Two brilliant quotes from two of my oft read blog sites.
This one is from Crooked Timber, commenting on Thomas Friedman’s new book, The World is Flat:
It takes a long, long apprenticeship laboring the Augean stables of Globollocks to write a sentence like this:
The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.
Amazing. Tom Friedman is a God. No, not a God so much as a moustachioed force of nature, pumped up on the steroids of globalization, a canary in the coalmine of an interconnected era whose tentacles are spreading over the face of a New Economy savannah where old lions are left standing at their waterholes, unaware that the young Turks—and Indians—have both hands on the wheel of fortune favors the brave face the music to their ears to the, uh, ground.
ROTFL over and over again. I must read the book now. I need a good laugh:). I don’t think that i will be able to read a single chapeter without grinning ear to ear thinking about being pumped up with the “steroids of globalisation”
A link left for this review is even funnier. Read them both. And think about them if you have the urge to read the book.
The second one is from Marginal Revolution. and it is on Corruption:
Then Suharto looked at [James] Wolfensohn. “You know, what you regard as corruption in your part of the world, we regard as family values.”
So true especially in India. Don’t know about the rest of the world. Just look at the families Yadav (laloo), Thackeray, Nehru Gandhi – etal. And corruption is not just taking money under the table – it is also nepotism.
A review on The World”s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations
This is a book that is on my to read list. Doesn’t seem as funny as Friedman’s book but worth a read all the same.
I read the World is Flat, quiet impressive. Friedmen those have a habit of going all coloumnist on you and go about chronicling globalization all big eyed and awe struck.
All and all I quiet liked the book. Its starts off in Bangalore in a golf course.
Here my review
Hi Akshay
i always found Friedman a difficult book read. It started with his “From Beirut to Jerusalem” which i gave up half way through reading. Much preferred Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation.
Then my brother gifted my mom – Lexus and the Olive Tree. I again gave up on the book. And I usually tend to read almost anything that i can lay my hands on – cover to cover.
I am going to make an attemt with the “world is flat”. I read portions of it in the Express. There is no rocket science in his book – it is stating the obvious. i found the newyork press review very cutting and funny:)
am hopping across to your site to read yours!
Corruption is imbibed in our culture from childhood.
1) We will buy you cycle if you get first rank/class in exams.
2) Behave properly when guests are home; will give you chocolate.
3) Bonus to do job properly
We may glorify it by calling performance (linked) incentives; it is nothing but bribe and corruption.