Arithmetic

Title: Arithmetic

Author: Paul Lockhart

Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017 (First)

ISBN: 9780674972230

Pages: 223

Even though arithmetic forms only a small subset of mathematics (when you say something about math, it causes no harm using some of its parlance such as subsets), for many people it is the science of mathematics. And, it is the subject that scares away children from appreciating the art and experiencing the joy of doing math. It is forced learning by rote and mechanical procedures for performing arithmetical operations without stopping a moment to perceive what is going on that repels so many children away from it. Clearly, a new paradigm is needed to teach math in elementary schools, making it a participatory experience for the students. However, the sad fact is that most of the teachers were also churned out by the system of memorizing of multiplication tables and doing long division by carefully choreographed procedures which keeps you on tenterhooks until the final result appears. This book is a welcome change to the genre of popular math. It teaches a teacher of math how to teach it to young boys and girls and to make a generation quite confident of dealing with it. The methods and structures detailed in the book are highly oriented to practical learning, while clearly explaining the theoretical aspects in an easy to follow way. Paul Lockhart teaches math at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York. He is the quintessential teacher who renounced his prestigious career in the university to teach in a grade school. He is the author of two more books on learning math.

Arithmetic is the skillful arrangement of numerical information for ease of communication and comparison. Lockhart makes it categorically clear that being good at it does not make you particularly smart or mathematically inclined. It is like any other craft you can get good at if you wanted to, but it is no big deal either way, assures the author. The book gives an excellent introduction to the two main schemes of arranging numerals – the marked-value and place-value systems. It starts right from the activity of counting where you take stock of something by assigning a numeral to denote something in the real world. Actual examples from the Egyptian, Roman, Chinese and Indian systems are given. It is the place-value system developed in ancient India that revolutionized the way the world did its calculations. Invention of the symbol and concept of zero as a place holder to denote a null value was a novel concept, without which the explosion in information exchange wouldn’t have come into being. The Indian numerical system reached Europe in the thirteenth century through Arab traders. Leonardo of Pisa – better known as Fibonacci – showcased the new ideas in his book Liber Abaci (Book of the Abacus). Strangely, such a fool proof system was slow to catch on with the general public in Europe. Such is the aversion of people to change! Even as late as the eighteenth century, well-educated adults found it confusing and overly technical. Eventually, convenience and increasing availability of inexpensive paper won out over the traditional Roman numerals.

The book is an attempt right from the first page to the last to kindle the spirit of appreciation for mathematical beauty among the readers. In case anyone still ‘feared’ numbers, Lockhart encourages them with sage advice that mathematical operations are only good strategies for encoding and manipulating numerical information, and we can use them in any way we see fit. Instead of thinking in terms of systems and rules, we should think of it more as options and tools at our disposal (p.73). The entire gamut of basic mathematical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are covered in detail and provide new insight into the heart of the problem. Even those who are well-versed in math would learn one or two new ideas from this impressive book. Lockhart also attempts to detach numbers and its representations from its homologues in the real world. It is not always possible to find a related process happening around us. Math or arithmetic is abstract, making reification – the process of searching for counterparts in the real world – extremely difficult and sometimes impossible. Whether or not it is physically possible, arithmetic imagine or invent some sort of logically coherent structures and forms a part of mathematical reality. This disclaimer is issued in the context of negative numbers which can’t be compared readily to any real thing. But it provides an excellent tool for making calculations to arrive at the result that has real significance. Even though Lockhart doesn’t mention it in this book, complex numbers – which are square roots of negative numbers – are another realm of arithmetic which has no physical meaning, but is immensely useful in calculating and comparing real world data.

