Just finished reading an absorbing book on AI by one of its leading practitioners, and I was hoping it wouldn’t be one of those rapturous, ra-ra kind of books on the subject. Thankfully, The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, founder of DeepMind which Google acquired, and Inflection AI, isn’t one of those kinds of books;… Continue reading Can We Change the Direction of The Coming Wave?
Having read Rama Bijapurkar’s first book, We Are Like This Only way back in 2007-08 in Delhi, I was looking forward to reading this new book of hers called Lilliput Land: How Small is Driving India’s Mega Consumption Story. In her first book, she delves into why foreign companies find Indian consumers hard to fathom… Continue reading Lilliput Land Big on Message, Short on Meaning
Finished reading the second book that my aged father gifted me in Goa for my birthday this year. I hadn’t heard of the author or any of her books, even though she is supposed to be a Pulitzer Prize winner. Right from the start, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson struck me… Continue reading The Dangers of Supplanting Caste for Race
This August I received two books from my aged father for my 61st birthday and one of them is Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh. He has written this years after writing the Ibis trilogy – a fictional account of India’s opium trade with China – which was well reviewed in the press at the… Continue reading Smoke and Ashes, And Parallels Too Many
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
I just finished reading a book about economists and their theories that my aged father gifted me for my birthday this August in Goa. Looking at the title and reading the preface and introduction, it struck me immediately as mischief and meddling in publishing once again. The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L Heilbroner, published by… Continue reading Whirled-ly Philosophising
I just finished reading Salman Rushdie’s book of essays, Languages of Truth, that my father had bought last year. If it appears to be a timely read, considering the attack on his life in New York recently, so it is. If one thinks about why he attracts so much hate and vitriol even today, it’s… Continue reading Languages of Truth Coasts on the Surface
In the days, when there is hardly any news reported from on the ground, whether in print, or on television, and much of it not believable, one wonders whatever happened to reportage, as it used to be called. Now, I am not a journalist, though I do write – in my advertising and brand communications… Continue reading Reportage as News, History, Literature?
While I was still contemplating buying Amitav Ghosh’s newest book, The Nutmeg’s Curse, my father had already ordered it from Amazon India. Well, I’m not complaining. I greatly admire his writing, having owned and read several of his books, before I lost almost all of my books to termites at my parents’ flat in Goa.… Continue reading The Nutmeg’s Curse, of Colonisation and Capitalism
Minouche Shafik’s new book, What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract seems perfectly timed, with the world teetering between the 2008 financial crisis and a global pandemic. The book is not written for the general reader, but I think that they too might like it. They would like it for her astute observations… Continue reading A New Social Contract for a New Kind of Economy
Peripatetic Perch 