This is my annual reading review for 2023. You can read and critique my reading reviews for the other years in this decade here (2020), here (2021) and here (2022).
Unlike on LinkedIn, where my content is tailored in bite sized pieces to cater to the limited attention span of its readers, this will be a comprehensive TLDR, non-serialized version of my review - for you to hopefully bookmark/star in your inboxes and then read it at your leisure. Given the limits to publication on Substack, this will be a two-part essay.
The books that I read this year, barring two, all underwhelmed my expectations. So, this review is less about what they have in them (and why you should read them) than about what I expected them to be. Ergo, this is unlikely to be a review where I tell you about my reading experiences and all the positive and life changing things that happened to me as a result. This year, I was more often left wanting for answers and starved of good post-reading ideas than the other way round. But then that I guess is the process of discovery and learning. After all, the world is not a fast food joint looking to fulfill your hunger for knowledge and curiosity.
I chose these books for the concepts they were based on. If nothing, these reviews are about what I would have expected them to tell me, instead of what they did. What I read this year can be broadly divided into a few archetypes. Books that were missed opportunities - a writer chose a rich subject but squandered its promise; or a writer whose earlier works I loved, producing an utter let down. Books that were glibly written, but empty on reflection. Books that were highly regarded but I couldn’t relate to. And the best of the lot - books that made me fall in love, in a new way, with things that I had known for a very long time. Here is the first of them:
Barons of Banking: Bakhtiar K Dadabhoy
Hasmukhdas Thakurdas Parekh; 2X Founder; Didn't drop out of college; Created companies that were EBITDA Positive within their first five years. Source: Shri Modh Vanik Seva Samaj
What if I told you that ,pre-1991, there was a 2x entrepreneur, who started two companies that as of date are the second and fourth largest in India by market cap? And that he started the first of them in his mid-40s and the other in his mid-60s?
What if I told you about a cohort of self-taught Indian industrialists and economists whose contribution to India’s economic sovereignty and its stature on the global financial stage far surpassed that of the first Prime Minister and the Finance Minister of India?
And of the inspirational story of a bank clerk living in 19th century Mumbai who went on to found the first bank that would appoint brown people in managerial roles?
There is a book that talks about all of them. But this is not that book. That book is yet to be written. This one is perhaps the first, muddled draft . A hasty verbatim representation of the archives of the Reserve Bank of India, State Bank of India and the Ministry of Finance. It can, at best, be used as a raw material for a more thoughtful, immersive book about modern Indian banking history. This one is a Massive Letdown.
Parts of this book read like the history and civics textbooks written by the British educators or their immediate Indian heirs. People my generation had to wade through them at high school. They were for us to mug up and memorize. Other parts read like test prep material for civil services aspirants - bullet points upon bullet points of dates, sections and paragraph numbers of arcane legislations provided in fine detail. As if the reader has to take a qualifying examination after finishing the book to show how well he went through the pages. Without understanding why.
If anything, this book is a searing example of how a lack of critical thinking exercises in our school and college curriculum atrophies our ability to reason. Read this book to see how it imparts us with a superficially rich vocabulary resting on an extremely shallow base of reasoning. This is a book that talks about HT Parekh, a man who rose from Mumbai slums to become the founder of HDFC and ICICI Bank. The author dutifully chronicles almost everything from his birth in 1911 to his last breath in 1994 - where he worked, who he met, what he said and how he set up his two “start-ups” - without really giving us any peek into his mind or soul. Maybe we should wait for an Indian Walter Isaacson to do justice to Parekh.
The author picks up the story of Purushottam Das Thakurdas and AD Shroff, two criminally under-discussed economists who took on the British financial bureaucracy and the Home Office between 1920-45. They fought the colonial government on payments of the British war debt to the independent Indian state. They also put up a spirited fight to prevent the Raj from artificially over-valuing the Indian Rupee against the Sterling in a bid to kill Indian exports. For someone who has always been very interested in macroeconomics, I found this entire section focusing on the irrelevant aspects - “this speech by that dignitary”, “ that sub section of that act as narrated by a certain member of the Home Office in London” . There is no consideration at all to explain to lay readers why Thakurdas and Shroff were so adamant to prevent an appreciation of Rupee against the Sterling after the First World War. In the same vein, John Maynard Keynes appears in a few pages. His comments about India are “double quoted” without context. The sad part is, you cannot even read much about these events online . This book happens to be the primary reference for all media and wikipedia coverage of these events. Unless one revisits all the national archives to re-write (explain) these events.