There is nothing to be said against the book, except its small type size and the absence of categorization into distinct chapters. The entire volume appears to be divided into several topics of varying lengths, more akin to an encyclopedia rather than a normal work of learning. Even though the focus is on aspiring teachers, the author has cleverly included several practice questions without making it appear as an exercise. The chapter on mechanical calculating machines could’ve been eliminated, as it proves a redundant chapter that doesn’t contribute anything to the general thread of argument. This book is an excellent choice for anyone who has set his heart on becoming a teacher of elementary schools, which will surely help them become an arithmetician of wit and intelligence.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 5 Star

The Sultan and the Queen

Title: The Sultan and the Queen – The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam

Author: Jerry Brotton

Publisher: Viking, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9780525428824

Pages: 338

Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century was a defining moment in the history of England. Henry VIII’s adoption of the faith which the popish clergy termed as apostasy forced the country’s destiny to diverge from that of continental Europe where Pope’s writ reigned supreme. The catholic world devised all means in their power to browbeat England away from Protestantism. However, Queen Elizabeth I turned into a bulwark of national pride and prestige. Her subjects boldly stood behind their monarch in fighting off the forces of Catholicism. However, England needed to have allies in their war and trade efforts. Who else can be more apt than the Muslim powers that rimmed the Mediterranean littoral who were themselves enemies of the catholic states? England soon established relations with the Ottoman, Moroccan and Persian empires. Trade and cultural interactions with them flourished towards the close of sixteenth century. English theater came to be a mirror of public opinion of the impact created by the increased interchange with Muslims. This book is a summary of the brief period of Elizabeth’s reign, how England obtained a good commercial rapport with Islamic kingdoms and how it all tumbled down after the death of Elizabeth. Jerry Brotton is a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is a renowned broadcaster and critic, as well as the author of many books on East-West relations and history of early-Modern age.

Religion is a powerful factor in state formation and further developing their interactions. Christianity had an old score to settle against Islam for conquering the Holy Land. After its ultimately futile crusades, a working relationship seems to have originated after the fall of Constantinople to Ottomans in 1453. Close on its heels came the Reformation which rent the Christian body politic into Catholics and Protestants. All political equations changed in a few decades. Catholic states under the spiritual – and often temporal too – guidance of the Pope tried their best to score over their Protestant rivals, while the Protestants were not averse to enlist the alliance of the Muslim empires of the Ottoman, Moroccan and Persian to defeat the Pope’s forces. Brotton begins the book in an atmosphere of intrigue and Christian fraternal antagonism, when Queen Elizabeth I receive a letter from Ottoman Sultan Murad III offering to allow English merchants to trade with his country. Charles II of Spain and the Papal interests lay in the middle of both and hence treated as a common enemy. The Protestants equated Islamic aniconism in religious worship to their own iconoclasm that separated them from their Catholic brethren. Similarly, the Ottomans observed a kindred spirit in the Protestants’ fierce opposition against Catholic rituals venerating saints and adoring graven images of Christ and the Madonna. Deriving maximum mileage out of the prevalent perceptions, the English established trading relations with all three major Islamic regimes. The book introduces detailed narratives of how the trade agents faced very heavy odds in foreign lands where they were initially torn between the hostility of ambassadors of European catholic states and the condescending indifference of the sultan. Anglo-Ottoman relations began with the trade concessions obtained by the young adventurer Anthony Jenkinson from Suleyman the Magnificent in 1554. William Harborne consolidated the trading relations under Murad III in 1579. England was driven to the wall when Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570 and ordered his supporters to isolate and dethrone her. England orchestrated attacks against the Spanish with active help of Moroccans, who were in turn became so impressed as to let Elizabeth known by the affectionate sobriquet of Sultana Isabel.

England’s increased involvement in Mediterranean politics produced its echo in the cultural context as well. English writers were increasingly attracted to Islamic themes and experimented with a cast of characters which drastically differed from the established canon. Anti-heroes in the guise of Moors (an epithet of Muslims that came to be associated with them in the sense of inhabitants of Morocco) came on the stage with thunderous impact on the masses. Its greatest influence was seen in theatre. It all began with Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine in 1587 and Jew of Malta just three years later. The floodgates of creativity were opened wide with these sensational plays. Of more than sixty plays featuring Turks, Moors and Persians performed in London’s public theaters between 1576 and 1603, forty were staged between 1588 and 1599. More than ten of them acknowledged explicit debts to Tamburlaine. William Shakespeare was another glorious entrant to this branch of drama that enacted plays which transcended established boundaries of morality, religion and ethnicity. While Marlowe emphasized his characters’ relentless will to power, Shakespeare made historic failures into figures of empathy, interest and pathos. This book examines several Shakespearean plays with a critical eye to their historical inspiration. Plays such as Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus and Othello have a strong Moorish influence on the storyline. Othello, in fact, was a Moor whose uncertain entry into Venetian aristocracy through his marriage with Desdemona was marred by the intrigues caused by racial hatred personified in the character of Iago. Brotton makes a memorable review of these plays and exposes the defining parameter of its motivation to Mediterranean concerns that caused a stir in contemporary London.

