The Past, The Present And The Future.
An account of the three wonderful Books, the ones that I must recommend to everyone.
Books are no doubt a wonderful source of knowledge. Knowledge, that is hard to find elsewhere, and is so vast that one single mind cannot learn all of it in one life by itself. “Stand on the shoulders of giants” is a very apt proverb indeed.
And with the speed that comes with all the tech that we have build our world around, surprisingly reading is so uncommon these days. Humans are very impatient and they want all the ‘gyan’ in minimum possible time. Just-enough to do their job and with bare minimum movements possible. As a consequence, internet (particularly YouTube) is full of all these contents in video forms, which promise to enlighten you.
Fair enough, some of these are really good. Fortunately, some good writers kept up with the changes in which we consume information, and were fast enough to present their ideas in various mediums.
There are three books in particular which I suggest to every Indian, to know more about our own country. And with them, there are videos that can give you brief but good enough essence of the books and the knowledge they hold within.
The Past
An Era Of Darkness — Dr Shashi Tharoor
A wonderful orator himself, Dr Tharoor stunned the world when he participated in the Oxford Union debate where he enlisted the various acts of loots and cruelty by Britishers on the land of India. The speech was later scripted and structured along with many other facts, figures, stories and citations, into a wonderful piece of work known as “An Era Of Darkness”. This book shows how glorious India was before the British came, and how devastating the conditions of India was, during and after the British Raj.
In describing and confronting what the British did to us, are we refusing to admit our own responsibility for our situation today?
The book is way more than what his speech is, a much needed extension to make Indians aware of their past.
Finally, this book makes an argument; it does not tell a story.
The Present
The Broken Ladder — Anirudh Krishna
The Paradox and the Potential of India’s One Billion. One of the most insightful books I happened to read in 2018. Anirudh Krishna has done a wonderful work in explaining the present condition of India, unforeseeable by the many who are graced with a good life. While India is betting big on Mars Exploration and AI is made use of as far as possible in businesses and governments, India still has to cater the basic needs of the other less fortunate mass. One of the challenge faced by today’s administration is that we need to target all sectors from Stone Age to the Space Age.
It took me some long time to finish the book, it has lots of data and the author has made some amazing use of statistics, which at time took me hours to grasp. But when I finished, I had lots of changed opinion about my country. I became aware of many economics and government policies, and how they work. I came to know about many NGOs and the wonderful work they are doing.
The reason why I bought this book in the first place is this summary of it on The Hindu. I used to read The Hindu regularly and the weekend edition, where they review books was one page I was always delighted to read.
The Future
21 Lessons of the 21 Century — Yuval Noah Harari
Prof Harari is just amazing. He holds a vision of future, which is radically unseen by most of us. This book doesn’t present you a future of any particular nation. And this is what makes Harari’s books interesting. He believes that the future belongs not to the success or failure of some group of people, but to the actions of humans altogether. It makes sense, its’t it? If you see the problems that we are facing, or have a good change to face in future, are all global problems. Global Warming, Climate change, Plastic and wastes, Peace and War, Trade and Commerce, all are Global matters.
The video is not a suitable preface of his book, note that there are many more relevant videos on YouTube, if you may search, the ones at WEF or Google, but since this talk was delivered in India, so I chose it over others.
