long one.

Because, thanks to Buddhism, the once martial Hindus, who still are a majority in Hindustan, have now become peace-loving wimps.

And a ‘soft state’ can never become a superpower, it will always be a waiter at the top table, if that.

I must confess when I first heard about his book, Hinduism and its military ethos, I was less than impressed.

The book jacket, which portrayed a pale brick wall, or pavement, with a crack running down the middle, did nothing to change that impression.

But I should have known not to judge a book by its title, or its cover.

Air Marshal Nehra has obviously spent a lot of time and energy studying not just Hinduism, but every major religion of the world.

He starts by examining the India-born religions, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, before moving on to describe the Judaic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – in a nutshell. (All this, in 13 pages of crisp text.)

He then concludes that “Hinduism, ‘the first formal religion of mankind’, remained confined to Bharat (India) while Christianity and Islam spread rapidly across the world simply because of the ‘stark simplicity of the creeds of the two faiths. These are easy to understand by laymen with average, (or even below average) intelligence. By comparison, Hindu philosophy is highly complex and their view of life difficult to understand.”

But wait, I digress.

Nehra’s argument is essentially simple: We as a nation lack the killer instinct. We lack the ruthlessness, the cunning, the immorality needed to become a true world power.

And he blames Buddhism for our recent meekness.

‘Of the recorded Hindu history of around 2,300 years, Bharat was under the jackboots of slavery for some 1300 years—a dubious record.’

The ancient Hindus, he says, ‘were a set of martial people who lived by the sword. Somewhere along the line, Hindus lost their way and their martial spirit…(they) developed a deluded sense of Dharma under the influence of Buddhism, and that was the main reason for their downfall.’

While the Bhagvad Gita emphasises the duty to engage in holy (righteous) war, Buddhism and Jainism injected self-defeating concepts like ‘ahimsa, (non-violence), shanti (peace) and satya (truth) into the Hindu psyche, ‘with disastrous results,’ argues Nehra.

It is that mindset, he says, which produces ‘patriotic songs’ which say things like: Duniya ka zulum sehna, aur munh se kuch na kehna,’ which loosely translated means: “it is a great tradition of ours to bear all type and manner of atrocities, without ever complaining.

“In addition to ahimsa, another insignia fondly, forcedly and firmly put on the Hindu lapel is that of ‘Tolerance’. It is difficult to utter the ‘Hindu’ word, without uttering ‘tolerance’ in the same breath,” he says.

“The Hindu is being constantly told that his religion and scriptures require him to be ‘tolerant’. It is generally projected as if Hinduism has no existence independent of tolerance; a Hindu should ‘walk’ tolerance, he should ‘talk’ tolerance. During TV debates, one often hears Hindu leaders, both pseudo-secularists and ‘communal’, going hysterical about ‘Hindu Tolerance’.

But yet in the Ramayana, he notes, ‘Laxman displays extreme intolerance in cutting off nose of a woman, Surpanakha. What was her fault? She had only made a marriage proposal to Laxman, who at that time, was without his wife. In any case, those days, rulers used to have multiple wives.’

While in the Mahabharata, Arjun, at Krishna’s behest, killed Karna when he was helpless. Bhima, again at Krishna’s urging, hit Duryodhana on the thigh with his mace, violating prevailing norms of combat.

Thus, ‘the projected tolerance of Hindus, born out of bogus spirituality, is a myth. It is an artificial web woven round the Hindus by people with base instinct and baser intentions,’ he concludes.

Superpower? Top table? Not just yet.

The meek, as they say, will inherit the dearth.

Karna_A · Post by **Karna_A** » 10 Aug 2010 01:05

Chronicle Of Martyrs

Does anyone know how to get these Hero comic books in US?
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?266529

Bullets don’t bounce off their chests. Nor do they have superhuman powers to unleash webs or hoist themselves into the air, voluminous capes and all. What they do have is extraordinary courage. Meet the heroes of the Indian War Comics, a series that began in ’08 with a comic on Kargil martyr Capt Vikram Batra. The third one, commemorating Maj Sandeep Unnikrishnan of 26/11 fame, will be released on Independence Day. If the cover is any indication—a fiery-eyed Maj Unnikrishnan aiming his rifle at the enemy against the backdrop of a burning Taj Mahal Hotel, all the while supporting his injured colleague—the portrayal of the protagonist will fit snugly into the superhero mould, though it will also dwell on his early life and influences.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 11 Aug 2010 07:37

Ronald Wright, "What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order"
Publisher: Da Capo Press | 2008 | ISBN 0786720972 | 384 pages |

Following his international bestseller, A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright provokes once again, as he explores the oldest American myth: the endless frontier. In the six years since 9/11, as the Bush regime has squandered domestic solidarity and international goodwill, many of the archetypes and ideals with which we've traditionally framed the American enterprise now seem endangered, even hollow. This raises the question, has America ever been what it thinks it is? What Is America? goes to the heart of that inquiry. Ranging with dazzling expertise through anthropology, history, and literature, Wright reconfigures our self-perception, arguing that the "essence" of America can be traced to the foundations of our history--literally to the collision of worlds that began in 1492, as one civilization subsumed another--and exploring how these currents continue to shape our world.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 16 Aug 2010 09:48

What Does China Think?