When I closed this book I remembered a quote from Isaac Asimov in his legendary Foundation Series - “If you want to enslave a society, kill its historians”. In India’s case, those historians and those to come were not killed under colonial rule - they were permanently distracted. They were incentivized to look at the minutiae without even realizing the bigger picture. They were taught to write to obscure; and not to explain.
Through generations of being conditioned to see history, civics, economics and law as subjects to be read to get into government services - we see them as a collection of random facts (data lake) without context. This informs our transactional relationship with our liberal arts, the paucity of terms to describe Indian economics, finance and jurisprudence. And as a side effect of that, we then tend to look at history in an extremely “black and white” and juvenile way (more on that later). A writer in the future who revises the subject matter in this book, in a more readable way, should earn the eternal gratitude of the nation.
Double Down: Game Change 2012: John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
Presidential Debates: Barack Obama vs Mitt Romney, 2012; How much of winning the US Election is about the atmospherics and strategy? Source: CNN
It is just twelve years, but 2012 seems to be a long time ago. Back then, the Internet was a thing that enabled revolutions. Facebook was overwhelmingly a force for the good. Donald Trump was just a controversial reality TV star. Nobody gave him, or Joe Biden, a chance of ever being the US President. All sides of the political spectrum in the US had some agreement on what constituted political misconduct and hate speech.
This book is a behind-the-scenes account of the 2012 US Presidential Election campaign, with a style that would go down as emblematic of the journalism of the 2010s era. Highly subjective. Written as a screenplay. With a predominant focus on personalities rather than circumstances and larger socio-economic forces of the time. And with an intent to reduce an entire electoral cycle of 18 months into a series of easily imbibed and narratable anecdotes which you can tell your friends over dinner. In a way, it is an ode to electoral tactics over political strategy. A pep-up soundtrack for speech coaches, polling consultants and political donors to make them feel important. That is why it is such a compelling page turner. Never mind that objectivity leaves the chat right at the cover page.
It takes what traditionally should be the content of a documentary, and writes it in the style of a movie script. But because it focuses so much on character sketches of even the non-serious presidential contenders as they hurtle towards election day, it ends up inadvertently bringing to light the ideological diversity and eccentric flavors within the Republican and Democratic parties - an aspect that is usually lost on foreign readers.
In hindsight, the book also appears to be a distant prequel to the rise of Trump in 2016. He himself sits on the sidelines through this book, cheekily shifting his support between Republican hopefuls. But even in 2012, there were enough takers within the party for the first of his trademark “manufactured conspiracy theories” - that Obama was not a natural-born citizen of the US and hence ineligible for Presidency - a weapon that the Republican party under Trump has effectively and cynically used since his ascent to Presidency.
Closing this book left me with a very nihilistic view on democratic politics, regardless of the superb readability of its content. If what the authors portray is the true picture of elections in America, it is disappointing to see real electorates’ issues mattering so little in the final political calculations.
If by 2012, that exceptional man of color, who had catapulted himself into power out of nowhere four years ago on the basis of a message of hope and change (and his challenger too), was fretting over poll ratings, courting wealthy political donors even as America’s inequality widened and was willing to submit to experts to tell him what to say and when - then it was the victory of tactic over strategy. Of bureaucrats and insiders over people. Of one dollar, over one vote.
Janesville: An American Story: Amy Goldstein
Top: The shuttered Ford Assembly Plant in Janesville, Wisconsin; Bottom: The new Business District of Hiranandani Gardens in Central Mumbai; Are their fates related?; Source: Wikpedia; Yappe
Janesville is the story of an American town in Wisconsin which was built around a single industry - auto assembly and manufacturing for General Motors. It follows the lives and careers of families over a period of five years between 2008-13, to understand the impact of the shutdown of the General Motors plant and its suppliers in the city. It shows us why solutions suggested by the policy wonks and business consultants, which seem very plausible on paper, are under-questioned and often do not stand the rigors of transplantation and implementation in a real context. Especially enlightening for me was to understand why job retraining programs, through the formal education process, do not work so well for people who have not been to a college in decades. Notable are the challenges to general cohesiveness and lifelong learning that a weakening in workers’ unions brings to a manufacturing community, whose results are irremediably painful when an organization/ community suffers an external shock like the Global Financial Crisis.
