Category: Books

  • Freedom at Midnight

    Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

    It’s ironical that I picked up Freedom at Midnight thanks to the show, but this is how history needs to be written. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre have created a meticulously researched account of the final year of British rule in India – starting with the appointment of Lord Mountbatten as the last viceroy of India and ending with the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi.

    But it isn’t dry history, it is almost like a cinematic view of the events that led to the partition of India and its independence in 1947. The narrative is gripping, the prose is eloquent, and the descriptions vivid enough to make one actually feel it’s playing out in real time.

    Through a combination of interviews, archival research, and narrative storytelling, Freedom at Midnight brings to life the key players and tragic choices of that defining year. The Congress, the Muslim league and its leaders, the princely states and their colourful rulers, the machinery of the Raj, all come to life.

    So too do the places – Delhi, Punjab, Bengal. And the British’s summer capital Simla, and how supplies and earlier, even people, were carried up steep mountains by porters each year. The book’s strength lies in its ability to weave together high-level politics and decisions with the (affected) human stories. From the opulence of the British Raj to the celebrations across the nation to the brutal massacres of partition, it is a vast canvas, both geographically and emotionally.

    Freedom at Midnight is written like a thriller – the pace never slackens, even as it moves in and out of complex political drama, the horrors of large-scale violence, and the moving stories of people caught in the upheavals. If one had to pick, Lord Louis Mountbatten stands out. And so does Gandhi.

    Admittedly, the prose does point to a Raj romanticism and the authors have a bias for both the gentlemen. But I don’t think that takes away from the enormity of the task at hand, and they respectively achieved. Appointed the last Viceroy of India, Mountbatten is portrayed with as charming, burdened with the unenviable task of overseeing the end of empire. Gandhi is inimitable – both saintly and stubborn, a man of deep moral conviction navigating a world descending into chaos.

    Jawaharlal Nehru emerges as idealistic and modern, while Muhammad Ali Jinnah is painted in darker shades – stubborn, brilliant and aloof. The quietly important VK Menon, the strong and efficient Vallabhai Patel, an adamant Churchill, kind and gracious Lady Edwina Mountbatten, all play pivotal roles.

    Freedom at Midnightvividly brings out the price of freedom – on a date hastily (in hindsight) decided by Mountbatten in the spur of the moment – the chaos of partition, the failure of political leadership to prevent communal violence, and the limits of British imperial power.

    It captures the horrors of the time – the trainloads of corpses, the mass migrations, and the unspeakable violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. It is possible to simultaneously feel for the decision-makers and the moral cross they had to bear, and for the people who faced the realities stemming from those decisions. They were all just humans, caught in a particular time in history.

    Freedom at Midnight is a fascinating read with a level of detailing that’s quite astounding for the enormousness of the canvas. In my Bibliofiles 2025 long list.

    (Not by design, but Freedom at Midnight is indeed a worthy book for review #400 on Goodreads)

    Notes & Quotes from Freedom at Midnight


    1. Mountbatten’s last act as Viceroy was to promote the wife of the Nawab of Palampur to the rank of Highness. She was an Australian and had been denied that rank because she was not of Indian blood. Years later, she asked for the author’s autograph after a lecture in Geneva. Mountbatten also used the debt 3 years later to ensure the navy kept its customs’ privileges because the Collector of Customs had previously been the Nawab’s British Resident – Sir William Croft.
    2. The first British to land in India was William Hawkins, captain of the galleon Hector
    3. Cows were deemed sacred to protect them from slaughter during times of famine
    4. One of the people released thanks to the Irwin pact was Gurcharan Singh, right when he was about to be hanged. He became Gandhi’s follower and would be the person to hold Gandhi in his last moments. Irony!
    5. Gandhi refused to save his wife because the drug would have to be administered intravenously, and that went counter to his principle – natural cures
    6. “You will never know how much it costs the Congress to keep that old man in poverty” ~ Sarojini Naidu, because many in the crowds around Gandhi were Congress folks, to protect him
    7. The Nizam of Hyderabad combined his passions for photography and pornography to amass what was believed to be the most extensive collection in India!
    8. When Jinnah first announced the formation of Pakistan, his inability to speak Urdu meant that the only words he said in the language (after the announcement in English) was Pakistan Zindabad. Many people didn’t realise the language switch and thought he said ‘Pakistan’s in the bag’!
    9. Mountbatten decided on the transfer of power date in the spur of the moment, when asked by a journalist. Same date as the unconditional surrender of the Japanese in WW2 in his previous role
    10. So banal and petty was the bureaucracy of partition that dictionaries were split from A-K and L-Z and taken to separate countries!
    11. The man who had articulated the idea of Pakistan was Rahmat Ali in 1933, and at that point, Jinnah vehemently refused to be party to it
    12. To the orthodox Hindu, the navel is the body’s frontier – for acts above it, right hand, for acts below, the left.
    13. By giving Gurdaspur to India, Radcliffe also gave it land access to Kashmir, changing that state’s destiny
    14. Nehru and Patel were stunned in the early days of partition horrors. They asked Mountbatten to come back and take charge, and it became an Emergency Committee
    15. Pakistan blatantly lied about the Pathan force it had sent to take over Kashmir. Ironically, their sacking and rape of the nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary delayed them and allowed the Indian army to take control.
    16. India held back Pakistan’s share of the overall money – 550 million rupees, courtesy the Kashmir issue
    17. Immediately after partition, there were refugees chanting “Let Gandhi die” (I am assuming Murdabad and not anything this drastic) as he fasted for peace
    18. A few weeks before his assassination, Gandhi’s last fast for peace was almost fatal. His ask – a peace charter which had to be signed by all key political and social organisations – was an impossibility that the leaders managed to accomplish just in time.
    19. Godse and co, tried to assassinate Gandhi once before. They failed, and part of their attempt was a bomb going off. The enquiry, led by DJ Sanjevi, was an exercise in incompetence. One of the cops, UH Rana, even had the identities of the would be assassins, but didn’t share them in time.
    20. Two crucial people were missing on the day of the assassination. Sushila Nayar, his doctor who always walked ahead of him, was in Pakistan, making preparations for Gandhi’s planned visit. D.W. Mehra, the policeman who was assigned to protect him, had been called away for other duties.
    21. Jinnah’s condolence message called Gandhi one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community. When pointed out that Gandhi’s dimensions went beyond his religion, he insisted on retaining the line.
    22. Jinnah’s tuberculosis diagnosis was a well-kept secret, and so was his life expectancy – a few months. If Mountbatten had known this, he would have delayed the transfer of power because he was confident of swaying the other League leaders, and Partition might have been avoided.
    23. Roy Bucher prepared two funerals for Gandhi. The first was in Yeravada Jail in 1942, but Gandhi ‘declined to attend’ after somehow surviving his 21-day fast! His actual funeral was also prepared by Lt. Gen. Sir Roy Bucher.

