by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Mayabhushan Nagvenkar,
Book: How Fund Managers Are Making You Rich; Author: Pravin Palande; Publisher: Maven/Rupa; Pages: 254; Price: Rs 595
If you have invested in mutual funds and are waiting for those number-crunching fund managers to do their thing and make you rich over time, this thoroughly researched book tells you more about those invisible financial wizards who ensure that your stacks of virtual cash actually go skyward.
Pravin Palande, a financial journalist, may not offer you the proverbial key to the gold mine, but what “How Fund Managers Are Making You Rich” actually does is to offer the reader a pickaxe and a shovel and then goes on to explain how to use it to get through to the mother lode. Sure, it is not a “get rich overnight” manual, but an essential primer to understanding mutual funds and the minds which manage them.
Through 254 pages, Palande offers a basic primer to investing in mutual funds, along with approaches to investments and the risks involved, while outlining the highs and the lows, and profiling some of the big guns in the fund management industry. The detailed profiles of fund managers will not only reveal nuggets of their personality but, for a serious investor, will also lend a face and offer facets of the very people who are in a position to escalate your fortunes.
A case in point is star fund manager Anoop Bhaskar, who made a killing on the Unitech stock, which multiplied a hundred times, and successfully exited before the stock went bust and sank under the weight of the 2G spectrum allotment scam.
The author also simplifies and puts into context Bhaskar’s acumen early in the fund manager’s career, when he invested in courier firm, Blue Dart, at a modest Rs 70 per share.
“He (Bhaskar) bought one per cent of Blue Dart at Rs. 70 per share and sold it for Rs 1,600 (per share) in the next three years. The basic call was that if the economy picked up, logistics would follow. If there is a financial boom in the economy, then it will be a good thing for courier companies. Blue Dart became the secured company for people who wanted to send confidential documents across India. Be it housing loans, credit cards or other bill payments, Blue Dart became the chosen courier for those who weighed security the highest,” the author explains, in an attempt to simplify Bhaskar’s very, very remunerative call.
Palande also profiles Sunil Singhania of Reliance Mutual Fund; Prashant Jain, who has managed ace funds like HDFC Top 200 and HDFC Equity; Chandresh Nigam of Axis Mutual Fund; and S. Naren of ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund, to name just a few.
With India’s mutual fund assets growing at 18 per cent per annum over a quarter of a century and shooting from a mere Rs 47,000 in 1993 to nearly around Rs 20 lakh crore now, the book could well serve as a ready reckoner for a small investor keen to hop on to the gravy train.
(Mayabhushan Nagvenkar can be contacted at mayahushan.n@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Mayabhushan Nagvenkar,
Book: The Sting of Peppercorns; Author: Antonio Gomes; Publisher: Amaryllis; Pages: 240; Price: R. 325
Antonio Gomes’ “The Sting of the Peppercorns” is set in an era of transition and tumult. It opens in the lavish, stately village of Loutolim in South Goa, once the abode of elite Catholic landlords, who had converted from the Gaud Saraswat Brahmin caste. Incidentally, Loutolim is now a well sought-after piece of real estate for the wealthy elite from Indian metros who are obsessed with the quest of owning perfectly preserved Indo-Portuguese homes.
On a balmy summer morning in 1961, one of the village’s grandest mansions and its masters — Afonso de Albuquerque, his wife Dona Maria Isabella dos Santos Albuquerque, other son Roberto and daughter Amanda — await the return of their ward Paulo from Coimbra in Portugal, where he had ostensibly gone to pursue law, but had wallowed in debauchery in the seedier parts of the river-fronted city, unknown to most others in the family.
The author immediately establishes the inevitable air of change, when Paulo, soon after his return, faces a brutal attack by a band of anti-colonial guerrillas keen on looting the valuables in the homes of the rich landlords of the time in the name of raising money for their subversive war against the colonists.
“The Sting of the Peppercorns” captures the steady decline in the fate and fortunes of rich, aristocratic Catholic families in Goa in the wake of the socio-political changes following the Liberation by the Indian armed forces and the subsequent takeover by the Indian administration.