If you are an economist, a sociologist or even a data scientist looking to understand methods of collecting data for policy research, this book is worth your time. Strangely enough, you might find it extremely thin on figures though. But that is the point. Janesville, alongside The Life Project (which I am due to read soon), is a great book to understand ethnographic research. This is a method in which a researcher lives with their subjects for an extended time to understand the context in which they are asking questions. This is primarily for the purpose of questioning the priors of their research design, rather than to collect more data to prove or disprove one’s hypothesis. That makes it an important interventional method that data scientists and applied economists/ business students should have in their toolbox.
For economists, this book also is an illustration of why development measures geared towards the extreme long-term prove insufficient, and eventually detrimental to an already suffering community. Unless there is a short-term effort to bridge the gap created by joblessness by creating extra demand.
The accelerated de-industrialization of the American midwest is brought into sharper relief when we look at the human cost of these misplaced incentives. General Motors and the local government provide a sub-optimal severance package to the families laid off, promising a greater investment in “high-tech”, “digital” jobs for the Industrial Revolution 4.0. People with rudimentary digital literacy are sent to schools where everything is done on computer. There is a limited appreciation of the mental impact of unemployment on the laborers. And entrepreneurs from far off areas are brought in as role models, to emphasize the importance of taking personal initiative. All the while as wages in the local community continue to be nowhere near the levels they were before the auto industry shut down.
That said, as an Indian, it is easy to understand the appeal for a more granular study of economic displacement through globalization that the author makes. It is difficult though, to empathize with the plight of those who lose their jobs in Janesville. Perhaps that is because our threshold for grief is fairly higher than that of an average auto worker in that motor-town. As people who have little, we have little to complain about what has been taken from us. East of the 82.5 degree east longitude, the India that lives sees a dozen Janesvilles being created each month. Families lose their livelihoods all of a sudden, pack up and leave. Every year, close to 90 million of us move within the country, mostly from the dark hinterlands of northern, central and eastern India to the dazzling cities in the west and the south. Hearing those stories, even partially, makes the tribulations of the workers of Janesville feel like garden variety fever compared to raging malaria. A former technician has to drive four hours to go to a new factory each day. Well at least that is in his own car and not on the top of a bus. A mother worries about not having enough to send her daughters to school prom…, wait what is that? Is that now being counted as a problem?
But that is not Goldstein’s fault to be honest. Our lives are like vessels and grief and sadness are like gas. Whatever the amount of grief (trivial or profound) it will fill up the vessel of our life entirely and push against its walls from all sides.
If there is a book waiting to be written about the economically displaced in Asia, then it is up to scholars on this continent to do it. And there is much to write about, because somehow both these stories are related. The ledger which debited the manufacturing jobs in America, credited them to sweatshops and call centers in Asia. But the benefits that were lost there, were never fully gained here.
The aspirational workers in Asia, who for a while feel good as their wages play catch up with that of their global peers, soon find they are as unfortunate as someone living in that antipodal location. I can attest to the fact, very personally, that they end up hitting a glass ceiling and being treated as a “cost center resource”, their entire talent being reduced to a padding on the margin of the bottom lines of offshoring companies. Perhaps that is where Janesville’s sequel should begin.
Devi: The Devi Bhagvatam Retold: Ramesh Menon
Kamakhya Temple in Assam - one of the holiest sites in the Shakta tradition, at the geographical margins of the cradle in which Hindu civilization developed. Source: Savaari
This is one of the books that I had excitedly purchased back when I was in college in Pilani. Back then, I was going through a phase where I wanted to read more extensively about Indian tradition. I remember picking this up alongside an anthology of Urdu short stories. That phase perhaps might be relatable to a lot of Tier-2 city students, whose language of everyday communication is not English, go through in India's premier universities. I had found Menon’s “Krishna: The Life and Song of a Blue God” brilliant. It is a book I later considered as a close peer to Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and Ben Hur by Lew Wallace in its style and content. Reading “Devi” years after those college days, I found it deflating, robotic and badly edited.
