BookReview : India Unbound - Gurcharan Das

Reading is one of my favourite pastimes.You may abhor the idea if you think yourself as one of the fun-loving,action oriented types. But then I bet you never laid your hands on the right book.Reading can be fun. It can 'broaden your horizons' wherein you can see the fun in things you thought were boring earlier.Reading has the potential to make your life more lively where it just doesn't goes on and on from one day to another.


I shall present a very strong case for reading sometime later. Here, I write about a book that got me interested more in reading. Furhter, I believe one shouldn't read passively or only for pleasure.Reading with a purpose will not only help you select the right books but increase you exploits from the reading experiences. If you read with a questioning mind correlating facts and corroborating evidences from your real life it would not only help you to become more practical but give you a distinct voice of your own too. My voice however seems struck with nursery rhymes...

Now without much ado
I present the book review
which I wrote long ago
for my witty bimbo**
my coochie my coo my puff-paste
who makes my readings all waste
for what good is a book-pile
that fails to bring her one smile!


"...Well, 'India Unbound' is a book that I re-read recently. Both the book and it's author has impressed me very very much. It's author - Gurcharan Das, when he was a baby, his parents laid him on the feet of the Guru at Satsang Beas who named him 'Guru+Charan+Das'.


You may find more useful details about the author at this site:
http://www.ccsindia.org/gdas/gurcharandas.htm


This book though being a non-fiction goes like a gripping story of transformations that India underwent since independence with particular focus on it's economic policies and their manifestations. I better take care not to sound too technical, learning from the author of the book, Gurcharan Das(GD). His book is intended for layman and serves as a very good entry point into many things at once. Reading it interested me more into host of things like history, sociology, politics, economics, business, management and most importantly correlating pieces and visualizing the future.

It's written in a very crafty manner...unlike this review.. and personal anecdotes from author's life dot the narration of various factors shaping the country. And this is what makes it enjoyable unlike other non-fictions. So we come to know that GD sold news paper, went to Harvard, worked with Procter and Gamble (India) since its infancy and took voluntary retirement to write and now he serves as a consultant to a number of companies living happily with his wife somewhere near IIT in posh South Delhi itself. He is cash rich with children all settled. He has already lived the 'middle-class household dream' that we have been entrusted by our parents and which many of us will realise or are realising while working in the glass towers at Gurgaon and elsewhere..lols.

However commuting between glass towers and our homes, doing our routine part and returning home exhausted day after day many of us slowly get alienated from a larger context. This is where we begin to differ from GD. Most people reduce them to money making machines,trapped in their EMIs, chasing the middle-class dream but few like Nandan Nilekani who are leading big corporations like Infosys have to inevitably know this greater context that books like India Unbound makes us laymen aware of. (Nilekani's book 'Imagining India' can be another good read.)

GD in his wide angle view of Indian economy invokes history as old as Alexander-Puru battle to give plausible explanations. He writes about failings of leaders as great as Gandhi and Nehru. Quoting from Adam Smith to Amartya Sen he investigates things like 'developement' and 'modernization'. He charts routes of Ambanis' success in frustrating license raj and few business failures post liberation.He identifies values we acquire in families and castes and nations and their implications in business.

GDs canvas is very wide and lot of things converge in his complex context following a strict time line spread over 364 pages which I can't reproduce here. But most importantly it gives a lesson to inculcate in us an insatiable hunger to know, to tinker to think and to see trends and connections between what we know, to vision what the future would be like and finally to use it to our advantage. His book ends at very optimistic note predicting the boundless opportunities that exist after India was unbounded in 'the golden summer of 91' with initial economic reforms.

The rest I leave for you to discover yourself if you choose to read the book, which I think one should in our positions. For ours is a formative period and we have to be conscious about what we are feeding our minds with and what we keep thinking in our heads. My head reels with just one thought however..."

My pretty bimbo
would you now be please kind
and get out of my mind .. :))

** Bimbo for now is a figment of my imagination. But being a hardcore romantic I firmly believe she is there somewhere. I have invented her with my craving for giving love and being loved. She does inspire many beautiful thoughts. She would surface frequently in my writings just the way she intrudes the interludes between flipping of a book page or uploading of a webpage. She is always on my mind. More on bimboo,my undying love for her and the detailed psychoanalysis sometime soon .. :)