Bon Mots And Title Deeds

Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister:

These are some of the books I read this year. I wish I had more time to read all the books that were suggested by friends.

• Article 370: A Constitutional History of Jammu and Kashmir by A.G. Noorani
• India’s Economy: Performance and Challenges by Shankar Acharya and Rakesh Mohan
• The Blood Telegram by Gary Bass
• Kai Chand thhe Sar-e-Aasman (in Urdu) by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

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L.K. Advani, BJP leader:

Three books I have read this year and liked immensely:

• A View From Raisina Hill by P.P. Balachandran
• The Case for India by Will Durant
• Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel by Balraj Krishna

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Amitabh Bachchan, Actor:

Like so many others, I never get to read through an entire book; I attempt to go through several at the same time. I felt the need to revisit Nehru’s Glimpses of World History and Discovery of India, not just to understand the world and our country perhaps with greater awareness, but indeed to wonder how one individual could possess the wisdom and inf­ormation contained in the book and also be able to put it across with such fluidity.

I also ‘went through’ Don’t Buy this Book, NOW!, The Art of Procrastination, by John Perry, which is a guide to effective dawdling, lollygagging and postponing. It has small chapters on matters and elements that affect us or those we encounter almost on a daily basis, but fail to notice with any serious intent. Relevant and most ‘constructive’.

I also never fail to read a page or two, each day, of my father’s works—they give me an insight into not just his genius, but indeed into the ways of the world. Other than this, of course, I find the editorial pages of all print media most educative. They offer me rare ins­ights into sit­u­ations we encounter alm­ost every day. Books have never disappointed me!

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Mani Shankar Aiyar, Politician and author:

Kicked off the year with Ananya Vajpeyi’s magisterial Righteous Republic that exp­lores the civilisational origins of the miracle of Indian democracy and ended the year with Maya Tudor’s lucid discovery in The Promise of Power of the political, social and economic origins of India’s trajectory to stable democracy and Pakistan’s inevitable descent to autocracy.

I was greatly enlightened by Husain Haqqani’s exposition, in his Magnificent Delusions, of the tangled, ‘epic misunderstandings’ between the US and Pakistan. It explains the horror of the world’s greatest democracy supporting the most venal military dic­tato­rship that inv­olved Pakistan in the vic­ious genocide that East Pakistan was subjected to in 1971, also relentlessly det­ailed in Gary Bass’s masterly The Blood Telegram. The march of avarice that has dogged markets since the great depression of the ’30s, exquisitely captured in Liaquat Ahamed’s Lords of Finance, to the great collapse of 2007, was revealed in a contemporary microcosm through Anita Raghavan’s The Billionaire’s Apprentice—telling the tragic tale of Rajat Gupta’s rise and fall as India’s star NRI export to the land of opportunity. They are perfectly complemented by David Caute’s fascinating rec­ounting, in Isaac & Isaiah, of the great ideological debates of the 20th century through the mouths of two giant emigre intellectuals, Isaiah Berlin on the right and Isaac Deutscher on the left. Two utterly del­ightful, heartwarming reads were served up from Pakistan, Fakir Aijazuddin’s From a Minister’s Journal and Raza Rumi’s Delhi by Heart. My bonanza of the year was picking up a hard cover of Dan Yergin’s The Prize, an unb­eatable history of oil and geo­politics, for just a dollar in a Boston second-hand bookstore and the discovery, also in Boston, of No Fear Shakespeare, comprising eight of his great plays that display the original text on the left page and facing it a rendition, brilliantly done, of that text in contemporary easy-to-comprehend Eng­lish. The new year begins with the mouth-watering prospect of Rajmohan Gandhi’s Punjab: A History From Aurang­zeb to Mountbatten and my brilliant niece, Pallavi Aiyar’s Punjabi Parmesan: Dispatches from a Europe in Crisis.

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Shivshankar Menon, National security advisor:

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, is a book I like: it takes an altogether new approach to problem-solving, a very different way to do it, that forces one to adopt quite an unorthodox, untraditional app­roach to looking at and defining problems.

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William Dalrymple, Author and historian:

I have enjoyed some wonderful fiction this year, especially Mohsin Hamid’s How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Jim Crace’s Harvest and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go. But for me it was primarily a non-fiction year.

