What I have read so far in 2022 (Part 1 of 2)
The reading list for 2022- four books- has been even thinner than that for 2021. Mea Culpa. But for all it was worth, this has been an extraordinary year. That, for the simple reason that it was an ordinary year, with ordinary pleasures and perhaps ordinary responsibilities.After two, unending years of collective misery and confinement shared by humanity (for those of us living outside China). Revenge travel, unending commutes, water cooler conversations and obligatory socializing came roaring back. Reminding us of how much of our time over the past two years, hitherto being deployed towards reading and contemplation, was being nibbled away by the hum and din of life. Readings this year were troubled, no thanks to the cognitive distractions that rose from a desire to make up, in social interactions, what had been lost so far in this decade.?
That said, there was still this saving grace - of having read books that were purchased, but were never read over the past decade or more, the fulfillment of a customary obligation to one’s library. Fighting the multiple distractions of a crazy year, here are the books that I read this year:?
Research suggests that what you eat has an impact on your mood, what you listen to while working has an impact on your concentration. If that be the case, then, does being in a particular place while reading a book also affect your comprehension of its contents? If I were to take this instance of my readings of this Gurucharan Das classic as an evidence, the aforementioned hypothesis should be true. I read this book while in Andalusia, where its lessons were interspersed with sayings of stoics (Seneca), Arab philosophers (Ibn Rushd) and Jewish mystics (Maimonides) of the medieval age. I remember wondering how thinkers across cultural and religious traditions have wrestled with the moral haziness of their actions, with ideals and accepted behaviors and with the very necessity to be good, truthful and honest, in a world where these values are often not rewarded.?
The book begins with the concept - that which sustains is Dharma (Dharyate iti Dharma), and then the author, much like the ancient Indian philosophers - refuses to elaborate further. That is because there is a subjectiveness and heterodoxy in what sustains. And who does it sustain? And like Bheeshma in the epic Mahabharata, Das accepts and explains, with both ancient and contemporary examples, why moral judgments are imperfect and subtle.?
Each chapter explores the concept of Dharma from the perspective of a key character of Mahabharata, it defines a particular emotion dominating their story arc - envy for Duryodhana, righteousness for Yudhisthira, the dilemma of choice between militarism and pacifism for Arjuna, revenge for Ashwatthama and the limits of justice, in their own ways, for Draupadi and Karna - to name a few. What beautifully comes out in this process is how their actions remain informationally incomplete and largely influenced by their own personal experiences. A victim of casteism, Karna himself becomes blind to the war crime of killing a minor (Abhimanyu) by his friend Duryodhana - because he is bound by the oath of unconditional friendship he took, in a vulnerable moment. Or, on the other side, how Balarama, looking at the war from a broader social lens, never reconciles with his younger brother Krishna’s view of this being a just war worth fighting for? his friends and cousins.?
Finally, the book’s contribution, at least to our modern? lives, is to warn against ideological extremism - a word of caution to protect ourselves from moral extremes. As different characters realize it through their journey, being good, sans nuance and context, is difficult. It cannot be achieved by imbibing any scriptures or commandments written in stone. Dharma is contextual. It confronts one with challenges at each step and the necessity of existence is to make those tough moral choices in a world with incomplete information, living within the tight embrace of our emotions. It is that intricate balance between Sadharana Dharma (what society expects out of you because of your status) and Swadharma (what your conscience tells you) that one must strike before making any decision. In that sense, Mahabharata, and by its corollary, this book - are manuals of action, not belief. Unlike a self-help book, no listicle-based paths to success or happiness are prescribed.?
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The Difficulty of Being Good is a book worth engaging with, at different times in one’s life. It is a guidebook that you periodically come to, to reflect on the consequences that your actions have had in life and how some of the most celebrated characters in Sanskrit literature related with them and solved them.?
Here is an easy summary of the steps that led to the Great Depression:
However, this oversimplified version lends itself to the risk that in the future, while we may have the means to prevent to exactly this form of economic crisis, we may still have no idea of the missteps and cognitive biases the policymakers in charge of the central banks in developed economies harbored.?
This is also why Liaqat Ahamed’s account of the central bank governors of Bank of England, New York Fed, Reichsbank and Banque de France in the 1920s is such an important read for economics enthusiasts. History depends on much weightier factors than actions of individuals. But the priors, proclivities and behaviors of the more powerful among them have an outsize impact on the course of crises. It is easy to see the folly of these men in hindsight. However, people who were raised with a belief that governments should spend within their means; that a currency peg to gold? was a natural check on populist leaders and that central banks and governments should maintain an arm’s length relationship. Moreover, it was difficult to see how outdated the gold standard was to the economic realities of the 20th century. Or, in the United States, which drew its central bankers from a close cabal of financiers from old immigrant families based on the East Coast, it was a blasphemy to contemplate bringing the rapidly multiplying rural and cooperative banks set up by immigrants into its regulatory fold, something that could have nipped the banking crises in the bud. Or, in France, where central bankers were - bureaucrats first, foreign policy experts occasionally and economists almost never - it would have been ludicrous to not push Germany too far when it came to reparations, and not come along too late, when it came to relief. Sometimes, in determining the course of history, personalities matter - especially if those people have a monopoly on the issuance of global reserve currencies.?
In its panoramic reach, the book also goes further than any that I have read to explain the Great Depression from a non- US point of view. The lay person in finance has come to associate the Great Depression with a stock market bubble in the US that once deflated, precipitated a bank run and then an economic crisis. Ahamed pulls the eyepiece of this telescope a bit further back, and shows the evolution of the Great Depression on both sides of the Atlantic - beginning with the attempts by Germany to restrict payments to foreign creditors back in 1928, the decision by Britain to go off the gold standard in 1931 and finally, a Europe wide corporate credit contagion in 1932-33. Seen through this perspective, the Great Depression did not just have a single point of failure in the US stock market, but was a succession of crises - foreign exchange in Germany and Britain, banking in the US and credit across Europe- that built upon each other. The tragedy was, through these years, the central bankers and policymakers largely stuck to their beliefs around austerity and fiscal discipline in the face of illiquidity. They scarcely questioned their? tendency to overestimate the capacity of the economy to overheat under a stimulus and disregarded their obligation to assist the state for having let them maintain a monopoly as an issuer of legal tender and a regulator of banks.?
To be continued....