Publisher: Fourth Estate | pages: 224 | 2008 | ISBN: 0007230680 |

This is a very good book, the author takes great effort in accounting what the Chinese intellectuals are really thinking--a subject that most western observers didn't really care much.
When talking about the "China Model", however, what's in the author's mind is "the rise of Europe", or to be more exact, "the best from the West". And so the Chinese are just learning from the "best" of either the market economy or the democratic system. Here, none of the western intellectual bias are seen avoided. In the end, too much attention has been paid to the Chinese intellectuals, that is, too much to the "book culture", and too little to the real "institutional changes" (the "reality culture"), and certainly, too little to some conscientious self-examination of the western democracy and free market mechanism (from which the current financial crisis is derived).

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 17 Aug 2010 10:05

CHURCHILL’S EMPIRE
The World That Made Him and the World He Made
By Richard Toye
Illustrated. 423 pp. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company. $32

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/books ... ari-t.html

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 18 Aug 2010 08:45

Kim Plofker, "Mathematics in India"

Princeton University Press | 2008 | ISBN: 0691120676, 1400834074 | 384 pages |

Based on extensive research in Sanskrit sources, Mathematics in India chronicles the development of mathematical techniques and texts in South Asia from antiquity to the early modern period. Kim Plofker reexamines the few facts about Indian mathematics that have become common knowledge--such as the Indian origin of Arabic numerals--and she sets them in a larger textual and cultural framework. The book details aspects of the subject that have been largely passed over in the past, including the relationships between Indian mathematics and astronomy, and their cross-fertilizations with Islamic scientific traditions. Plofker shows that Indian mathematics appears not as a disconnected set of discoveries, but as a lively, diverse, yet strongly unified discipline, intimately linked to other Indian forms of learning.

Far more than in other areas of the history of mathematics, the literature on Indian mathematics reveals huge discrepancies between what researchers generally agree on and what general readers pick up from popular ideas. This book explains with candor the chief controversies causing these discrepancies--both the flaws in many popular claims, and the uncertainties underlying many scholarly conclusions. Supplementing the main narrative are biographical resources for dozens of Indian mathematicians; a guide to key features of Sanskrit for the non-Indologist; and illustrations of manuscripts, inscriptions, and artifacts. Mathematics in India provides a rich and complex understanding of the Indian mathematical tradition.

**Author's note: The concept of "computational positivism" in Indian mathematical science, mentioned on p. 120, is due to Prof. Roddam Narasimha and is explored in more detail in some of his works, including "The Indian half of Needham's question: some thoughts on axioms, models, algorithms, and computational positivism" (Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 28, 2003, 1-13).

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 26 Aug 2010 13:06

India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ ... -in-south-

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 26 Aug 2010 13:08

Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ ... -studies-i

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 26 Aug 2010 13:08

The Muslim Revolt: A Journey Through Political Islam

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ ... lumbiahurs

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 26 Aug 2010 13:11

Many good books:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/6 ... hnological

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/6 ... nd%20Legal

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/6 ... d%20States

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/6 ... n%20Europe

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 27 Aug 2010 07:10

Psychology of Intelligence Analysis By Richards J. Heuer
Publisher: Center for the Study of Intelligence 1999 | 210 Pages | ISBN: 1929667000

Richards Heuer's Psychology of Intelligence Analysis is based on a compilation of declassified articles from the CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence, prepared for intelligence analysts and management. However, this book will benefit anyone conducting analyses of complex scenarios in a structured way, including health care professionals, financial and market analysts from all industry verticals, law enforcement and security staff, auditors and fraud investigators, and many others.

Heuer's point is that `analysts should be self-conscious about their reasoning processes. They should think about how they make judgments and reach conclusions, not just about the judgments and conclusions themselves'. The book presents a discussion of how mental models and subconscious cognitive processes can limit our reasoning capabilities (especially when coping with uncertainty and doubt), as well as an introduction on how we can try to understand and negate these effects.

In his analysis, Heuer presents data from internal and external cognitive studies, scrutinizes past CIA success and failure cases, and proposes a re-evaluation of the way we generally look at problems. The author brilliantly makes his point in Chapter 13 by showing scenarios in which the reader is invited to review previous statements and `evidence' from the text, look at the discussion from different angles, methodically apply or remove certain models, and then compare his/her own conclusions as a professional analyst would be expected to do.

The outcomes are disturbing, but not surprising. Disturbing because it is alarming to see how our judgments are normally biased by previous experiences, pre-conceptions and mental models; also because it is extremely hard to change or even notice this fact by ourselves. Not surprising because we can see the same analytical problems happening over time; even when talented, trained professionals are warned about the dangers of cognitive biases, such as `events that people experience personally are more memorable than those they only read about. Concrete words are easier to remember than abstract words, and words of all types are easier to recall than numbers. [Information having the qualities cited] is more likely to be stored and remembered than abstract reasoning or statistical summaries, and therefore can be expected to have a greater immediate effect as well as a continuing impact on our thinking in the future'.