I’ve been reading a lot about Indian art recently, but one book stood out: Naman Ahuja’s The Body in Indian Art and Thought, which accompanies the remarkable show he has just put on in Brussels. I also loved Julia Keay’s Farzana. The story of the Begum Sumroo of Sar­dhana has been told several times, but perhaps never so well as by Julia Keay, who brought her customary style and wit to this amazing story. Sadly, it has proved to be her last book. Soon after she and her husband John came to lunch at my Delhi farm on the last leg of their research for the book, Julia contracted cancer, and wrote it up while battling the disease. She died soon after finishing the first draft. The lively tone of her voice survives in its jauntily att­ractive and engaging style, and this book, about an amazing woman, now comes to stand as a fitting memorial to another. Julia will be greatly missed, and this book shows what an enjoyable writer we have lost.

I hugely enjoyed Robert Macfarlane’s Holloway: a perfect miniature prose-poem of a book, beautifully printed and published, and co-authored with his friend and travelling companion Dan Richards. Macfarlane is one of our most physical writers, and the greatest pleasure of his precise and worked prose is his astonishing ability to capture the spirit of a place. Macfarlane is drawing on a deep wellspring of nature writing: his musical repetitions echo those of Gerald Manley Hopkins; the precision of his nature writing draws on J.A. Baker, author of The Peregrine, as well as the higher travel writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin and Robert Byron (the latter being the source, I think, of his fondness for lists and listing); while his sensitivity to the spirit (and spirits) of the past echoes his hero Edward Thomas. But it was two very different books that moved me most. Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave—the story of how she lost almost her entire family in the 2004 tsunami—is possibly the most moving book I have ever read about grief; but it is also a very, very fine book about love. For grief is the black hole that is left in our lives when we lose someone irreplaceable—children, parents, a lover. It is the negative image which in its blackness sometimes reveals love with a greater clarity than its positive counterpart. And while in Wave love rev­eals itself by the bleak intensity of the pain of abso­lute, irreplaceable loss, it is in the end a love story, and a book about the impo­rtance of love—love of children, love of parents, love of a lover. It is a paean to the loving shelter provided by the ark of the family, rev­ealed with terrible clarity by the utter destruction of that final emotional refuge. Meanwhile, The Broken Road confirms that Patrick Leigh Fermor was, along with Robert Byron, the greatest travel writer of his generation and this final volume of his great Time of Gifts trilogy assures its place as one of the masterpieces of the genre; indeed one of the great masterworks of post-war non-fiction.

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Ranjit Sinha, Director, CBI:

Helium by Jaspreet Singh: It relives one of the most shocking moments in the history of modern India and makes you wonder whether the real culprits will ever be brought to book. I found it to be a brilliant narration of personal trauma and collective silence.

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Kaushik Basu, Chief economist, World Bank:

The book I enjoyed reading most is Darwin: A Life in Science by Michael White and John Gribbin. After his ext­raordinary travels in South America, Darwin, by all standards, led a boring life. I, therefore, did not ant­icipate this would be such a page-turner. His passion for science and staggering originality of his mind is brought out excellently. I also read and enjo­yed Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans by Charles Kahn. Pythagoras was an eccentric genius who may or may not have discovered the Pythagoras theorem. The book describes a key turning point in western intellectual history.

I reread this year what I can recommend to all—Letters of Swami Vivekananda. The letters, written from around the world, bring out a side of Vivekananda, int­ellectually towering but vulnerable in human ways, that no hagiographic biography can do justice to.

This weekend I travel to India. For the long flight I have to pick a book and the current candidates are Tom Stoppard’s Plays, Mario Bunge’s classic Causality and Modern Science, originally published in Spanish, and Peter Blair Henry’s Turnaround. The final choice will also depend on font size (for an ill-lit airplane cabin) and weight.

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Anu Aga, Industrialist

• Whatever it Takes by Paul Tough. This is about a black man named Geoffrey Canada’s attempt to change the educational landscape in Harlem. Geoffrey tries out different innovative methods to reach out to the most difficult students and ens­ures that every student goes on to have university education from his school.
• The Snowball by Alice Schroeder and Warren Buffet. I am a great admirer of Warren Buffet. I look up to him for his simplicity and for his ability to make exc­ellent use of his wealth.
• Invisible Giants by Lindsay Levin. Media often focuses more on well-known, wealthy people rather than write stories of people at the grassroot level who do amazing things.
• Steve Jobs by Walter Issaacson. It is a beautifully written biography about the brilliant innovator who led a very complex life.

