The Difficulty of Being Good

Author: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199779600
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 487

Book Description
Why should we be good? How should we be good? And how might we more deeply understand the moral and ethical failings--splashed across today's headlines--that have not only destroyed individual lives but caused widespread calamity as well, bringing communities, nations, and indeed the global economy to the brink of collapse? In The Difficulty of Being Good, Gurcharan Das seeks answers to these questions in an unlikely source: the 2,000 year-old Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata. A sprawling, witty, ironic, and delightful poem, the Mahabharata is obsessed with the elusive notion of dharma--in essence, doing the right thing. When a hero does something wrong in a Greek epic, he wastes little time on self-reflection; when a hero falters in the Mahabharata, the action stops and everyone weighs in with a different and often contradictory take on dharma. Each major character in the epic embodies a significant moral failing or virtue, and their struggles mirror with uncanny precision our own familiar emotions of anxiety, courage, despair, remorse, envy, compassion, vengefulness, and duty. Das explores the Mahabharata from many perspectives and compares the successes and failures of the poem's characters to those of contemporary individuals, many of them highly visible players in the world of economics, business, and politics. In every case, he finds striking parallels that carry lessons for everyone faced with ethical and moral dilemmas in today's complex world. Written with the flair and seemingly effortless erudition that have made Gurcharan Das a bestselling author around the world--and enlivened by Das's forthright discussion of his own personal search for a more meaningful life--The Difficulty of Being Good shines the light of an ancient poem on the most challenging moral ambiguities of modern life.

India Unbound

Author: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385720742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
India today is a vibrant free-market democracy, a nation well on its way to overcoming decades of widespread poverty. The nation’s rise is one of the great international stories of the late twentieth century, and in India Unbound the acclaimed columnist Gurcharan Das offers a sweeping economic history of India from independence to the new millennium. Das shows how India’s policies after 1947 condemned the nation to a hobbled economy until 1991, when the government instituted sweeping reforms that paved the way for extraordinary growth. Das traces these developments and tells the stories of the major players from Nehru through today. As the former CEO of Proctor & Gamble India, Das offers a unique insider’s perspective and he deftly interweaves memoir with history, creating a book that is at once vigorously analytical and vividly written. Impassioned, erudite, and eminently readable, India Unbound is a must for anyone interested in the global economy and its future.

India Grows At Night

Author: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 8184756747
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Book Description
Indians wryly admit that ‘India grows at night’. But that is only half the saying, the full expression is: ‘India grows at night... when the government sleeps’, suggesting that the nation may be rising despite the state. India’s is a tale of private success and public failure. Prosperity is, indeed, spreading across the country even as governance failure pervades public life. But how could a nation become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies when it’s governed by a weak, ineffective state? And wouldn’t it be wonderful if India also grew during the day—in other words, if public policy supported private enterprise? What India needs, Gurcharan Das says, is a strong liberal state. Such a state would have the authority to take quick, decisive action, it would have the rule of law to ensure those actions are legitimate and finally, it would be accountable to the people. But achieving this will not be easy, says Das, because India has historically had a weak state and a strong society. About the Author Gurcharan Das is a well known author, commentator and public intellectual. He is the author of the much acclaimed The Difficulty of Being Good, and the international bestseller India Unbound, which has been translated into many languages and filmed by the BBC. His other works include the novel, A Fine Family, a book of essays, The Elephant Paradigm, and an anthology, Three Plays, consisting of Larins Sahib, Mira and 9 Jakhoo Hill. Gurcharan Das writes a regular column for a number of Indian newspapers including the Times of India and occasional guest columns for Newsweek, Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs. Gurcharan Das graduated from Harvard University and was CEO of Procter and Gamble India before he took early retirement to become a full time writer. He lives in Delhi.