Heuer's presentation of the subject is very pleasant to read, fluid and rich in real-life examples from psychological research, political and military intelligence, and other domains. The author clearly differentiates empirical data from his own assumptions and opinions, even when his conclusions are naturally drawn from research data (i.e. following his own advice).

The book leaves the reader with some unanswered questions as to how one can change his/her own biased mental models to improve the outcomes of an analytical process, as many issues simply have no known remediation and are deeply rooted in the way humans reason. That being said, the greatest value of this book comes from Heuer's recommendations and logical steps to be followed in order to improve the accuracy of verdicts and conclusions, and avoid known cognitive traps that can ruin even an expert's assessment. Heuer also points out that by knowing about the existence and understanding the nature of the problem, we can further research ways to identify and isolate negative effects of cognitive limitations on our forecasts, plans, and professional judgements.

LINK to pdf

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 27 Aug 2010 07:36

Playing Our Game
Oxford University Press, USA | August 5, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0195390652 | 280 pages |

Conventional wisdom holds that China's burgeoning economic power has reduced the United States to little more than a customer and borrower of Beijing. The rise of China, many feel, necessarily means the decline of the West--the United States in particular.
Not so, writes Edward Steinfeld. If anything, China's economic emergence is good for America. In this fascinating new book, Steinfeld asserts that China's growth is fortifying American commercial supremacy, because (as the title says) China is playing our game. By seeking to realize its dream of modernization by integrating itself into the Western economic order, China is playing by our rules, reinforcing the dominance of our companies and regulatory institutions. The impact of the outside world has been largely beneficial to China's development, but also enormously disruptive. China has in many ways handed over--outsourced--the remaking of its domestic economy and domestic institutions to foreign companies and foreign rule-making authorities. For Chinese companies now, participation in global production also means obedience to foreign rules. At the same time, even as these companies assemble products for export to the West, the most valuable components for those products come from the West. America's share of global manufacturing, by value, has actually increased since 1990.

SSridhar · Post by **SSridhar** » 31 Aug 2010 10:13

Politics of Partition - Book Review in The Hindu
PATHWAY TO INDIA'S PARTITION — 3 Volumes,
Vol. 1: The Foundations of Muslim Nationalism: Rs. 600;
Vol.2: A Nation within A Nation: Rs. 800;
Vol.3: The March to Pakistan: Rs. 1250.
The above books by Bimal Prasad; Manohar Publishers & Distributors, 4753/23, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002.

K. N. Panikkar

The partition of India leading to the formation of Pakistan in 1947 is undeniably the most decisive event of the 20th century, the memory of which continues to plague the politics of the subcontinent even now. The three key players involved in this traumatic event were: the Indian National Congress (INC), the Muslim League, and the British. The British were expected to play the role of an honest broker, facilitating the transfer of power of a country they had ruled for about 200 years. Many have argued that the failure of the British to discharge this responsibility rendered Partition inevitable.

Nationalism

The INC guided by Mahatma Gandhi was keen on preventing Partition; the Muslim League was adamant on realising its dream of an independent sovereign nation, even if it happened to be ‘moth eaten'; and the British sought to delay the inevitable by proposing solutions that had little chance of being accepted. From the federal scheme of the Government of India Act of 1935 through the offer of dominion status (1940), the Cripps Mission's proposals (1942) and the Cabinet Mission Plan (1945), they paved the way for Partition. The focus of this three-volume, well documented study is on Muslim politics and the “triumph” of religious nationalism it advocated. This massive work reflects Bimal Prasad's life-long engagement with the subject.

Prasad begins his story by tracing the historical foundations of Muslim nationalism, which in his view was not limited to any single factor, religious or political, but embedded in a variety of experiences. He says: “While the legacy from the past, the economic divide between Hindus and Muslims, and the ideological and emotional environment of the Muslim elite constituted its main foundations, it also drew strength from Hindu nationalism — and last, but not the least, British policy in dealing with the communal problem.” He is rightly critical of the romanticisation of the pre-colonial past as an idyllic period of inter-community relations. He is of the view that religious differences found social articulation from the medieval period itself. Otherwise, he argues, the medieval saints like Kabir, Nanak, and Dadu had no reason to preach toleration and reconciliation.

Two-nation theory

However, there may not be many takers for Prasad's opinion that Shivaji's success in mobilising support was a result of hatred for the Muslims and that it persisted till the 20th century. His argument is that mutual distrust, and even hatred, between the Hindus and Muslims came down from the medieval times and the religious politics that culminated in the creation of Pakistan drew upon these sentiments.

The second volume traces the transformation of ‘communitarian consciousness' into ‘national consciousness' among the Muslims — and this the author calls “the emergence of a nation within the nation.” Several events contributed to this transformation. The social and religious reforms within the communities made them inward-looking and led them to define their identity in religious-cultural terms. Out of such a perspective was born the two-nation theory, both among Hindus and Muslims.