Strangely, the Anglo-Islamic alliance collapsed as swiftly as it began. Elizabeth died in 1603 and within a year, King Ahmad al-Mansur of Morocco died of plague and Sultan Mehmed III of Turkey of a heart attack. James I who succeeded Elizabeth wanted to resurrect closer ties with Christian kingdoms, catholic or not. Continental kingdoms supporting the Pope had also learned the hard lesson in trying to humble the English whose might stood unchallenged in the sea. A quick rapprochement between England and Spain made the position of Muslim ambassadors precarious in London. James turned towards the west, to America while the Ottoman sultan turned east, to Persia as the next battleground to expand their empires, creating an uncanny inactivity in the Mediterranean. The sharp polarization on religious lines helped European Christians take a lead over the Near Eastern Muslims with rapid progress in scientific knowledge and giant strides in technology. Muslim culture began its downward slide to stagnancy when they were driven out of the gates of Vienna in 1683. They were never to raise their heads again in Europe for a long, long time. Islamic motifs ceased to inspire English playwrights around the time of Elizabeth’s death. Shakespeare didn’t use Moorish characters after Othello. Brotton paints a closely followed picture of how the curtain fell on Islamic influence and the era of Orientalism began. The book includes a good collection of colour plates depicting portraits and other scenes related to the narrative.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

China’s Crony Capitalism

Title: China’s Crony Capitalism – The Dynamics of Regime Decay

Author: Minxin Pei

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9780674737297

Pages: 365

When Mao died in 1976, China was at a crossroad of her destiny. The Chairman’s politically exhilarating but economically disastrous policies had put the country in a fix. It was Deng Xiaoping who succeeded Mao that put China back on rails and steered her to prosperity by scrapping ideological underpinnings and ushering in capitalist reforms in the 1990s. However, the power to set policy and take crucial decisions was still vested in the hands of a coterie of powerful party bosses. With advancing decentralization that came in the wake of Deng’s economic reforms, party chiefs in the provinces and prefectures wielded unrestrained power and liberal delegation of authority was transferred to them. Transparency of financial transactions and installation of an open market mechanism to channel them were not the priorities of the party elite. Consequently, collusion between the party officials and private businessmen began to have a clinching effect on major economic decisions taken by corrupt officials at all levels. This went on in the party, the government and state-owned enterprises (SOE). Corrosion of the political authority of the party led to regime decay. The degeneration of the administrative apparatus was stemmed in 2012 when Xi Jinping assumed power and immediately ordered a crackdown on corruption. As ordinary Chinese watched in disbelief, hundreds of officials having very high ranks and their accomplices were booked and mercilessly brought to justice. This book analyses the systematic failures that encouraged foul play, the methods by which unscrupulous elements carried on their murky business and the prospects of the communist party which is hampered by the bogey of corruption. Minxin Pei is Tom and Margot Pritzker Professor of Government and Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College in the US.