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Chiki Sarkar, Publisher

The best book I read this year is an old one: J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. He is, to my mind, the greatest living novelist in English. And this short, haunting novel about empires and violence is chilling, traumatic and profound. I also read Raghuram Rajan’s Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, which was a clear-eyed and acutely analysed explanation of the financial crisis, a great primer for non-specialists like me. My favourite books of 2013 were Liz Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, a kind of 19th century epic written with wit, emotion and a knowing, ironic eye. It’s the most del­ightful novel I read this year, and I spent an entire Sunday in its thrall. I adore Jhumpa Lahiri and I think Lowlands is her most ambitious work to date and a book with real power. Like the Gilbert, I read it in a kind of compulsive haze. I was also gripped by Anita Raghavan’s The Billionaire’s Apprentice, about Rajat Gupta and Rajaratnam.

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Dipankar Gupta, Sociologist and author:

I liked Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. It builds a strong case for how enterprise  sets apart cultures that are similar. Though there is too much emphasis on free market and enterprise, leaving little room for the state to engage, I would pick this book as my favourite read this year.

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Kavita Krishnan, Activist:

My favourites this year are a mix of the old and the new. Why Loiter by Shilpa Ranade, Shilpa Phadke and Sameer Khan is one such. Why Loiter ties up with what women experienced last year and this year. It maps the exclusions and negotiations women of various classes and communities encounter and are forced into in our urban spaces. Nivedita Menon’s Seeing Like a Feminist, Mohsin Ahmed’s Moth Smoke and Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow were others.

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Aruna Roy, Social Activist

• Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I read the book at the age of nine. Never read it again until recently and I wonder what it is about the book that it resonates even 200 years after it was written. Is it the contradiction between refinement and vulgarity, or the central paradigm where young women are waiting to get married? At one level, it is also about politics and even though I am a strongly pol­itical person in a public domain, and certainly not desperate to get married, I find myself drawn to the book. Whether it is the false patriarchal critique of the novel or the films made on it, the book continues to be in public domain
• Balasaraswathi by Douglas M. Knight. The book is like a novel and I read it without putting it down. Growing up in my father’s house, Bala was like an icon to me and I soaked in the information on her.

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Indira Jaising, Lawyer

My favourite book this year was Political Emotions by Martha Nussbaum. She reinstates the role of emotion in politics and draws attention to and rejects any kind of false emotionalism vis-a-vis nationalism. She examines how figures like Rabindranath Tagore and B.R. Ambedkar, through their emotional app­eal on relevant issues, were able to build the right kind of nationalism. In the very contemporary context of Hindutva and its very particular link to patriotism, I would recommend this book to everyone.

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Binny Bansal, Co-founder, Flipkart

• Sidetracked by Francesca Gino: It’s a smart and ins­ightful book that will appeal to those who are interested in the psychological underpinnings of the decision-making process. The clarity and simplicity with which the thoughts were structured was quite refreshing.

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Prasoon Joshi, Adman, Poet

A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food by K.T. Achaya. I am not a food aficionado in the real sense of the word. I rea­lly like the way this book opens up your mind tow­ards the enormous variety of cuisine that can fall under the larger umbrella of ‘Indian food’. The book draws from literature, arch­aeology, anthropology and throws interesting light on the history of Indian food. A book I didn’t like is Don’t Kill Him by Ma Anand Sheela. I don’t think it does justice to the brilliance of Osho at all. I found it more of a rant than an insight into his world.

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Nimrat Kaur, Actress

I finally got to reading The Outsider by Albert Camus. I have been in love with the subtle irony it presents. It made a huge difference to my mindspace while I was working on The Lunchbox script. I also read Ways of Seeing by John Berger, a very unconventional read. It makes you look at every­thing around you with a different eye and mind.­ Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee is a simple story, simply told, and really moved me. I was disappointed with Moth Smoke by Mohsin Ahmed and Fifty Shades of Grey.

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Ritu Dalmia, Chef and author

It was a great year for reading; I enjoyed Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert and Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan. There have been some fabulous Indian authors, like Krishna Udaishanker, who wrote Govinda and Kaurava. But my favourite book of the year is The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson. You will find none of the typical Swedish grimness; instead, the hero Allan Karlsson, who is 100, is upb­eat, happy and definitely not ready to die. The other must-read is The Hood by Emma Donoghue. It deals with grief, death, love, lust and jealousy in a way that will surely make you laugh and cry.