In 1908, Syed Ali Imam, President of the Muslim League, referred to Muslims and Hindus as the ‘conquerors' and the ‘conquered' and asserted that, in spite of living together in the same country for centuries, they had continued to maintain their separate identities in respect of “nationalities, character and creed.” This was echoed by the Kheiri brothers, Abdul Jabbar, and Abdul Sattar, and given a concrete shape by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Punjabi Muslim student at Cambridge in 1933. Among Hindus, Lala Lajpat Rai and V.D. Savarkar, supported the two-nation theory, the former indirectly and the latter directly, in 1924. Thus it was the idea of a separate nation for Muslims struck roots.

The third volume traces the final phase marking the “triumph” of the politics of Partition, in which Muhammad Ali Jinnah, eager to realise his dream of an independent sovereign state for the Muslims, emerged not only as the “sole spokesman” of the Muslims but also as a powerful leader capable of influencing the future of the subcontinent. The author supports the popular view that Jinnah was the maker of Pakistan and, in the process, overlooks the importance of larger historical forces at play — as, for instance, the political opportunism of the colonial rulers and the devious methods of communalism. It is pertinent to ask whether Jinnah, by implication, served as an instrument of these forces.

The massive electoral support during 1942-46 emboldened him to take obdurate positions in negotiations. It was not the least surprising that the Cripp's Mission and the Cabinet Plan floundered and no solution could be found. Despite the opposition of Mahatma Gandhi and the experiment of an interim government, Partition could not be avoided. An era ended; the new one did not obliterate the bitterness and hostility generated by it.

Muslim politics

An outcome of painstaking research and meticulous study of a variety of sources — official, institutional, and private — over a long period, these empirically rich volumes qualify as standard books of reference on Muslim politics in the 20th century. Like any true scholar of substance, Prasad is very cautious in going beyond the construction of a historical narrative. Except in a few instances, like the Khilafat and the role of Jinnah, he leaves the reader to form his own judgment. Students and researchers on modern history would find the publication very useful as an introduction to the national movement, in general, and Muslim separatist politics ,in particular.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 02 Sep 2010 05:55

Helen E. Purkitt, Stephen F. Burgess - South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction
Publisher: Indiana University Press | 2005-04-20 | ISBN: 025321730X | 336 pages |

South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction offers an in-depth view of the secret development and voluntary disarmament of South Africa's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons program, Project Coast. Helen E. Purkitt and Stephen F. Burgess explore how systems used for nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in South Africa were acquired and established beyond the gaze of international and domestic political actors. On the basis of archival evidence from Project Coast and their own extensive interviews with military and political officials, Purkitt and Burgess consider what motivates countries to acquire and build such powerful weaponry and examine when and how decisions are made to dismantle a military arsenal voluntarily. Questions such as how to destroy weapons safely and keep them from reappearing on international markets are considered along with comparative strategies for successful disarmament in other nation-states.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 02 Sep 2010 06:10

Graham P. Chapman, "The Geopolitics of South Asia"
Publisher: Ashgate | 2009 | ISBN 0754673014| 382 pages

This enthralling volume tells the story of one of the world's greatest cultural heartlands - the Indian subcontinent. It shows how geological movements moulded the land of this unique cradle and how they still impact on it; from the early settlers, the great Mogul Empire and the British Raj, through the impact of railways, the development of irrigation systems on the economy and the spread of representative democracy.Discussions are woven around the three major forces of integration. These are 'identitive' forces - bonds of language, ethnicity, religion or ideology; 'utilitarian' forces - bonds of common material interest, and 'coercion' - the institutional use or threat of physical violence. By studying these forces, Professor Chapman shows how the organisation of territory - as states and empires, as monarchic realms and as representative democracies - has been central to the region's historic, cultural, linguistic and economic development. Anyone who is planning on carrying out research in South Asia or indeed anyone who simply wishes to understand more about this cultural heartland should read this book.In addition to the material on the Northwest frontier, Afghanistan and Kashmir which was added for the second edition, the Northeastern borderlands are also now examined in this fully revised third edition. The current geopolitical state of the region is completely updated and greatly enhanced.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 04 Sep 2010 01:26

To Uphold the World: A Call for a new Global Ethic from Ancient India
Bruce Rich (Author)

Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press (March 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0807006130
ISBN-13: 978-0807006139

In 1991, Bruce Rich traveled to Orissa and gazed upon the rock edicts erected by the Indian emperor Ashoka over 2,200 years ago. Intrigued by the stone inscriptions that declared religious tolerance, conservation, nonviolence, species protection, and human rights, Rich was drawn into Ashoka’s world. Ashoka was a conqueror who converted to Buddhism on the heels of a bloody war, yet his empire rested on a political system that prioritized material wealth and amoral realpolitik. This system had been perfected by Kautilya, a statesman who wrote the world’s first treatise on economics. In this powerful critique of the current wave of globalization, Rich urgently calls for a new global ethic, distilling the timely messages of Ashoka and Kautilya while reflecting on thinkers from across the ages—from Aristotle and Adam Smith to George Soros.

To read To Uphold the World is to read several books at once. Presented as "a call for a new global ethic", To Uphold the World is a timely critique of the instrumental rationality of our time that has produced a globally networked self-destructive culture of consumption. At the same time it is a narrative of travel, a contemplation of the phenomenon of travel, a biography of the great King Ashoka, who Rich discovered while traveling when he came upon his monumental inscriptions, and then of his councilor Kautilya, and a philosophical treatise on ethics. Ultimately, To Uphold the World is a meditation on leadership and its importance in a world of collective self-deception.