Crony capitalism is an instrumental union between capitalists and politicians designed to allow the former to acquire wealth, legally or otherwise, and the latter to seek and retain power. Liberal capitalism, with its appendages like democracy and transparency, is anathema to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its cronies. Collusive corruption came to the fore in 1990s, after the Tiananmen Square massacre in which thousands of protesting students were mauled and crushed under the wheels of army tanks driven into the midst of the young people in a bid to clear the square. It was one of the most horrific and brutal acts of oppression by a regime on its citizens. Opening up of the economy reached fever pitch after this incident because the Chinese government was anxious to ensure a speedy improvement in the economic lot of the people and mollify them. But collusive corruption is more destructive than individual corruption because such behaviour destroys the organizational fabric of the state, increases the difficulty of detection and produces greater financial gains for the perpetrators. With the administrative decentralization came the collusion of party chiefs and their subordinates with businessmen. Local chiefs were now powerful enough to appoint and control the career prospects of subordinates. Transfer of state assets to private entrepreneurs put more problems on the table. Reforms on ownership rights under opaque regulations offered more avenues for corruption. Real estate and land transactions, infrastructure and construction, mining and SOE restructuring are the most corruption-prone areas in China. However, the perpetrators of graft appear to yield as soon as they are taken into custody. In a bid to get leniency of sentences, they make a clean breast of it all and disclose the names and deeds of their co-conspirators. Investigation into totally unrelated cases thus leads to exposure in other areas. China’s judiciary is also complicit. Unlike conventional courts of law that strive to uphold the rule of law, Chinese judiciary is just another arm of the Communist party apparatus and functions as an instrument of party autocracy. It is governed by a strict hierarchy of party men who are themselves venal.

Organizational reforms in CCP in 1984 transferred the control of an organizational unit from another unit two levels above it to the immediately superior party committee. This brought in the practice of maiguan maiguan (buying and selling of offices) by which cronies could be inserted at any level in the bureaucracy. Disciplinary inspection committees, which controlled foul play to some extent, were weakened. The affordability of bribes for superior positions posed another dilemma. Local officials were paid low salaries and so couldn’t manage the required kickbacks. Such people sought the help of businessmen and crime bosses who advanced the requisite sums. Usually, funding for buying positions came from embezzled public funds, savings from previous corruption income and money received from public sources. This makes the author claim that institutional flaws of the Leninist party state is the root cause of regime decay rather than moral failings of its individual members.

Pei compares the economic after-effects of East Bloc countries to China’s experiment with the same scope and magnitude, but with the party still in command. Transfer of state assets to individuals spawned a kleptocracy in Russia, but this process was comparatively transparent in Poland, Czech Republic, the Baltic States and Hungary. Appropriation of power and financial wellbeing of the mafia-politician nexus bodes ill for the future of China especially if the party apparatus is suddenly or violently dismantled. The author makes a prescient warning that if a regime transition should come, the initiating event is more likely to be a breakdown of the decaying autocracy, possibly induced by a split among the elites inside the party-state, a devastating economic shock, an Arab Spring-style mass revolt that the authorities fail to crush quickly, a disastrous external adventure, or a combination of such events (p.268).

The book is tiresome to read with its monotonous drawl of repeating data and the author making extensive conclusions from hypothetical evaluation of the actual cases of corruption. The entire analysis is based on a dataset of just 260 cases. Frequent and indiscriminate use of statistical concepts of mean, median and standard deviation in analyzing the amount of wealth illegally acquired, the tenure of prison terms awarded to the culprits and the number of years they could carry on with their trade lends an aura of armchair intellectual exercise to the whole book rather than providing a down to earth picture of the ground reality. However, it must also be remembered that China is not going to allow foreign researchers to interview its convicts in the foreseeable future. Each chapter in the book begins with a quote from President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption speeches made in 2013-14. Detailed appendices showing the data on individual convictions are given, but when Pei repeatedly mention corrupt deals and the names of perpetrators in the main text, it gets a bit tedious for the reader.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

The Dynasty

Title: The Dynasty – A Political Biography of the Premier Ruling Family of Modern India

Author: S S Gill

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1997 (First published 1996)