Thanks to Paulo, the privileged, stoic Albuquerque lineage now finds itself getting charmed by the hippies in Anjuna and Calangute beach villages who had just begun to descend on Goa from Europe and Northern America in the mid to late 1960s.
The major socio-political changes in Goa in the 1960s, like the transition of power, the iconic referendum where Goans chose to be an independent state rather than merge with the neighbouring state of Maharashtra, the emergence of the hippies on the Goa canvas, as well as clash of cultures, both old and new, is vividly described by the author using the characters which are at his disposal.
“The Sting of the Peppercorns”, where the reference to peppercorns is undoubtedly linked to the overwhelming spice trade off Goa and the west coast fuelled by the colonisers, serves as a timely fictional reference of a relatively less-documented period and region.
Antonio Gomes, a native of Goa, is a Professor of medicine at the Mount Sinai Medical Centre in New York and specialises in cardiology. Not surprisingly, he has very aptly analysed Goa’s beating heart through one of its roughest periods.
(Mayabhushan Nagvenkar can be contacted at mayabhushan.n@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: The Defectors; Author: Joseph Kanon; Publisher: Simon & Schuster: Pages: 304 Price: Rs 550
It may be the ultimate form of rejection of one’s origins, families and homeland, but can defection to the purported enemy represent an irreversible parting of ways? Can amends be made for it by a further betrayal? And can the “traitors”, who have specialised in deceiving everyone around them for years, ever give up their deception?
While there are no definite answers to these questions or even a standard pattern of responses, the very fact of asking them can embroil those curious in what legendary (and by some accounts, cracked) American spy-catcher James Jesus Angleton called the “wilderness of mirrors” where the truth can be — and frequently is — distorted, elusive and lethal.
And Joseph Kanon’s latest work fully captures this moral complexity and ambiguity — a staple of the espionage genre’s “stale beer” variant (against the more glamorous martini-flavoured aspect — for instance, the cinematic James Bond).
Set in Moscow in 1961, where Khrushchev is still in power and the ominous era of Stalin is not far in the past, it is the story of the strange and eventful reunion of two brothers from an elite American family where the elder turned their world upside-down by defecting to the USSR.
Over a decade after his flight, Frank Weeks, “the man who betrayed a generation”, has obtained permission from his KGB bosses to write and publish his memoirs — in the US no less. And in Moscow for final editing of the manuscript is his younger brother Simon.
Relations between the brothers are not the usual sibling rivalry or resentment — not only did Simon have to leave his State Department job after his brother’s bombshell (though rising high in the publishing industry), but his sister-in-law Joanne, who fled with Frank, was earlier his lover. And then, like his brother, he also had served in the secret services during World War II.
But as Simon arrives in drab, paranoid Moscow where every fitting can conceal a mike and every person may be keeping a tab on others, especially the rare foreigners, his brother, as charming and unpredictable as ever, has another bombshell — he wants to return home, trading all the information he has amassed for amnesty, resettlement help and protection from his former employers.
And Simon, who was always the follower and the nice boy, has landed himself in the role of arranging this — but as he tries to do so, he is confused as to what his brother really wants: A ticket home, or is he planning some further subterfuge? And where does his wife come in?
As matters come to a head through visits to Moscow landmarks — a chilling scene in the Novodevichy convent, clandestine meetings in the Bolshoi Ballet, and then a visit to Leningrad, which, in Kanon’s spare, evocative prose, “at first glance, was a faded beauty that had stopped wearing make-up” and hits a high-point, through twists and turns, at Vyborg, then the suburbs of Leningrad, but earlier the Finnish town of Viipuri.
If you think that is the end, read on for the narrative, now breathtakingly fast, as it reaches an unsettling climax just beyond the Soviet-Finnish border.
Kanon, who began writing his acclaimed, atmospheric Cold War thrillers after a long and distinguished innings as a publisher, is fully in the John Le Carre mould — with the clipped but meaningful narrative devoted more to mindgames or insights into espionage and other deviations of the human mind and characterisation, rather than violent action which is not absent, but sporadic, unexpected and always shocking.