It is a tribute to the importance of this book that it is published by Beacon Press, the publisher of Herbert Marcuse's magisterial One Dimensional Man. Rich extends and updates Marcuse's critique of the authoritarian ritualization of meaning that closes the "universe of discourse." Rich observes that "the penetration of market, transactional relationships has become so pervasive in Western society, and particularly in the Anglo-American world, that family and personal relations are increasingly atomized and replaced by market-derived transactional interactions." Past and future fade in our networked world of instantaneous communication; we have become a culture of the "eternally ephemeral".

Arguing that the modern world has exchanged traditional forms of social authority and identity for a highly structured global consumer economy, and now finds itself teetering on the brink of catabolic collapse, Rich suggests that mankind is left bereft of guidance on how to transit to a more resilient, sustainable and free state.

He turns to the past for lessons, because "the past provides us with a store of human experience that can be truly subversive of the present." The core of the book is the story of Ashoka the Great, the warrior emperor who unified India in the third century BC through a series of bloody campaigns, converted to Buddhism, and ruled benignly for about forty years, leaving behind a legacy of benevolent rule and respect for life, including arguably the earliest known bans on slavery and capital punishment, and the earliest environmental regulations and the protection of natural areas.

Although the story of Ashoka is, if not well known, not particularly obscure, Rich identifies a significant and underappreciated aspect; behind the visionary Ashoka stood his administrator Kautilya, author of the Arthastra, the first known treatise on statecraft and economic policy. Kautilya was a materialist, master of realpolitik, and the fisted glove behind Ashoka's vision. "The critical issue is not the desirability of Ashoka's principles, which at a certain level of generality is easy to acknowledge. How to put these principles into practice in a society, and Ashoka's success and failure in doing so, is the deeper issue.... The greatness of Ashoka likes not only in his conversion ... following [the bloody battle of] Kalinga, but in his heroic effort to reconcile the underlying, tragic tensions between the dharma of the king and warrior, which prioritizes force and violence, ... the revolutionary materialism of Kautilya and his espousal of [it] in statecraft; and a universal dharma of non-violence." Ashoka and Kautilya represent the unity of universal ethical values and pragmatism. Perhaps it is this loss of unity that explains why, in today's world, progressives can't progress and conservatives can't conserve.

Rich concludes that we live on the cusp of a second "Axial Age" where "the old Gods are dead and what will replace them is still being born". He looks to religious tradition and a growing ecological consciousness as sources for an "emerging sense of the transcendent". The emergent culture will require both Ashoka and Kautilya in order to put principles into practice. Indeed, in the future we are likely to get a full measure of Kautilya in view of the massive system disruptions from a runaway climate that humanity is likely to face due to our lack of resolve today; the challenge is to find the Ashoka of the twenty-first century who can articulate the vision we need of a more resilient, sustainable mode of being.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 05 Sep 2010 02:57

ramana wrote:Graham P. Chapman, "The Geopolitics of South Asia"
Publisher: Ashgate | 2009 | ISBN 0754673014| 382 pages

FREE DOWNLOAD
http://www.freebookspot.in/Books-The%20 ... 20Asia.htm

Contents

List of Figures
List of Tables
Foreword
Acknowledgements and a Lament

Part I
IntroDuCtIon
1 Brahma and Manu: Of Mountains and rivers, Gods and Men
2 Hinduism: the Manifold of Man and God
3 Islam: Submission to the One true God

Part II the BrItIsh raJ
4 the Usurpers: the Life and Death of John Company
5 Securing the Empire
6 A New Geography: A New Economy
7 the New Nationalisms and the Politics of reaction

Part III the suCCessor states

8 Divide and Quit

9 New Lines on the Map
10 From two to three: the Birth of Bangladesh
11 raj and Swaraj: regionalism and Integration in the

vi Successor States

the Forgotten Sisters: India’s Northeast
the Power Upstream
the Greater Game

Part IV ConCLusIons
States and region in South Asia
15 The Geopolitics of South Asia

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 05 Sep 2010 05:50

The Middle Eastern Question: Or, Some Political Problems of Indian Defence

J. Murray, 1903

Must read to understand what was happening during Lord Curzon time

http://books.google.com/books?id=OcH-cR ... navlinks_s

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 05 Sep 2010 09:02

FINEST HOURS
The making of Winston Churchill.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/a ... rge_gopnik

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 08 Sep 2010 08:03

WASHINGTON RULES
America’s Path to Permanent War

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/books ... ass-t.html

negi · Post by **negi** » 08 Sep 2010 23:52

Has anyone read the following ?

'Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy'
ISBN 0-14-302901-0

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 10 Sep 2010 10:07

Robert Cowan, "The Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765-1885 (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)"
Publisher: Camden House | 2010 | ISBN 1571134638 | 236 pages |

In the early nineteenth century, German intellectuals such as Novalis, Schelling, and Friedrich Schlegel, convinced that Germany's cultural origins lay in ancient India, attempted to reconcile these origins with their imagined destiny as saviors of a degenerate Europe, then shifted from 'Indomania' to Indophobia when the attempt foundered. The philosophers Hegel, Schopenhauer, and, later, Nietzsche provided alternate views of the role of India in world history that would be disastrously misappropriated in the twentieth century. Reconstructing Hellenistic and humanist views of the ancient Brahmins and Goths, French-Enlightenment debates over the postdiluvian origins of the arts and sciences, and the Indophilia and protonationalism of Herder, Robert Cowan focuses on turning points in the development of an 'Indo-German' ideal, an ideal less focused on intellectual imperialism than many studies
of the 'Aryan Myth' and Orientalism would have us believe. Cowan argues that the study of this ideal continues to offer lessons about cultural difference in the 'post-national' twenty-first century. Of great interest to historians, philosophers, and literary scholars, this cross-cultural study offers a new understanding of the Indo-German story by showing that attempts to establish identity necessarily involve a reconciliation of origins and destinies, of self and other, of individual and collective.

Enjoy!

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 10 Sep 2010 10:09

Cynthia Grabo, "Handbook of Warning Intelligence: Assessing the Threat to National Security (Scarecrow Professional Intelligence Education)"
Publisher: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. | 2010 | ISBN 0810871661 | 326 pages |

Handbook of Warning Intelligence: Assessing the Threat to National Security was written during the Cold War and classified for 40 years, this manual is now available to scholars and practitioners interested in both history and intelligence. Cynthia Grabo, author of the abridged version, Anticipating Surprise: Analysis for Strategic Warning, goes into detail on the fundamentals of intelligence analysis and forecasting. The book discusses the problems of military analysis, problems of understanding specific problems of political, civil and economic analysis and assessing what it means for analysts to have warning judgment.

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 10 Sep 2010 10:39

ramana wrote:Robert Cowan, "The Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765-1885 (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)"
Publisher: Camden House | 2010 | ISBN 1571134638 | 236 pages |

Download the free book from here

http://www.ebookee.com/The-Indo-German- ... 22372.html

chetak · Post by **chetak** » 10 Sep 2010 11:39

http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/

churchill's secret war: the rape of india during world war II

Publication Date: August 10, 2010 Churchill’s Secret War The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II By Madhusree Mukerjee
“[W]ell-researched…This gripping account of historical tragedy is a useful corrective to fashionable theories of benign imperial rule, arguing that a brutal rapaciousness was the very soul of the Raj.” —Publishers Weekly
“An important though uncomfortable lesson for readers who think they know the heroes and villains of World War II.” —Kirkus
* * * Winston Churchill—protector of the British Empire, loyal ally to the United States…and brutal war criminal? History often turns a blind eye to the most calamitous events, hiding heinous deeds under the guise of brilliant genius or bravery. However, once we are no longer obstructed by bias or hindsight, the ugly truth of even our most beloved historical figures is illuminated.
In Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II (Basic Books; August 10, 2010) Madhusree Mukerjee offers a meticulously researched account of Churchill’s questionable decisions and destructive actions that led to the death of some three million Indians during WWII. While previous accounts of the war have overlooked the famine in the Indian province of Bengal, Mukerjee sheds light on the avoidable devastation that was justified as a means to defeat the Axis powers and maintain colonial control over India. When the United Kingdom entered the Second World War in September 1939, so did India as its longtime colonial claim. A common imperialistic theme, the British envisioned their rule abroad in South Asia as benefiting an inferior civilization.
Such entrenched condescension certainly shaped Winston Churchill’s perception of India and its people. Harboring intense racist sentiments, Churchill exclaimed to a close advisor in 1943, “I hate Indians. They are beastly people with a beastly religion.” Words aside, Churchill’s actions more than illustrated his disregard for Indian lives, as he in effect caused the death of millions by callously refusing them shipments of wheat and rice.
Due to myriad factors associated with the United Kingdom’s – and Churchill’s – wartime aspirations, adequate provisions were withheld from India in the summer and fall of 1943. While all of the contributing forces cannot be identified, Mukerjee asserts three main explanations for the UK’s inaction: · However excessive, British officials were determined to accrue 27 million tons of civilian imports for the UK during 1943. Churchill had an aversion to austerity when it came to his people, so he did not want to impose restraints on the quantity and variety of food available. He also built up the supply of provisions to protect against inevitable post-war economic shocks. ·
Churchill was also committed to maintaining a stockpile of food for the Balkans. These reserves were meant to feed the Greeks and Yugoslavs that the UK intended to liberate, so shiploads of wheat from Australia passed by famine-stricken India en route for storage.
· Ego. Churchill wanted to avoid the embarrassment of admitting to American officials that he controlled enough resources, in terms of ships and grain, to relieve a colony imperiled by hunger. Had adequate relief been sent, Mukerjee writes, it “would have proved to Americans what they had suspected all along: the British had extracted a lot more shipping than they really needed.” Regardless of the specific rationale, it is certain that some three million people died in a man-made famine.
In addition to outlining why the famine broke out, Mukerjee also provides a broader overview of India’s internal divisions along primarily religious lines, while situating the famine in the larger context of India’s fight for independence. Churchill sought to exacerbate the rift between the country’s Hindu and Muslim populations in an effort to divide and conquer, but the discord (heightened by the turmoil of war – particularly the famine) eventually led to violence that expedited the UK’s disengagement with India.
While independence was won following bloodshed, Hindu leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had previously endeavored to end British rule peacefully through the Quit India campaign. On the other side, Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League sought to establish an autonomous nation for India’s minority Muslim population – Pakistan – and achieved that end in 1947.
As Mukerjee writes, “So it was that WWII sowed the seeds both for the independence of India and for its division.” Considering the human toll of the Bengal famine and the impact that it had on India’s post-war composition, it is hard to believe that it has until now been largely overlooked by history. More shocking still is the exposure of Winston Churchill’s complicity in the death of so many Indian people. A humane and richly detailed account of this gruesome chapter in India’s history, CHURCHILL’S SECRET WAR is essential reading for anyone seeking to uncover one of history’s buried truths.
# # # ABOUT THE AUTHOR Madhusree Mukerjee won a Guggenheim fellowship to write her previous book, The Land of Naked People. She has served on the board of editors of Scientific American. She lives near Frankfurt, Germany.
ABOUT THE BOOK CHURCHILL’S SECRET WAR The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II By Madhusree Mukerjee Published by Basic Books Publication date: August 10, 2010 ISBN: 9780465002016 $28.95 / $34.50 (Can.)
For additional information about CHURCHILL’S SECRET WAR and other Basic Books,visit us on the web at www.basicbooks.com. Contact: Nick Davies, 212-340-8163 / nick.davies@perseusbooks.com