    Freedom at Midnight

  • Abundance

    Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

    Just so we are clear, the scope of this book is only the US, the rest of the world will have to figure its own way to abundance, though we might learn a few tricks from this. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wonder why, for all its enormous wealth and technological capability, the US cannot address the fundamental human problems of hunger, homelessness, life-threatening diseases, and fuel an equitable world with clean energy.

    Indeed, the introductory chapter ‘Beyond scarcity’ does imagine an utopian world really well. And it’s clear that it isn’t technology that is stopping us. Sigh.

    Through the analysis of political, economic and cultural ethos across decades, they trace the ‘how we got here’ to a scarcity-driven politics, not from the conservative right that likes to keep the government out of most things, but from the so-called progressives on the left. They identify a decades-long shift beginning in the 1970s – when American liberals became more concerned with process than outcomes, enforcing strict zoning codes, environmental regulations, and costly infrastructure mandates that, in real life, put the brakes on growth.

    I remember reading this point of view in Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay, where he says “there is too much law and too much ‘democracy’ relative to the American state capacity”. That it has now become a vetocracy, with economically powerful special interest groups and the judicial arm having hijacked the system and preventing reforms. Of course, given his leaning, it probably came from a different sentiment.

    A central theme is the critique of process and proceduralism. The book argues that when the Democratic-leaning coalition ties itself to onerous permitting processes, it inadvertently bolsters housing shortages, dilapidated transit systems, and underinvested public utilities – a supply problem across all infrastructure, leading to people at lower rungs being gated out. This can be seen now as a regulatory impasse in many liberal jurisdictions, where well-meaning (in isolation) rules and community objections prioritise preventing ‘bad’ development over enabling ‘good’ development.

    Klein and Thompson present their solution into an ‘Abundance Agenda,’ a Third Way framework aimed at rebalancing social goals and regulatory safeguards. This agenda aspires to dismantle needless barriers while preserving essential protections and build economic dynamism without sacrificing equity. A middle ground to a progressive movement fearful of change and a conservative movement allergic to any government action.

    While I liked the synthesis idea, the ‘how’ is not even a thought beyond a few small examplesof when such an approach has worked. Clearly, the challenges at higher scale would be massively different. These are diverse problems- housing, climate change, research , innovation, and mass deployment of this ‘abundance. I also wonder how capitalism would react to it. Elite capture of every resource has been a recurrent phenomenon, what is their take on an abundant life for everyone? Can humans really live without classes and status?

    Having said that, this is a very accessible and thought-through book. It provides an excellent systematic flow through the five chapters – each, with its own narrative of what is happening with examples, why it is happening seen through the lens of historical, economical and cultural contexts, and what can be done (directionally) to remedy it.

    Quotes & Notes from Abundance

    1. The fascinating story of Katalin Karikó and mRNA in ‘Invent’ (p 129)
    2. Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is one of the best examples of solving at scale. The creation and distribution of Covid vaccines in ‘Deploy’ (p 184)
    3. “It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it, but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again.” Paul Sabin

    Abundance Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

  • Careless People

    Sarah Wynn-Williams

    As someone who has worked with founders in the startup space for over a decade and a half, the megalomania, the lack of empathy, and the moral bankruptcy in Careless People all seemed familiar. But Sarah Wynn-Williams’s first person account is about arguably the biggest phenomenon that has hit culture in the last decade and a half – social media, and specifically, the biggest player in it – Meta (then Facebook). She worked at Facebook from 2011 until her termination in 2017, the time when Facebook went from infancy to a full-blown global power base.