Kama

Author: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: India Allen Lane
ISBN: 9780670087372
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A riveting account of love and desireIndia is the only civilization to elevate kama-desire and pleasure-to a goal of life. Kama is both cosmic and human energy, which animates life and holds it in place. Gurcharan Das weaves a compelling narrative soaked in philosophical, historical and literary ideas in the third volume of his trilogy on life's goals: India Unbound was the first, on artha, 'material well-being'; and The Difficulty of Being Good was the second, on dharma, 'moral well-being'. Here, in his magnificent prose, he examines how to cherish desire in order to live a rich, flourishing life, arguing that if dharma is a duty to another, kama is a duty to oneself. It sheds new light on love, marriage, family, adultery and jealousy as it wrestles with questions such as these: How to nurture desire without harming others or oneself? Are the erotic and the ascetic two aspects of our same human nature? What is the relationship between romantic love and bhakti, the love of god

Overwhelmed

Author: Brigid Schulte
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408826690
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
______________________ 'Too much to do? Stop and read this' - Guardian 'For a fresh take on an eternal dilemma, Overwhelmed is worth a few hours of any busy woman's life – if only to ensure that she doesn't drop off the bottom of her own “To Do” list' - Mail on Sunday ______________________ In her attempts to juggle work and family life, Brigid Schulte has baked cakes until 2 a.m., frantically (but surreptitiously) sent important emails during school trips and then worked long into the night after her children were in bed. Realising she had become someone who constantly burst in late, trailing shoes and schoolbooks and biscuit crumbs, she began to question, like so many of us, whether it is possible to be anything you want to be, have a family and still have time to breathe. So when Schulte met an eminent sociologist who studies time and he told her she enjoyed thirty hours of leisure each week, she thought her head was going to pop off. What followed was a trip down the rabbit hole of busy-ness, a journey to discover why so many of us find it near-impossible to press the 'pause' button on life and what got us here in the first place. Overwhelmed maps the individual, historical, biological and societal stresses that have ripped working mothers' and fathers' leisure to shreds, and asks how it might be possible for us to put the pieces back together. Seeking insights, answers and inspiration, Schulte explores everything from the wiring of the brain and why workplaces are becoming increasingly demanding, to worldwide differences in family policy, how cultural norms shape our experiences at work, our unequal division of labour at home and why it's so hard for everyone – but women especially – to feel they deserve an elusive moment of peace. ______________________ 'Every parent, every caregiver, every person who feels besieged by permanent busyness, must read this book' - Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Why Women Still Can't Have It All

Fine Family

Author: Gurcharan Das
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9351184277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Book Description
This majestic novel by the author of India Unbound is the extraordinary chronicle, rich in passion and incident, of a Punjabi family that is uprooted from its settled existence in Lyallpur by the violence of Partition and forced to flee to India. Everything is lost in the transition, but when a son is born into the family, hopes revive of rebuilding the family's fortunes, the efforts towards which mirror those of India itself as it struggles to build itself anew.

The Difficulty of Being a Dog

Author: Roger Grenier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226308272
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
Forty-three vignettes, in which the author visits the great dogs of history and legend, beginning at the beginning with Ulysses and his dog, Argos; on to Virginia Woolf and her dog, Flush; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel; André Gide; Freud's dog, Lün; Franklin D. Roosevelt's Scottish terrier, Fala; Michael and Jerry, heroes of Jack London's novels; Napoleon's dog; and the dogs collected and deported from the city of Constantinople in 1910, sent to a desert island without food and water.

Nickel and Dimed

Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1429926643
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Author: Harold S. Kushner
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
ISBN: 0805241930
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Offers an inspirational and compassionate approach to understanding the problems of life, and argues that we should continue to believe in God's fairness.

The Difficulty of Tolerance

Author: Thomas Scanlon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521533980
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
These essays in political philosophy by T. M. Scanlon, written between 1969 and 1999, examine the standards by which social and political institutions should be justified and appraised. Scanlon explains how the powers of just institutions are limited by rights such as freedom of expression, and considers why these limits should be respected even when it seems that better results could be achieved by violating them. Other topics which are explored include voluntariness and consent, freedom of expression, tolerance, punishment, and human rights. The collection includes the classic essays 'Preference and Urgency', 'A Theory of Freedom of Expression', and 'Contractualism and Utilitarianism', as well as a number of other essays that have hitherto not been easily accessible. It will be essential reading for all those studying these topics from the perspective of political philosophy, politics, and law.