svinayak · Post by **svinayak** » 10 Sep 2010 12:26

South Asian Security and
International Nuclear Order
Creating a Robust Indo-Pakistani Nuclear Arms
Control Regime
Mario EstEban Carranza
Texas A&M University-Kingsville, USA

Dangerous Optimism: Indo-Pakistani
Nuclear Relations Before the May 1998
Nuclear Tests
Introduction
Before the May 1998 nuclear tests the conventional wisdom was that nuclear
proliferation in South Asia was irreversible and that the best US non-proliferation
strategy was to work with India and Pakistan toward ‘capping’ their nuclear
weapons programs (Gordon 1994; Cohen 1991, 350; Perkovich 1994, 113; Reiss
1993, 1118; Asia Society Study Group 1995, 37; Ganguly 1996) rather than
rolling them back and eventually eliminating them.

This chapter challenges the
conventional wisdom, showing that ‘non-weaponized’ or ‘existential’ deterrence
did not guarantee a ‘nuclear peace’ in the subcontinent. I will argue that the
present nuclear dangers in South Asia—including the possibility that India will
escalate a future Indo-Pakistani crisis to an all-out conventional war that could
become a nuclear confrontation, see Kapur 2008, 87–94—did not come out of
the blue.

On the contrary, the current unstable balance of terror between India and
Pakistan has been made possible by the dominance of proliferation optimism in
the scholarship on Indo-Pakistani nuclear relations that led to the wrong belief that
nuclear deterrence would indefinitely keep the peace in the region.

The idea that
nuclear dangers could be easily managed in South Asia was promoted not only
by Indian security analysts complaining that the West lacked moral authority to
doubt the ability of the Indian elite to exercise command and control over India’s
nuclear arsenal, but also by an American epistemic community that included
influential Indian-American scholars who made the case for allowing India to have
its ‘minimum nuclear deterrent’, also using proliferation optimistic arguments (see
e.g., Tellis 2001, 2003).

RajeshA · Post by **RajeshA** » 16 Sep 2010 13:45

Some propaganda by Uneven Cohen

Arming Without Aiming: India's Military Modernization Book by Stephen P. Cohen, Sunil Dasgupta

ARMING WITHOUT AIMING: INDIA’S MILITARY MODERNIZATION: Book Launch Event on September 9, 2010 @Brookings Institute (pdf)

Transcript Page 11 wrote:Stephen Cohen: I think it would be disastrous, however, if India squanders its money on that white elephant of a weapons system, the Arihant, which is a seagoing, nuclear-powered, nuclear weapons delivery vessel. The book and my own view is I’m really quite skeptical about the Arihant as a practical weapon. They may make one demonstration model of it, but I doubt if they’ll go beyond that.

abhishek_sharma · Post by **abhishek_sharma** » 18 Sep 2010 02:43

New books: nukes, Russia and the secrets of 1989

http://hoffman.foreignpolicy.com/posts/ ... ts_of_1989

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 24 Sep 2010 09:00

Handel Jones, "Chinamerica: The Uneasy Partnership that Will Change the World"
McGraw-Hill | 2010 | ISBN: 0071742425 | 304 pages |

Praise for ChinAmerica

“A must-read for anyone seeking to understand the emergence of China as a major industrial power and how profoundly it is changing the world economy.” —Dr. Henry Kressel, author of Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations Are Changing the World

“This book is essential reading for business leaders and observers everywhere as this dramatic shift of economic and political power from the West to China continues.” —Ray Bingham, chairman, Flextronics International

“ChinAmerica provides extremely in-depth visibility into the interactions and interdependency of China and the United States. I believe everyone who takes the time to read it will learn of the many challenges and opportunities that exist for both China and the United States.” —Richard Kulle, president and CEO, gEM Services, Inc.

