BOOK REVIEWS


If you have been meditating in a cave or under a rock, or just been in a bubble due to the pandemic, you may have missed the news of children dying every now and then of cough syrup. We have known, for more than 50 years now, that diethylene glycol (DEG) is a fatal contaminant in cough syrups...

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Moneylife Digital Team 02 July 2022
'The Scam: From Harshad Mehta To Ketan Parekh', one of the most thrilling non-fiction business books ever written in India by Debashis Basu and Sucheta Dalal, is now available in Marathi. The book, translated into Marathi by Atul Kahate and Poonam Chhatre, was launched in Pune on Friday by...

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Harsh A Desai 08 June 2022
My greatest cavil when I finished the book, The Commissioner for Lost Causes, published by Penguin Viking, was that there was not more of it. My greatest regret was that Arun Shourie had disregarded his well-wishers by not including several episodes which they suggested be included. Well,...

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Ravi Nene 19 April 2021
Every automobile—small or large, historic or modern—has its own personality and place in the motoring universe. India’s automotive history is replete with the finest examples that straddle generations and genres. Gautam Sen, the ‘automobile man’ who spearheaded motoring journalism in India,...

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Harsh Desai 24 November 2020
Arun Shourie’s  Preparing for Death is both a meditation on death as also a handbook on dying.  It is theoretical as well as practical.  Being an exceptional storyteller, Arun Shourie has deftly woven together a book telling stories from old Hindu and Buddhist scriptures as well as...

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Arunima Haldar 08 September 2020
How do family businesses create a legacy?    One-third of the 1,000 largest companies in the world are family businesses.   Some 70% of the BSE listed Indian companies are family controlled and account for two-thirds of India’s gross domestic product (GDP).   However,...

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Mala Raj 22 July 2020
Prof Narayan Das of Harvard Business School had this to say about the book “…while focused on the world of start-ups, this book provides executives in all contexts an in-depth look into the complexities underlying the rapidly changing world of marketing and business in which we live....

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Much to the surprise of friends and family, in 1991, Brijendra K Syngal resigned a plush tax-free job with Inmarsat in London to head Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL), an old-style, stodgy public sector company.   Over the next seven years, Mr Syngal transformed VSNL into a nimble...

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Shrirang V Samant 13 January 2020
Book Review: In Service of the Republic The Art and Science of Economic Policy   Authors: Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah   This book could well have been titled ‘In the Service of the Public’ since it helps the lay reader understand what has gone wrong with the economic policy...

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Millions of lives all over the world have been saved by the innovation of Indian generic pharma companies. With a majority of pills consumed around the globe being manufactured in India, global healthcare depends on Indian pharma manufacturers for its very existence. As a result, India is...

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Bad Blood is a story that has been be told, thanks to the courage, persistence and methods of John Carreyrou, a twice Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist of The Wall Street Journal.    It took him over three years of intense follow-up, standing up to the pressures from law firms,...

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Corruption is everywhere. ‘It a global phenomenon’—the words of former prime minister Indira Gandhi. It could be by corrupting someone to part with an asset below fair price, or to be able to grab an asset in preference to someone else, or to snag some contract to make money. There are two...

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On 9 May 2017, James Comey, director of the powerful US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was addressing his colleagues at Los Angeles bureau. He explained that FBI had rewritten its mission statement in 2015 to make it shorter and to better express the importance of its responsibility....

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It has been raining memoirs by governors of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in the past year or two. Three immediate predecessors of RBI governor Urjit Patel have published books in quick succession, each skirting the big elephant in the room—the gigantic bad debts of public sector banks...

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This is not a new book. It was published way back in 2004 by the fund rating company Morningstar. It has just been reissued jointly by Macmillan and Wiley as an Indian edition, given the huge popularity it enjoys. It is a classic which appeals to those interested in understanding ‘moats’ that...

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As everyone by now knows, Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese–American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst whose books Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Anti-fragile have dealt with problems of randomness, probability and uncertainty. The Sunday Times has rated...

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Let me start with a confession. I have read only parts of this book and I don’t think I am likely to go back and read it—at least the 400-odd pages of principles. That is unfortunate because the cornerstone of all consistently high achievers is fundamental principles of thought and action...

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How many books can you churn out of a simple two-factor quantitative filter, of 34-year vintage, called the ‘Coffee Can Portfolio’ (CCP)? Two years ago, Saurabh Mukerjea, CEO of institutional equities, Ambit Capital, came out with Unusual Billionaires, a 445-page tome that was essentially the...

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Most books on successful investors are either by big traders or investors who run large money management accounts or focus on their successes. Peter Lynch ran one of the largest funds when he retired from Fidelity. Warren Buffett has grown super rich by investing the float from an insurance...

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Charles Darwin and Leo Tolstoy were ordinary students; they showed no spark of creativity or genius. Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, was an uncoordinated and graceless child. Photographer Cindy Sherman, on every list of top artists of the 20th century, failed her first...

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