Books of the Week - Saturday, 27th August, 2022

Shivaji: India's Great Warrior King 
by - Vaibhav Purandare

About the Book
    Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the legendary seventeenth-century Maratha warrior who audaciously took on the Mughal empire at the height of its powers under Emperor Aurangzeb, and became a beacon of inspiration well after his death for those fighting for Indian independence, is one of the most compelling figures of early modern India. This is his definitive biography, relying on a vast variety of Marathi language sources overlooked in standard English works and enriched by author Vaibhav Purandare’s deep knowledge of the rugged terrain and culture of the region. With a wealth of evocative detail, it charts the dizzying story of this self-made military hero who started out as a teenage rebel of great precocity and daring, and ended up crowning himself king of an independent Maratha state after changing the political map of his native Deccan.

Especially relevant for our times is Purandare’s erudite and insightful exploration of whether Shivaji was a Hindu icon, as many have labelled him, or a secular figure, as others have chosen to call him, or something altogether more complex and thought-provoking. This biography corrects many falsities and myths, and it is the only book you need to read about one of India’s greatest heroes.

About the Author
Vaibhav Purandare is the author of the acclaimed Savarkar: The True Story of the Father of Hindutva, Hitler and India: The Untold Story of His Hatred for the Country and Its People, Sachin Tendulkar: A Definitive Biography and Bal Thackeray & the Rise of the Shiv Sena. He works as a senior editor with The Times of India.
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Books of the Week - Saturday, 20th August, 2022

The Last War: 
How AI will shape India's final showdown with China.
by - Pravin Sawhney

About the Book
If India and China were to fight a war shortly, India would face the prospect of losing the war within ten days. China could take Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh with a minimum loss of life, and there is very little that India could do about it. This is because the Indian military is preparing for the wrong war. In this eye-opening and disquieting book, a military expert and bestselling author Pravin Sawhney explain how this alarming scenario could play out.

China’s war with India will be reminiscent of the 1991 Gulf War. The US military’s battle networks connecting sensors to shooters and guided munitions with support from space assets had induced shock and awe in militaries worldwide. Similarly, China’s war with India will stun the world with artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, multi-domain operations, imaginative war concepts, and collaboration between humans and intelligent robots. China has been preparing for this since the 2017 Doklam crisis, after which it permanently augmented its troops across the Line of Actual Control.

The author argues that China’s superpower status will only grow, and the ‘capabilities lag’ between the two countries will expand. And if there is outright war, the Indian military will be no match for China’s AI-backed war machines. In such a war, traditional conventional forces will be at a huge disadvantage, nuclear weapons will have no role to play, and the valour of individual soldiers will be of no consequence. India is honing its strengths to fight a war in the three physical domains of land, air, and sea. In contrast, the PLA is working on becoming the overwhelmingly superior force in seven domains—air, land, sea (including deep-sea warfare), outer space, cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, and near space (aka the hypersonic domain). The PLA’s disruption technologies will overwhelm India within the first seventy-two hours of hostilities commencing, leading to the quick end of India’s resistance. The primary battleground will not be on land but in cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum.

About the Author
Pravin Sawhney has been the editor of FORCE (a news magazine on national security and defence) since August 2003. The author of three books—Dragon On Our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power (co-authored with Ghazala Wahab), The Defence Makeover: 10 Myths That Shape India’s Image, and Operation Parakram: The War Unfinished—he has been visiting fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, United Kingdom and visiting scholar at the Cooperative Monitoring Center, United States. After thirteen years of commissioned service in the Indian Army, he worked with India’s leading newspapers—the Times of India and Indian Express—and with the UK-based Jane’s International Defence Review.
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Books of the Week - Saturday, 13Th August, 2022

Tata's Leadership Experiment : 
The Story of the Tata Administrative Service

by - Mukund Rajan

About the Book
The Untold Story of the Tata Group's Most Ambitious Leadership Development Programme

In the mid-1950s, JRD Tata envisioned the creation of an exclusive management cadre for the Tata Group, christened the Tata Administrative Service (TAS). His vision was to create future leaders who would perpetuate the Tata values such as integrity, excellence, unity and responsibility throughout the Group. At the core of all these values was the agenda of nation building. Understanding fully well that leadership development is a dynamic phenomenon and continues to change over time, JRD was looking at leaders who would be constantly groomed for roles across Tata companies.

What led to the TAS becoming a natural choice among aspirants over the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), which, at any point of time, would give them the assurance of a stable government job? How did the TAS fare with creating leaders? Who were some of the brightest leaders that it created? Where is the TAS today and how does the future look?

In Tata's Leadership Experiment, three former TAS officers, Bharat Wakhlu, Mukund Rajan and Sonu Bhasin, come together to find answers to these and many other pertinent questions. Based on extensive research and detailed interviews with former and current TAS officers, this book presents a fascinating account of an ambitious leadership experiment.

About the Author
Dr Mukund Rajan chairs a pioneering investment firm focused on catalysing Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) improvements. Previously, in a twenty-three-year career with India's largest corporate house, the Tata Group, he served as the Group's first Brand Custodian, Chief Ethics Officer, Chairman of the Tata Global Sustainability Council and Member of the Group Executive Council.

A graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, Dr Rajan completed a Doctorate in International Relations on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. His previous books include Global Environmental Politics (1996) and The Brand Custodian: My Years with the Tatas (2019). 

SONU BHASINis one of the early women professionals in the corporate world. She has led various businesses in senior leadership positions during her career, including when she was a part of the TAS (Tata Administrative Service), ING Barings, Axis Bank, Yes Bank and Tata Capital Limited.

Bhasin is an independent director on boards of well-known and reputed domestic and multinational companies. As part of her work now, she focuses on family businesses, and is the founder of FAB – Families and Business.

She is a family business historian, a business author and the editor-in-chief of Families & Business magazine. She has been named one of the Global 100 Most Influential Individuals for family enterprises in 2020. Sonu has a B.Sc. (Hons) degree in mathematics from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University, and an MBA from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University.
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Books of the Week - Saturday, 6th August, 2022

Translating Myself and Others
by - Jhumpa Lahiri 

About the Book
Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages.

With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid’s myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle’s Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom. She traces the theme of translation in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and takes up the question of Italo Calvino’s popularity as a translated author. Lahiri considers the unique challenge of translating her own work from Italian to English, the question “Why Italian?,” and the singular pleasures of translating contemporary and ancient writers.

Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others brings together Lahiri’s most lyrical and eloquently observed meditations on the translator’s art as a sublime act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.

About the Author
Jhumpa Lahiri teaches creative writing and literary translation at Princeton University, where she is director of the Program in Creative Writing. A writer in both English and Italian, she is the author of Interpreter of Maladies, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and the editor of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories. She has translated three novels by Domenico Starnone into English.
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