Take Simon ruminating: “Every meal a performance. Saying one thing, knowing another. Something no one knew”, or his brother’s KGB minder observing: “You see a man every day, you know him” but Simon retorting: “I used to see him every day”. But the best is by Frank: “It’s a funny word, defector. Latin, defectus. Makes it sound as if we had to leave something behind. To change sides. But we were already on this side. We weren’t leaving anything.”
Added to the descriptions of Moscow in an era rarely seen and through the rare perspective of high-profile defectors who live in comparatively comfortable but caged lives, this is a book that aficionados of the genre shouldn’t miss at any cost.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Sex, Botany and Empire; Author: Patricia Fara; Publisher: Icon Science/Icon Books; Pages: 176; Price: Rs 399
An Indian minister has made himself notorious all over social media for his comments questioning Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, but can we take this to show that the two worlds — of politics and science — are exclusive or even antagonistic? Not at all, and scientific disciplines that apparently seem farthest placed from human affairs may be the most influential.
For science has done more for setting the course of nations and their governance and economy than we can suspect — beyond its part in helping develop powerful weapons or technologies.
While this alliance of politics and science is a far more recent development than we think, it owes its genesis to botany, and two 18th century natural scientists who furthered this combination, as Patricia Fara shows in this book, part of a special set chronicling key turning points in science.
And this — in the last three decades or so of the 18th century — qualifies well enough for it shows how science progressed beyond the pastime or patronage of rich, idle noblemen to become institutionalised with government support.
And as Fara, from the History and Philosophy of Science department at Cambridge University, shows it not only saw the rather incongruous trio of the “Three Ss” — sex, science and the state — coming together with so many consequences, but also brought the subject of sex out into the public discourse, though against much opposition.
It also set in train a process — in Britain initially — that would lead a few decades later to Darwin boarding HMS Beagle to make the observations that enabled him to formulate his theory of man’s origin and development — a theory which has stood the test of time despite what some misguided or willfully ignorant politicians may think.
At the heart of this development, shows Fara’s account, were two naturalists, not as famous as Issac Newton or Darwin but contributing to science’s progress at a time “science started to become established and gain prestige”.
And both of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks, along with the other Enlightenment contemporaries, “fought hard to establish that scientific knowledge was valid and valuable”.
Linnaeus was a gifted but eccentric and self-propagandising Swede whose classification system for all living organism still rules today, but raised hackles of his conservative society by using sexual parts to order flowers and using human terminology for the purpose.
Banks was his British “disciple” -turned-science administrator — and no less self-propagandising — but also managed to make “science work for the state — and the state to pay for science”. A key cameo is played by that intrepid explorer, Captain James Cook.
And in telling their story, Fara ranges over small Swedish towns and the country’s unforgiving terrain, the mansions and the seats of power of Georgian England as well as its lush countryside, hazardous voyages over uncharted oceans, encounters with uninhibited, pre-industrial societies in South Pacific islands, ambition and professional jealousy, to show how the underlying root was something more heartlessly mercenary.
For, as she contends, “scientific exploration in the Age of Reason was driven by an imperialist agenda to own, to conquer and to exploit”. But apart from the above spin-offs, there were some other positive benefits too, as she brings out. Say the way, men, especially white Europeans, began to see rest of humanity and themselves in the world, or what women could be allowed to study or not — though it would still take time before all these would be tangibly realised for all.
Along with her lucid and telling discourse on the birth of modern botany with Linnaeus and Banks — almost concurrently with its economic uses, Fara also enlivens it with a colourful account of their explorations in various climes and encounters with exotic races and, above all, the contemporary public reactions to their discoveries and doings. And this could have a thing or two to teach protesters today.
