Just finished up a biography of Narasimha Rao, who was President of India from 1991-1996 and was the guy who fundamentally opened India up to liberal capitalism, after it had moldered under the Nehru-Gandhis. I had never heard of the guy, and am not sure how it got onto my shelf. Probably The Economist had given it a good review or something.
In any case, it was a tough reed, but ultimately a rewarding one. The world is such a large place, there is so much going on out there, and it's impossible for us to have our arms around all of it. But that doesn't mean that diversifying what's coming into one's brain doesn't bear fruit. Alongside Our Daily Bread, the bio of Green Revolution scion Norman Borlaug, this book opened new doors into the recent history of the developing world in a way that very little else has.
In the end, the key learnings from this book were the following:
- to effect significant change, it's often important to present the change as being continuous with the ideas of that which is being changed: Rao used Nehru's rhetoric to validate some of his reforms
- be wiley and think several steps ahead. This is hard for idealists like myself. Tactics sometimes precede strategy
The author, a young PhD candidate from Princeton named Vinay Sitapati, characterized a bio of Deng Xiaopeng by Ezra Vogel as "magisterial." That's high praise. That book is now on my list.
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