Author William Dalrymple has been in love with India for 30 years and written many books about the country. He tells Selma Day that it was just pure chance that he ended up there
Last month saw the famed Jaipur Literature Festival arrive at the Southbank Centre, showcasing South Asia’s literary heritage through a day of talks, music and readings. We caught up with festival director William Dalrymple, the author of nine books about India and the Islamic world, including White Mughals, The Last Mughal and his most recent, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan.
When did your fascination with India begin?
Knowing nothing about India and with very little interest, I ended up there by total accident, aged 18. I was in a state of total confusion for about a week and then fell rather hopelessly in love with it and it’s a relationship that has continued until this day. It’s 30 years this year.
Author: Jim Zellmer
Business jargon: Squaring the circle
“Putting together the pipelines,” was how Pfizer chief executive Ian Read explained his proposed takeover of British drugmaking rival AstraZeneca.
“Let’s make sure we get good capital allocation… build a culture of ownership… flexible use of financial assets… productive science… opportunity to domicile… putting together the headcount,” were among his phrases as he faced MPs last month, much to the frustration of committee members.
“I asked a simple question,” committee chairman Adrian Bailey said at one point.
Use of jargon is not a new phenomenon, but businesses are leaving their customers and even their own staff scratching their heads about where their firms are going and where they themselves stand.
“This jargon is tribal and reinforces belonging,” says Alan Stevens, director of Vector Consultants, which advises companies on culture. “It’s part of the psyche. But it’s not useful.”
The ‘Great Wave’ that reached the West
Ukiyo-e prints could be found in Europe from at least 1795 at the Cabinet des Estampes at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. It was not until the 1850s, however, when trade between Japan and Europe began to flourish, that the craze for things Japanese began to crescendo.
The story goes that French printmaker Felix Bracquemond (1833-1914) encountered a picture-book by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) that arrived in France with a shipment of porcelain in the late 1850s. In 1859, a sourcebook by the potter and designer Eugene Collinot and Adalbert de Beaumont included Hokusai’s imagery.
By the early 1860s, French intellectuals such as Charles Baudelaire and Edmond de Goncourt began to take interest. And that most internationally recognizable Hokusai print, commonly called the “Great Wave,” has now come to stand allusively for the surge of European interest in Japanese printmaking that emerged from the latter half of the 19th century.
Want to spot the next bubble? Look at where Harvard grads work
Everybody wants to know what the next bubble is, and there’s an easy way to tell: Just watch where Harvard grads are going. Then short the hell out of that.
It’s called the Harvard M.B.A. Indicator — though it applies to undergrads, too — and it’s one part psychology, another part economics. The idea is simple enough: It’s a bad sign when more Harvard grads go to Wall Street.
Harvard is a magnet for Organization Kids who excel at coloring between the lines. After graduation, they want to do something prestigious, something remunerative, but mostly, as Kevin Roose points out, something that gives them new lines to color between. That might be Silicon Valley, or it might be Teach for America — or it might be Wall Street, if, that is, the getting looks good.
“His ignorance freed him from the assumptions that dominated the industry”
Mr Munk’s greatest gamble was his move into mining when he founded Barrick in 1983. He knew little about the business at the time—just as he had known little about hotels before that. But his ignorance freed him from the assumptions that dominated the industry. It was mostly run by geologists and engineers whose aim was to dig enormous holes with other people’s money, paying little regard to shareholder returns. Gold miners were supposed to be “believers” in gold rather than efficient managers out to maximise profits. “Bullshit,” thought Mr Munk; he soon changed all that. A string of ever-more audacious acquisitions turned Barrick into what was for a while the world’s largest gold miner and is still among the biggest.
Mr Munk also turned out to be a first-rate manager of his growing business empire. He may have been willing to overrule old hands when it came to whether mining should be run by managers or miners—and do it with absolute self-confidence that brooked no question. But he was also willing to delegate operational decisions to experts. Indeed, he explicitly refused to micromanage, to give himself time to think big thoughts.
On China’s Property Bubble
Attempts to bail out the property market are unlikely to succeed. China’s property market is a bubble in both volume and price. Oversupply, especially in small cities, is destroying the expectation of price appreciation. Speculation cannot be revived. Household indebtedness is close to saturation. The high prices in large cities cannot be sustained by debt growth. Bailout attempts, such as eliminating purchase restrictions, will only backfire, as the restrictions do not suppress demand in the first place.