“Handel Jones lays out concisely what China is doing right and the United States is doing wrong. This is a wake-up call because China today is the most serious economic competitor that the United States has ever faced. This book should be required reading for all U.S. politicians and business leaders.” —Wilfred J. Corrigan, founder, chairman, and CEO (retired), LSI Logic Corp.

Conventional wisdom pits China against the United States in a war for economic supremacy. However, in ChinAmerica, Handel Jones, one of the leading experts on China's industrial and economic emergence, demonstrates that the wave of the future is cooperation between the two titans, not conflict-and how America will benefit from increased economic engagement and competition with China.

To some, conflict between China and the United States appears to be both imminent and unavoidable (indeed, in some eyes, the battle has already begun). But this perspective badly overlooks one vital fact: both nations have no choice other than to act in their mutual interest. Focusing on several key areas of conflict and mutual interest, Jones gives a thorough and eye-opening portrait of the policies, history, and habits that have led to the intersecting fortunes of the two superpowers. Jones also outlines actions the United States must take to hold on to its leadership role by forging equilibrium with China that's based on mutual respect and dependence.

As Jones makes clear, the contrast between the two powers couldn't be more startling: while China is amassing through trade nearly one-fourth of the world's foreign exchange reserves (nearly three-fourths of that amount in USD), the United States excels mostly as a consumer of finished goods, with Americans unconcerned about debt and other consequences of living beyond their means. China subsidizes development of more efficient manufacturing techniques, and in response America threatens protectionist barriers. Developments such as these, however, don't necessarily put the nations on a collision course. To Jones, these facts point to a very real opportunity for Chinese and American governments and businesses to work together rather than be separated by economic tensions.

Filled with cogent analysis and expert advice, ChinAmerica is the most comprehensive look yet at the interdependency of the world's two leading powers. This is a book that will change minds about Sino-American relations.

Handel Jones is the founder, owner, and CEO of International Business Strategies, Inc., a market and strategy consulting and analysis company whose client list includes IBM, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, TSMC, and China Resources. He has been involved with Chinese governments and state-owned and private businesses for more than 30 years, and he is one of the leading experts in directing international business investment in China and Chinese corporate investment/expansion overseas. He lives in Los Gatos, California.

“Handel Jones lays out concisely what China is doing right and the United States is doing wrong. This is a wake-up call because China today is the most serious economic competitor that the United States has ever faced. This book should be required reading for all U.S. politicians and business leaders.” —Wilfred J. Corrigan, founder, chairman, and CEO (retired), LSI Logic Corp.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 24 Sep 2010 20:22

Since the publication of the first edition of Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology, the textual fabric in which contemporary society functions has undergone a radical transformation – namely, the ongoing information revolution. Two decades ago, content analysis was largely known in journalism and communication research, and, to a lesser extent, in the social and psychological sciences. Today, content analysis has become an efficient alternative to public opinion research – a method of tracking markets, political leanings, and emerging ideas, a way to settle legal disputes, and an approach to explore individual human minds.

The Second Edition of Content Analysis is a definitive sourcebook of the history and core principles of content analysis as well as an essential resource for present and future studies. The book introduces readers to ways of analyzing meaningful matter such as texts, images, voices – that is, data whose physical manifestations are secondary to the meanings that a particular population of people brings to them.

Very useful tool for BRF members to add to their toolkit for analysis.

ramana · Post by **ramana** » 24 Sep 2010 20:34

Malcolm Byrne, Magdalena Klotzbach - Cardboard Castle?: An Inside History Of The Warsaw Pact, 1955-1991

Publisher: Central European University Press | 2005-06-30 | ISBN: 9637326081 | 726 pages |

A Cardboard Castle? is the first book to document, analyze, and interpret the history of the Warsaw Pact based on the archives of the alliance itself. As suggested by the title, the Soviet bloc military machine that held the West in awe for most of the Cold War does not appear from the inside as formidable as outsiders often believed, nor were its strengths and weaknesses the same at different times in its surprisingly long history, extending for almost half a century. The introductory study by Mastny assesses the controversial origins of the "superfluous" alliance, its subsequent search for a purpose, its crisis and consolidation despite congenital weaknesses, as well as its unexpected demise. Most of the 193 documents included in the book were top secret and have only recently been obtained from Eastern European archives by the PHP project. The majority of the documents were translated specifically for this volume and have never appeared in English before. The introductory remarks to individual documents by co-editor Byrne explain the particular significance of each item. A chronology of the main events in the history of the Warsaw Pact, a list of its leading officials, a selective multilingual bibliography, and an analytical index add to the importance of a publication that sets the new standard as a reference work on the subject and facilitate its use by both students and general readers.

So it was a cardboard castle as opposed to a paper tiger. Wonder if the PLA is a paper dragon for all we know.

Need to read the book to understand how to interpret the reality from the outward image. Could be good technique to extrapolate to understanding PLA and the PRC.