Bibliofile

Save The Giver

When Kaushik Basu was chief economic advisor to the Manmohan Singh government, he came up with a controversial scheme, of ‘differential punish­ment’, to check corruption. He elaborates this in his new book, An Economist in the Real World (excerpts are on the Out­­l­­ook website). His point is, the bribe-giver should not be punished, only the taker, as this would embolden the hapless man to complain later, after he gets his work done. At the launch, Basu illustrated this with the sati exa­­mple to his co-panelists, Prof Amartya Sen and moderator Barkha Dutt. The British punished people coe­­rcing women into sati as well as spectators. Basu argues if spectators were not punished, more cases of sati may have been reported. But nobody in UPA-II bought his idea.

No Encounter

At the launch of P. Chidambaram’s book, One Year in Opp­osition, Sanjaya Baru and his former boss Manmohan Singh came face to face. Baru’s controversial book, The Accidental Prime Minister, had put the PM in a spot two years back, which hinted that he took orders from Sonia Gandhi. But no sparks flew, as both the men are known for equanimity. They just exchanged pleasantries.

Natural Way

Navayana is to come out with their grandest book, Finding My Way. It’s an ambitious project, with paintings by Gond artist Venkat Raman Singh Shyam and text by S. Anand. It has been long in the making with no funding, so to recover some of the cost, there will be a special, numbered artist’s edition, 300 copies for Rs 10,000, printed on special paper, each copy signed by the artist. Later, Juggernaut will bring out the books in the regular format.