ISBN: 9788172232658

Pages: 569

The first four decades of the Indian Republic saw the unchallenged rule of the Nehru dynasty – 38 out of the 42 years, to be exact. Jawaharlal Nehru gave the mantle to his daughter Indira Gandhi, and she in turn, to her son Rajiv Gandhi. While it can’t be denied that the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is well known for their role in Indian politics, the people look to them as they did to a royal house in India’s ancient past. A lot of writers have contributed to the biography of the family as well as individuals all these years. So, what is the need of another book on the same theme? Coming to think of this, this book is a little different from the pack of this genre. While others follow a biographical approach, this work employs political biography in which the personal lives of the protagonists are by and large ignored. It analyses various sectors of the society and economy and summarizes how the rule of the dynasty brought about a change – not always positive – and how they shaped modern India. The tome is all the more relevant even though it came out 22 years ago, as the widow and son of Rajiv Gandhi are in the race to the prime minister’s chair in the elections to be held in 2019. S S Gill was a career civil servant and retired as Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1985. Having been decorated with Padma Bhushan, he contributed to leading English dailies and magazines after retirement.

The book is noted for its stark and unprecedented expose of many of Nehru’s follies. This is in spite of the naive reluctance on the part of Indian society which equates any criticism of Nehru and Gandhi to an attack on the founding principles of the modern Indian nation. However, Gill establishes with a quote from ‘The Discovery of India’ that Nehru approached India as an alien critic, full of dislike for the present as well as for its past. His ascent to power was not to be fully attributed to the merit of his work in the party or government. Nehru became Congress president in 1929 only with Gandhiji’s prodding of the delegates at the behest of his father Motilal. This is evidenced by the fact that only three out of the eighteen provincial committees had supported his candidature. When he became the prime minister at independence, he wanted to consolidate his power in the party too, in order to elevate his daughter Indira. Vallabhhai Patel was his bete noire in the party, but enjoyed popular support. Purushottam Das Tandon defeated J B Kripalani to become Congress president with Patel’s backing. Tandon and Nehru had a series of clashes on one pretext or the other. When Patel suddenly died, Nehru was emboldened to take on Tandon with no holds barred. Nehru threatened to resign from the party if his own men were not inducted into crucial party councils. An exasperated Tandon resigned in protest and Nehru shamelessly stepped into his shoes as party president. After a brief time, a pliant politician was found in the person of U N Dhebar to become the president and to carry out Nehru’s diktats. In 1959, Dhebar obediently vacated the chair for Indira Gandhi to become Congress president. The perpetuation of the Nehru dynasty in the Congress party began from that point.

Though Gill points out that the unbroken single-party rule for three decades provided the necessary continuity for democracy to take root in Indian soil, he relates a number of issues in which Nehru bungled miserably. His government neglected primary education altogether and encouraged specialized and university education instead. This skewed priority symbolizes the elitist mindset Nehru possessed, which endeared him to the rich, urban and educated upper castes. Allocation for education in the first three five-year plans hovered at a measly seven per cent. No emphasis was placed on increasing literacy. Female literacy was abysmally low and even in the twenty-first century half of the world’s total illiterates reside in the country. Readers can clearly discern from the description of Nehru that he thought himself taller in stature than his party or even the country itself! His beefed up ego and the urge to project himself as a great statesman forced him to spend four hours each day personally dictating replies to letters which came in the hundreds. This silly practice left him with little time for general reading or fresh thinking and was the reason why he often complained of being stale. The moment the country missed Patel the most was after the reorganization of states on linguistic basis which was made a messy and long-drawn out exercise caused by Nehru’s frequent fumbling. In foreign relations too, he made a favourable first impression, but piteously failed to follow through. Having no contact with ground realities, Nehru flew across the world attending inconsequential international conferences and summit meetings while China was readying for attack in 1962. Having an incompetent V K Krishnamenon as defence minister didn’t help matters. China scored an easy victory in the war. The bitterest part of the episode was that none of the non-aligned countries came in India’s support when China attacked her.

