But how are lawyers and the judicial system in India perceived today? It is no secret that the very thought of facing the courts in India leaves the common man with a sense of dread and despair; cases drag on interminably, and justice sometimes seems like an afterthought. Who or what is responsible for this situation? Where have we lost our way? It is at times good to see ourselves as others see us, and the picture is not a very flattering one, argues Fali S. Nariman, renowned constitutional expert, practising lawyer and president of the Bar Association of India. In this frank and thought-provoking book, he realistically appraises the performance of those in the profession and what they need to do in the years ahead, and addresses some home truths about our country's legal system.

    Veteran journalist and author of the bestseller Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay lays bare its fascinating, unique and perhaps startling world. He also chronicles the personal and political journeys of the most important men (and a woman) of the Hindu Right-wing, digging up little-known but revealing facts about them.KESHAV BALIRAM HEDGEWAR: The founder of the RSS, and its first sarsanghchalak, was called ‘Cocaine’ as a young revolutionary, and transported subversive literature and arms for a group back home in Nagpur.VINAYAK DAMODAR SAVARKAR: This leading light of the Hindu Right had once invited the vegetarian Mahatma Gandhi to dinner and told him that unless one consumed animal protein, one would not be able to challenge the might of the British.MADHAV SADASHIV GOLWALKAR aka ‘GURUJI’: The iconic ‘hermit-ideologue’, whose appointment as sarsanghchalak was challenged by many in the RSS, had once warned a protesting colleague, ‘I will throw him out of (the) RSS like a stone in rice...’SYAMA PRASAD MOOKERJEE: A brilliant academic-statesman who became part of Nehru’s Cabinet, Mookerjee had several differences with the prime minister. He once asked Nehru: ‘Are Kashmiris Indians first and Kashmiris next, or are they Kashmiris first and Indian next, or are they Kashmiris first, second and third, and not Indians at all?’BALASAHEB DEORAS: This towering pracharak had a strong dislike for religious rituals, and referred to himself as a ‘Communist’ within the RSS—‘it is highly debatable if he believed in God, or if in any way needed Him.’DEENDAYAL UPADHYAYA: The man who propounded the ‘philosophy’ of Integral Humanism was opposed to the partition of India and recommended that, ‘If we want unity, we must adopt the yardstick of Indian nationalism, which is Hindu nationalism, and Indian culture, which is Hindu culture.’These and other leaders, including Vijaya Raje Scindia, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani, Ashok Singhal and Bal Thackeray, are all reckoned with in The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right. Through individual stories of the organisation’s tallest leaders, a bigger picture emerges: in spite of a three-time ban on the RSS in a multicultural and secular India—and despite the RSS’s insistence that it has no truck with electoral politics—the group is, and will be, the hand that rocks the BJP’s cradle.

    Though the answers may seem simple, their profound implications make the prisoner's dilemma one of the great unifying concepts of science. Watching players bluff in a poker game inspired John von Neumann--father of the modern computer and one of the sharpest minds of the century--to construct game theory, a mathematical study of conflict and deception. Game theory was readily embraced at the RAND Corporation, the archetypical think tank charged with formulating military strategy for the atomic age, and in 1950 two RAND scientists made a momentous discovery.Called the prisoner's dilemma, it is a disturbing and mind-bending game where two or more people may betray the common good for individual gain. Introduced shortly after the Soviet Union acquired the atomic bomb, the prisoner's dilemma quickly became a popular allegory of the nuclear arms race. Intellectuals such as von Neumann and Bertrand Russell joined military and political leaders in rallying to the preventive war movement, which advocated a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Though the Truman administration rejected preventive war the United States entered into an arms race with the Soviets and game theory developed into a controversial tool of public policy--alternately accused of justifying arms races and touted as the only hope of preventing them.A masterful work of science writing, Prisoner's Dilemma weaves together a biography of the brilliant and tragic von Neumann, a history of pivotal phases of the cold war, and an investigation of game theory's far-reaching influence on public policy today. Most important, Prisoner's Dilemma is the incisive story of a revolutionary idea that has been hailed as a landmark of twentieth-century thought.