    The book is a summary of moral bankruptcy and ethical failings in the company on two counts – one, the internal culture and decision-making process, and the other – the recklessness and callousness that powers its growth-at-all-costs approach, impacting the lives of millions of people through the ways in which the platform is used by bad actors.

    On the first count, toxic behaviour, rampant and blatant sexual harassment by her own boss Joel Kaplan as well as Sheryl Sandberg (who allegedly said “You should have got into the bed” from a chapter titled ‘Lean in and Lie back’), and injustice in general. On the second, everything from helping China in surveilling its own citizens (and lying about it to the US lawmakers) to making politicians addicted to advertising so they be influenced on policies, to the Trump election, to targeting teens when they’re depressed, to the subterfuge in Intenet.org, to the apathy in the Myanmar genocide. As the book’s subtitle says, power, greed, madness.

    The book begins with a hilarious incident at the 2015 Summit of the Americas, one of her early attempts to get Zuck to interact with politicians, and then goes right back to the time she decided Facebook is where she wanted to work at. I am still figuring out if the early part of the first chapter (her encounter with a shark) is a metaphor – for swimming with sharks later, or being a survivor.

    In a way, Careless People is also like a biography of Facebook itself- the kind of problems it faced in its early days – from poop emojis to ISIS beheadings to Kony and breastfeeding protests! There really was no playbook for creating policies for these things!

    The book is full of anecdotes – from the early idealistic days to connect humanity to the cold, inhuman approach that one is now familiar with. Catching Hillary Clinton on a dance floor in Columbia, Sheryl un-walking a lot of the talk from Lean In when it came to her own employees, and lying about narrowly missing a plane crash, Zuck’s failed attempts at courting Xi (anything to get a handshake, Xi refusing Zuck’s request to name his unborn child), how one low-ranking official in TRAI unwittingly scuttled Facebook’s populist move to get Free Basics running in India by opting out of all emails from Facebook, Obama telling Zuck in a private meeting that Facebook is playing a destructive role globally and so on. And peppered with her own encounters with non-human organisms – sharks, wasps, (almost) Zika virus at its place of origin and so on.

    Careless People reads more like a thriller and is very accessible. One can easily sense the author’s frustration as idealism gives away to rampant greed and exploitation inside and outside. She doesn’t make it easy for herself with the blind idealism bordering on naïveté, and a work ethic that includes replying to a mail while in labour. Several times I wondered why she didn’t just quit, but later in Careless People, we get to know her own challenges. It is quite a read, and I’d definitely recommend it.

    Notes & Quotes from Careless People

    1. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face ~ John Updike
    2. WEF has weaponised the concept of status envy to create a Hunger Games for the .001 per cent. (about Davos)
    3. The spyware Onavo showed Zuck which apps to buy by giving him confidential usage data
    4. Sheryl once explained the cycle of wealth to me as she saw it I was complaining that someone I really admired had retired from Facebook at a very young age. I couldn’t understand why they’d do that. What would they do instead that would be so interesting? She said matter-of-factly that they would probably follow the cycle of wealth she’d observed at Google and Facebook: exotic travel for a year or more before becoming bored of that, then transitioning to getting very fit or some other personal goal. After achieving that goal, buying a boat or some other extravagant hobby purchase, and then finally getting divorced or going through some other personal crisis. If they come back from that, maybe they attempt their own start-up or fund or, most likely, philanthropy.
    5. Uber weaponizes their drivers and riders, creating strikes, protests, and transportation chaos, forcing authorities to the table. They’re sponsoring the football teams of the children of key Brazilian senators responsible for decisions that impact their business, insisting on having UBER plastered across their kids’ uniforms. They propose compiling opposition research on journalists.
    6. Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima. Elliot patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.”

    Careless People Sarah Wynn-Williams

  • Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

    Cat Bohannon

    There is a choice we make when we use the word ‘mankind’ when we should be using humankind, or even better, humanity. ‘Eve’ is a good reminder, and the sub-heading – How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution – is exactly what the book is about. Cat Bohannon gives us a lot of insights into the pivotal role of the female body in the evolutionary story, in a sweeping and provocative narrative that questions the ‘male bias’ in science and medicine at large, and offers the story of human evolution as told through the female body.

    The book is structured chronologically across 200 million years, and drives the story through the story of specific body parts, processes, and mechanisms. ‘Eve traces the evolution of women’s bodies, from tits to toes, and how that evolution shapes our lives today.’ In that process, we get insights on why women live longer, why they menstruate, are female brains different, and the very interesting question of whether sexism is useful for evolution.

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  • #Bibliofiles : 2025 favourites

    Bibliofiles 2025

    Compared to the last couple of years, I read fewer books in 2025, but I think the variety was higher. That probably explains the highest number of fiction books in a long time.

    And so, once again, like 2019,  2020,  2021,  2022, 2023 , and 2024, presenting #Bibliofiles 2025’s list of ten (plus the long list). From the 58 books I read this year…

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