Devi Bhagvatam, one of the 18 Great Puranas of Hindu tradition, is a precipitate text. It is considered as one of the canonical texts of Shakta Hinduism - which considers the ultimate power in the universe to be feminine. Shaktism is also one of the most heterodox Hindu denominations. That is so because there is a geographical dimension to it. Mother Goddess cults, which have their genesis in the Paleolithic period in the 9th millennium BCE, were always located on the margins of classical Indian geography.
The worship of the mother was the strongest where the need for fertility for soil, livestock and crops was the greatest. Along the frontiers of plains, in segregated mountain valleys, and in places where there was a vigorous intermixing of gentile and animistic religious traditions. Because of these geographical realities, there is, unlike Vaishnavism, a lot more diversity in practice and belief within Shaktism.
Devi Bhagvatam, in its current form, was written around 1000-1200 CE. It precipitated over 10,000 years of folklore and practices, in line with the prevailing early medieval trend to standardize the belief and ritual systems of Shaktism. Despite that, it remains far more complex in its narrative and concepts than Ramayana and Mahabharata, and justifiably so. Devi Bhagvatam, unlike the Bhagvat Purana which is about Krishna, is not a single story about a female divine entity. It is an anthology of how the mother goddess is understood in folk tradition by people who were limited by geography and distance in harmonizing their narratives about the same deity. It is this complexity that Menon fails to bring out.
Recently, there has been a revival in the translation of scriptures and traditional texts branded “as it is”. Bhagavad Gita as it is, Al Quran as it is, Bible as it is. The problem with “as it is” texts is that even though they believe that all the revealed words are eternal - which I disagree with- the language in which they are written itself is prone to change.
“Devi” calls itself as a text retold - but honestly it is a text written “ as it is”, or as closely as it can. At its best, it is a faithful translation of a Sanskrit text that was written, edited, expunged and appended for centuries (notice the irony here). At its worst, it is a book written without a regard to modern context and sensibilities. Unlike his earlier book that I have referred to, the author makes no attempt to show how philosophical concepts were embedded in mythology.
Not everything in religion is eternal. There are the basic existential and philosophical questions about life and its meaning that are common to all religions. They make up the noblest of human endeavors to answer things that go beyond our own agency. The rest of what we term religion is just a set of ritual practices that have their place in a particular time and place, at times not even rightly so. That part of religion deserves reform and criticism. It cannot be produced “ as it is” in the name of religious pride or claims to have been the word of god.
One of the integral aspects of classical education in India was a mastery of “tark” (logic) and “alochana” (criticism). The precepts of religion, including Puranas, were open to critique and amendment. To me, the biggest failure of this book is in failing to understand this difference.
A number of critics of this book have already pointed this out. The book abounds in graphic descriptions of sex, without explaining its centrality to Tantricism. It allows the early medieval views about women, as seductresses and spiritual hindrances, to creep into its narrative about, amusingly enough, a female supreme deity. Also, there is no shortage of passive-aggressive millenarian rants about how the world is headed towards destruction and why the worship of the Devi is the only refuge. If you hold yourself back a bit, that might make sense, because its authors were compiling this text in the immediate aftermath of Turkic invasions in 12th century CE. But without its context, all of the ideas about the society expressed in the book seem regressive, defeatist, sexist and exclusionary.
There is a reason why Chakravarti Rajgopalachari’s rendering of Mahabharata holds a treasured position in the book list of anyone interested in Hindu traditions. It was able to bring the best lessons from that great epic poem for a reader living in a newly independent India and filter out what was relevant centuries ago. In not doing this with this book, Menon does a bit of disservice - first to his talent as a writer, and next to the unique diversity of the Shakta tradition.
Much of what I had read in the first half of this year was thoroughly dissatisfying, as you can guess from the tone in these reviews. In the next part of this essay, I will move on to the books that I liked (or almost liked).