    Accepting the increasingly widespread belief that industrialized culture inevitably erodes the natural world, Endgame sets out to explore how this relationship impels us towards a revolutionary and as-yet undiscovered shift in strategy. Building on a series of simple but increasingly provocative premises, Jensen leaves us hoping for what may be inevitable: a return to agrarian communal life via the disintegration of civilization itself.

    If you steal 55,000 crores then you get to stay in a 40-foot cell which has four split units, internet, fax, mobile phones and a staff of 10 to clean your shoes and cook your food (in case it is not being delivered from Hyatt that particular day).’They say that prison can be a great leveler – but does this apply if you are a VIP inmate in an Indian prison? Maybe not.Based on extensive first-hand interviews with some of India’s most well-known inmates, award-winning journalist Sunetra Choudhury gives you a peek into the VIP prison life. It includes some interesting anecdotes about the lives of the rich and powerful prisoners: What does Peter Mukherjea do all day in his 4 x 4 cell in Arthur Road Jail? How does a 70-year-old Doon school alumnus who has spent more than 7 years in jail find a will to continue petitioning the state and fight his cases? Who came to visit Amar Singh during those 4 fateful days and why this scarred him and his wife for life, determining his future friends and allies?Apart from certain depictions in popular culture or the occasional news reports, there is little information about how rules are bent and law takes a backseat when it comes to people like Sanjeev Nanda, Vikas and Vishal Yadav, Anca Varma and Manu Sharma, who were given special benefits and often sent out on parole and furlough for their good behaviour.For the first time, India’s most famous prisoners share their own stories – from terror tales of ‘bladebaaz’ to torture chambers, from air conditioners in cells to food from five-star hotels, from cushy beds to private parties – and how they negotiate life in prison or the so-called ‘jail-ashram’.With unbelievable details of the life inside prison and the sorry state of hundreds of undertrials languishing in jails, this book questions the primary purpose of imprisonment – is it actually reform, punishment or just misusing the system we are a part of?

    Sharma shows what can and must change in India’s policies, its administration and even its attitudes. The answers he provides are not obvious, and require courage. Nor are they all comforting or conventional. Yet they could, in less time than you can imagine, unleash the creativity of a billion hopeful Indians.

    A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. Vermeer's images captivate us with their beauty and mystery: What stories lie behind these stunningly rendered moments? As Timothy Brook shows us, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur, which European explorers got from Native Americans in exchange for weapons. Those beaver pelts, in turn, financed the voyages of sailors seeking new routes to China. There--with silver mined in Peru--Europeans would purchase, by the thousands, the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time. Moving outward from Vermeer's studio, Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe. The wharves of Holland, wrote a French visitor, were an inventory of the possible. Vermeer's Hat shows just how rich this inventory was, and how the urge to acquire the goods of distant lands was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood.

    The monograph vociferouslydemanded that socialism be sacrificed for a competitive market economic system, so India cangrow at 10 per cent per year, achieve self-reliance, full employment and produce nuclear weaponry.The then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi denounced the plan as dangerous.Fifty years later, Swamy redefines his path-breaking ideas on India-specific economic developmentin his seminal work, Reset. It undertakes a nuanced analysis of the manner in which the highlyprosperous Indian economy witnessed a long, accelerated decline due to persistent British imperialistaggression, and compares the distinctive manner in which Asian giants—India and China—sufferedat the hands of imperialism. He critically analyses the highs and lows of the Nehruvian model ofcentralized economic planning borrowed from the Soviet Union, and the debilitating circumstancesthat impelled him, as Commerce Minister in Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar’s government, todraw up a blueprint for economic reforms.