The property market could follow the example of the A-share market. Bailout attempts have less and less impact. The market eventually dies when people no longer pay attention to it.
Allowing prices to adjust is the best policy. The distortions in the economy due to the bubble shrink. The efficiency of the economy improves as a result. The improving efficiency leads to better labor income, which supports the virtuous cycle of rising wages and rising consumption.
The myth of the science park economy
Paul Nightingale and Alex Coad.:
Over the last 30 years innovation and entrepreneurship have become increasingly prominent concerns for successive UK governments. And yet our record is mixed, to say the least. The economist David Storey has calculated that we spend about £8bn a year supporting small firms in the UK. Having spent this money we should be asking: where are our Googles?
Innovation is often seen as originating from university research, which then migrates into start-ups incubated in science parks, before moving out into the wider world. There is also financial support to create geographically concentrated ‘clusters’ of networked, innovative small firms. But how many new global firms has the UK produced in recent years? A handful perhaps, ARM, Imagination Technologies, CSR, and the recently acquired DeepMind and Natural Motion are all excellent firms, but not yet at the level of Google, Apple or Cisco.
This is not just a British problem. In Europe and the US it is probably fair to say that there is not a single example of a successful cluster that has been created by government intervention.
Winklevoss twins: Bitcoin will be bigger than Facebook
It was on a very hot day in July 2012 that the Winklevoss twins discovered bitcoin, while partying in Ibiza. At 32 years old, the enviably athletic pair have both Harvard and Oxford on their CVs, and seem predestined for success. They famously won a $65m settlement from Facebook after claiming Mark Zuckerberg had stolen their idea for a Harvard social network, and rowed in the 2008 Olympics.
Yet their chance encounter with bitcoin in the Mediterranean was rather more serendipitous. “We were on vacation, and happened to bump into a guy who is mutual friend and he started to tell us about bitcoin,” Tyler Winklevoss explains. “We were fascinated from day one,” he says, hinting that having just abandoned five years of chasing Facebook through the courts, the time was right to start something new. “At the time we were just re-immersing ourselves inside the tech world, getting into the trenches again.”
Debt Forgiveness In History
In the face of large-scale economic shocks, enforcing debt contracts places an unbearable burden on debtors, who cut back their spending and send the entire economy into deep recession. One of the main arguments we make in our new book is that debt forgiveness makes a lot of sense when the economy experiences a large-scale negative shock that is beyond the control of any one individual.
History seems to understand this lesson well. The 48th provision of the Code of Hammurabi, written more than 3,500 years ago in Mesopotamia, states that: “If any one owe a debt for a loan, and a storm prostrates the grain, or the harvest fail, or the grain does not growth for lack of water, in that year he need not give his creditor any grain, he washes his debt-tablet in water and pays no rent for this year.” The main threat to economic activity in ancient Mesopotamia was a drought, and one of the first legal codes understood that debt should be forgiven if such a negative shock occurred.
In 1819 when agricultural prices in the United States plummeted leaving farmers overly indebted and unable to pay their mortgages, politicians ran to their defense. Many state governments immediately imposed moratoria on debt payments and foreclosures. Senator Ninian Edwards of Illinois pushed through national legislation to forgive farmers’ debt, arguing that the country should have sympathy for the farmers who, like the rest of the country, got caught up in the short-lived “artificial and fictitious prosperity.”
How privacy became an American value
“I BECOME A TRANSPARENT EYE-BALL,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, in the most famous sentence of “Nature.” In an age of constant surveillance, that image has taken on a sinister new meaning. Transparent eyeballs regard us everywhere we go—from cameras perched above intersections, in building lobbies, and from our phones and laptops, which watch us as much as we watch them.
For those who worry about this oppressively bright light on our activities, the Fourth Amendment offers some shade, with its clear language against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and its promise that Americans have the right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects.” Lately, judges and attorneys have been scrutinizing those words, seeking to establish just how much privacy they grant us. On April 29, two cases reached the Supreme Court, asking whether the Fourth Amendment limits the right of the police to seize a cellphone from a suspect. As our lives become ever more visible to the transparent eyeballs of the future (including—yikes—drones disguised as birds and insects), the Fourth Amendment will stand at the center of the controversy.