Though her thesis is not brought out very exhaustively, she makes a fair enough case and that is enough to make this a must read — especially for ministers.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in )
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Saket Suman,
Book: Why I Am A Hindu; Author: Shashi Tharoor; Publisher: Aleph Book Company; Pages: 302; Price: Rs 699
Shashi Tharoor’s new book on Hinduism — the religion followed by a majority of Indians — comes at a crucial juncture when there is an upsurge in fringe elements that practise and propagate the ideology of Hindutva. The book, therefore, was being thought of as Tharoor’s response to Hindutva. However, limiting “Why I Am A Hindu” to the debate between Hinduism and Hindutva will be a grave injustice to this riveting offering as the book is much more than the sum total of this debate.
At the onset, it is a layman’s account of his journey of discovering the “extraordinary wisdom and virtues of the faith” that he has practised for over six decades. Tharoor himself makes it clear in the Author’s Note that he is neither a Sanskritist nor a scholar of Hinduism and, thus, did not set out to write a “scholarly exposition of the religion”. The book comes across as the author’s attempt to understand the religion that he follows, calling it a self-discovery of sorts will be accurate. Tharoor’s exposition travels between personal accounts and his understanding of the religious scriptures as well as the values propagated by the likes of Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna Pramahamsa and others in the league whom he refers to as the “Great Souls of Hinduism”.
It is thus imperative for the reader to have a clear state of consciousness before setting on to read the book because more than anything else, it is about Hinduism, a religion, and religions are, after all the reasons behind most conflicts.
The book is divided into three sections, the first of which is titled “My Hinduism”. This answers the question raised by the title of the book: Why I Am A Hindu? Admitting as sincerely as is expected of a liberal intellectual as Tharoor, he sets the record straight and confides that he is Hindu “because I was born one”, and goes on to elaborate that religion is selected for most people at birth, “by the accident of geography and their parents’ cultural moorings”. But this analogy is not to suggest that he is not a proud Hindu. “I was never anything else: I was born a Hindu, grew up as one, and have considered myself one all my life.” The section talks at length about Tharoor’s early days, highlighting how his personal understanding of the religion developed with time. “My Hinduism was a lived faith; it was a Hinduism of experience and upbringing, a Hinduism of observation and conversation, not one anchored in deep religious study,” he points out. The section also explains at length what he calls “My Truth,” where he describes the reasons why he is “happy to describe” himself as a “believing Hindu”, before going on to present a fair perspective on the values propagated by the “Great Souls of Hinduism.”
The second section is titled “Political Hinduism” and this is where Hindutva comes into play. It is interesting to note that the author takes 140 pages (about half of the book) to reach to the burning debate of our times and in doing so, he succeeds in providing a background on his belief of the religion, supplemented by the values propagated by the likes of Swami Vivekananda before explaining Hindutva. He begins this section by providing a clear distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva. For Hinduism, he presents an imagery of a banyan tree, in whose shade, “a great variety of flora and fauna, thought and action, flourishes”. From here, he moves to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and its ideologues — Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar, explaining their perspectives on Hindutva. Using original quotes, he mentions Savarkar’s assertion: “Hinduism is only a derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva.” The book then moves, at an incredible pace, to the advent of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya and the Bhartiya Jana Sangh and then to the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Tharoor then devotes 40 pages decoding the philosophies of Hindutva — not as he perceives it but exactly how its ideologues propagated it. Contrary to all expectations, he does not criticise them or counter their views, at least at this stage. It is from page 183 of the 302-page book, that he unleashes a storm of arguments on “the politics of division” that has led to “a travesty of Hinduism”. Next, the author eloquently elaborates on the uses and abuses of Hindu culture and history in the contemporary scenario, resulting from “the politics of division” that he early mentions.
The 28-page-long last section of the book is all that he spends on addressing what most would have expected from the entire book: “Taking Back Hinduism”. Beginning with a reference to former US President Barack Obama’s speech where he mentioned that “India will succeed so long as it is not split along the lines of religious faiths,” he elaborates on the “travesty of Hinduism” in the contemporary times.
Tharoor is brutal in his criticism of the saffron brigade but equally accommodating when it comes to presenting their views.
“Why I Am A Hindu” is a well-researched exposition and is yet a charming personal account — and it floats seamlessly in rich prose and diction synonymous with one of the most widely-read and revered authors of our times.
(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)
—IANS