    A land where history, myth and email forwards have come together to create a sense of a glorious past that is awe-inspiring...and also kind of dubious. But that is what happens when your future is uncertain and your present is kind of shitty—it gets embellished until it becomes a totem of greatness and a portent of potential. Sidin Vadukut takes on a complete catalogue of ‘India's Greatest Hits’ and ventures to separate the wheat of fact from the chaff of legend. Did India really invent the zero? Has it truly never invaded a foreign country in over 1,000 years? Did Indians actually invent plastic surgery before those insufferable Europeans? The truth is more interesting—and complicated—than you think.

    She is considered one of the outstanding Indian poets writing in English, although her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography. Much of her writing in Malayalam came under the pen name Madhavikkutty. She was born on March 31, 1934 in Malabar in Kerala, India. She is the daughter of V.M. Nair, a former managing editor of the widely-circulated Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi, and Nalappatt Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayali poetess. In 1984, she was short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature along with Marguerite Yourcenar, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer. Kamala Das is probably the first Hindu woman to openly and honestly talk about sexual desires of Indian woman, which made her an iconoclast of her generation. The fact that the book has run into thirty editions is proof enough to appreciate the popularity of the book

    An elderly passenger looked at him and said, "We're all trying to go that way," pointing to the rear. "You, you're going this way?"Giridharadas was returning to the land of his ancestors, amid an unlikely economic boom. But he was interested less in its gold rush than in its cultural upheaval, as a new generation has sought to reconcile old traditions and customs with new ambitions and dreams.In "India Calling," Giridharadas brings to life the people and the dilemmas of India today, through the prism of his emigre family history and his childhood memories of India. He introduces us to entrepreneurs, radicals, industrialists, and religious seekers, but, most of all, to Indian families. He shows how parents and children, husbands and wives, cousins and siblings are reinventing relationships, bending the meaning of Indianness, and enduring the pangs of the old birthing the new.Through their stories, and his own, he paints an intimate portrait of a country becoming modern while striving to remain itself."

    It examines a distinctive stage in the development of capitalism that began in the 1980s, in order to understand where we are now and how capitalism has evolved since. The book discusses the crisis tendencies of capitalism--including the S.E. Asian banking crisis, the collapse of the Russian economy, and the 1997-1998 global financial crisis--asking whether capitalism is doomed to fail. In the end, the author ruminates on a possible alternative to capitalism, discussing socialism, communal and cooperative experiments, and alternatives proposed by environmentalists.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

    Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the nineteenth century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history and to sow the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World.

    Why does such a small country speak to so many global concerns? More pressingly: Why does Israel make the decisions it does? And what lies in its future?We cannot answer these questions until we understand Israel’s people and the questions and conflicts, the hopes and desires, that have animated their conversations and actions. Though Israel’s history is rife with conflict, these conflicts do not fully communicate the spirit of Israel and its people: they give short shrift to the dream that gave birth to the state, and to the vision for the Jewish people that was at its core. Guiding us through the milestones of Israeli history, Gordis relays the drama of the Jewish people’s story and the creation of the state. Clear-eyed and erudite, he illustrates how Israel became a cultural, economic and military powerhouse—but also explains where Israel made grave mistakes and traces the long history of Israel’s deepening isolation.With Israel, public intellectual Daniel Gordis offers us a brief but thorough account of the cultural, economic, and political history of this complex nation, from its beginnings to the present. Accessible, levelheaded, and rigorous, Israel sheds light on the Israel’s past so we can understand its future. The result is a vivid portrait of a people, and a nation, reborn.

    The story only ends there, however, if you’re fortunate enough to live in an adequate civilization.Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Inadequate Equilibria is a sharp and lively guidebook for anyone questioning when and how they can know better, and do better, than the status quo. Freely mixing debates on the foundations of rational decision-making with tips for everyday life, Yudkowsky explores the central question of when we can (and can’t) expect to spot systemic inefficiencies, and exploit them.