The tenures of Indira and Rajiv are followed in a chronological way rather than the thematic pattern used for examining the Nehru period. As such, the narrative does not differ much from the myriad books written on the period. The information available with an insider like the author would’ve added weight to an in-depth analysis. However, he remarks sharply that idealism and greatness walked out of Indian politics with the exit of Nehru. The socialist pattern of Indian economy was of course designed by Nehru, but its enforcement was overseen by Indira, as is evident in the nationalization of banking, general insurance and the coal industry. She took over three foreign-owned petroleum companies, more than 100 sick private textile mills and various other loss-making companies all in the name of public sector commanding the heights of economy. A separate chapter is also included in the book which laments at the disastrous consequences of the excessive reliance on public sector. The dynasty’s progress card is, however, an unmitigated disaster. In 1950, India ranked as the tenth industrialized nation in the world, which slipped to the twenty-seventh position by 1980. India’s share of world trade dwindled from 2 per cent in 1950 to 0.42 per cent in 1980. Rajiv brought in liberalization measures and a partial opening up of the economy at first, but after he was embroiled in ugly corruption scandals like Bofors gun and HDW submarine deal, he lost the initiative. However, Gill brings out one important aspect. Indira’s intellectual outlook lacked the splendor of Nehru’s global concepts and his deep concern for peace, but she operated on a more down-to-earth plane and gave much greater economic content to India’s foreign policy. Rajiv was just an amateur by comparison.

The book’s scope is confined only to the years of power of the scions of the dynasty. No personal details other than deaths and assassinations are included so that it is essentially a political biography. Gill displays a marked leftist perspective in his observations which is unusual for a career bureaucrat. He compares China’s flawed ‘Great Leap Forward’ years to Nehru’s socialist planning and chastises him for not using the party organization of the Congress to impart change to the masses rather than utilizing bureaucracy for the job. Statements such as ‘only in a revolutionary struggle can a leader uphold his ideals untarnished’ (p.491) are jarring because of its empty rhetoric, but help to identify the author’s true political colours. But what is truly outrageous is his assertion that ‘India’s political stability rested on the prop of the elaborate network of relations with the USSR’ (p.526) as if democracy would’ve wilted in India had the USSR not extended its protective shield! This is outright falsehood. The Russian communists had no more affinity to Indian democracy than enlisting a useful partner in India for its cold war strategy. If at all, the USSR in fact supported Indira’s Emergency regime which is a permanent blot on Indian democracy’s balance sheet. Gill argues for the right of self-determination to the Kashmiris, but stops just short of arguing for secession. He riles against research labs set up by Nehru for its elitism and laments that scientists in these institutions were out of touch with the masses. It looks like the author was contemplating a drastic reform like China’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ in which party dissidents and intellectuals were forced to go to remote village communities to do manual labour. At the same time, he finds fault with opting for modern medicine rather than strengthening indigenous medical heritage.

The bureaucrat in Gill exposes his real self in the sharp criticism he reserves for Rajiv Gandhi’s reformed administrative paradigm which liberally borrowed from corporate management such concepts as evaluations and deadlines. These are degraded as worthless in the administration of a huge and diverse country as India. It is really tough to get a civil servant accountable to something! Gill’s most vehement denunciation is directed at General Krishnaswamy Sundarji for his supposed role in Operation Blue Star, though he tactfully does not focus on the General’s name in the military operation on Sikhism’s holiest shrine. Sundarji is accused of adventurism in getting the unsuspecting political leadership mired in a near war with Pakistan following the Brasstacks military exercise. His condemnation of the General is mean as he says without proof to uphold the argument: “Sundarji hankered after a war, not because he was convinced of its inevitability, but as it offered him the only path to personal glory and a niche in history” (p.478). Harsh words in deed, against a soldier who did his duty he was asked to perform by a civilian authority. He even claims that Sundarji had planned a military coup in India. Is this open hostility spawn out of the turf war between a bureaucrat and a military official? Or, is he venting his impotent anguish at the desecration of the holy Harmandir Sahib caused by the disastrous military operation? It is difficult to settle this issue with available material. Gill is also peeved at the undeclared taboo to criticize the armed even forces even on ‘vital matters of national interest’. A shocking claim of the army’s mass murder of innocent pilgrims during the temple operation is described in the book, which is not recounted in any other book I have seen on the subject. In an incident reminiscent of the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756, the army locked sixty pilgrims in a small room and closed all ventilation passages. By the time the door was opened again the next morning, fifty had died of suffocation (p.327). The veracity of this claim is to be verified.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star