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Category: Excerpts

An Excerpt from the Newest Jack Reacher Novel ‘Blue Moon’

Posted on by Penguin India

Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is back in Blue Moon!

Reacher is trained to notice things. He’s on a greyhound bus, watching an elderly man sleeping in his seat, with a fat envelope of cash hanging out of his pocket. Another passenger is watching too… Obviously hoping to get rich quick. As the mugger makes his move, Reacher steps in. The old man is grateful, yet he turns down Reacher’s offer to help him home. He’s vulnerable, scared, and clearly in big, big trouble. Will Reacher sit back and let things happen?

Read an excerpt from the book below:

The city looked small on a map of America.  It was just a tiny polite dot, near a red threadlike road that ran across an otherwise empty half inch of paper.  But up close and on the ground it had half a million people.  It covered more than a hundred square miles.  It had nearly a hundred and fifty thousand households.  It had more than two thousand acres of parkland.  It spent half a billion dollars a year, and raised almost as much through taxes and fees and charges.  It was big enough that the police department was twelve hundred strong.

And it was big enough that organized crime was split two separate ways.  The west of the city was run by Ukrainians.  The east was run by Albanians.  The demarcation line between them was gerrymandered as tight as a congressional district.  Nominally it followed Center Street, which ran north to south and divided the city in half, but it zigged and zagged and ducked in and out to include or exclude specific blocks and parts of specific neighborhoods, wherever it was felt historic precedents justified special circumstances.  Negotiations had been tense.  There had been minor turf wars.  There had been some unpleasantness.  But eventually an agreement had been reached.  The arrangement seemed to work.  Each side kept out of the other’s way.  For a long time there had been no significant contact between them.

Until one morning in May.  The Ukrainian boss parked in a garage on Center Street, and walked east into Albanian territory.  Alone.  He was fifty years old and built like a bronze statue of an old hero, tall, hard, and solid.  He called himself Gregory, which was as close as Americans could get to pronouncing his given name.  He was unarmed, and he was wearing tight pants and a tight T shirt to prove it.  Nothing in his pockets.  Nothing concealed.  He turned left and right, burrowing deep, heading for a backstreet block, where he knew the Albanians ran their businesses out of a suite of offices in back of a lumber yard.

He was followed all the way, from his first step across the line.  Calls were made ahead, so that when he arrived he was faced by six silent figures, all standing still in the half circle between the sidewalk and the lumber yard’s gate.  Like chess pieces in a defensive formation.  He stopped and held his arms out from his sides.  He turned around slowly, a full 360, his arms still held wide.  Tight pants, tight T shirt.  No lumps.  No bulges.  No knife.  No gun.  Unarmed, in front of six guys who undoubtedly weren’t.  But he wasn’t worried.  To attack him unprovoked was a step the Albanians wouldn’t take.  He knew that.  Courtesies had to be observed.  Manners were manners.

One of the six silent figures stepped up.  Partly a blocking maneuver, partly ready to listen.

Gregory said, “I need to speak with Dino.”

Dino was the Albanian boss.

The guy said, “Why?”

“I have information.”

“About what?”

“Something he needs to know.”

“I could give you a phone number.”

“This is a thing that needs to be said face to face.”

“Does it need to be said right now?”

“Yes, it does.”

The guy said nothing for a spell, and then he turned and ducked through a personnel door set low in a metal roll-up gate.  The other five guys formed up tighter, to replace his missing presence.  Gregory waited.  The five guys watched him, part wary, part fascinated.  It was a unique occasion.  Once in a lifetime.  Like seeing a unicorn.  The other side’s boss.  Right there.  Previous negotiations had been held on neutral ground, on a golf course way out of town, on the other side of the highway.

Gregory waited.  Five long minutes later the guy came back out through the personnel door.  He left it open.  He gestured.  Gregory walked forward and ducked and stepped inside.  He smelled fresh pine and heard the whine of a saw.

The guy said, “We need to search you for a wire.”

Gregory nodded and stripped off his T shirt.  His torso was thick and hard and matted with hair.  No wire.  The guy checked the seams in his T shirt and handed it back.  Gregory put it on and ran his fingers through his hair.

The guy said, “This way.”

Two rival criminal gangs are competing for control in Blue Moon. Will Jack Reacher be able to stop bad things from happening? Read to find out!

An Excerpt from Bibek Debroy’s Translation of ‘The Bhagavad Gita’

Posted on by Penguin India

As far as traditional Indian stories and lore go, The Bhagavad Gita is an enduring and nuanced reflection of the relationship between action and consequence, agency and choice. Bibek Debroy’s translation of the book is highly relevant and now accessible to a whole new generation of readers.

Here’s an excerpt that presents a glimpse into the insights this book has to offer!

 

‘Without performing action, man is not freed from the
bondage of action. And resorting to sannyasa does not
result in liberation.’

~

‘No one can ever exist, even for a short while, without
performing action. Because the qualities of nature force
everyone to perform action.’

~

‘The ignorant person who exists by controlling his organs of
action, while his mind remembers the senses, is said to be
deluded and is a hypocrite.’

~

‘O Arjuna! But he who restrains the senses through his mind
and starts the yoga of action with the organs of action, while
remaining unattached, he is superior.

~

‘Therefore, do the prescribed action. Because action is
superior to not performing action. And without action, even
survival of the body is not possible.’

~

‘O son of Kunti! All action other than that for sacrifices
shackles people to the bondage of action. Therefore, do
action for that purpose, without attachment.

~

‘Earlier, Prajapati created beings, accompanied by a
sacrifice and said, “With this, may you increase, and may
this grant you all objects you desire.’

~

‘Through this, cherish the gods and those gods will
cherish you. By cherishing each other, you will obtain that
which is most desired.’

~

‘Because, cherished by the sacrifice, the gods will give you all
desired objects. He who enjoys these without giving them
their share is certainly a thief.’

~

‘Righteous people who enjoy the leftovers  of sacrifices
are freed from all sins. But those sinners who cook only for
themselves live on sin.’

~

‘Beings are created from food and food is created from rain
clouds. Rain clouds are created from sacrifices and sacrifices
are created from action.’

Full of life-lessons and thought-provoking debates on morals, Bibek Debroy’s Bhagavad Gita is more relevant than ever.

Story of Trauma and Survival: Excerpt from ‘First, They Erased Our Name’

Posted on by Penguin India

In First, They Erased Our Name, for the first time, a Rohingya speaks up to expose the truth behind a global humanitarian crisis. Through the eyes of a child, we learn about the historic persecution of the Rohingya people and witness the violence young Habiburahman endured throughout his life until he escaped the country in 2000.

The narrative is an intimate and personal portrayal of trauma that endures even today. Here is a glimpse into Habiburahman’s story of survival and his struggles to exist:

“The dictator U Ne Win has presided over a reign of terror in Burma for decades. In 1982, he has a new project. He is planning to redefine national identity and fabricate an enemy to fuel fear. A new law comes into force. Henceforth, to retain Burmese citizenship, you must belong to one of the 135 recognised ethnic groups, which form part of eight ‘national races’. The Rohingya are not among them. With a stroke of the pen, our ethnic group officially disappears. The announcement falls like a thunderbolt on more than a million Rohingya who live in Arakan State, our ancestral land in western Burma. The brainwashing starts. Rumours and alarm spread insidiously from village to village. From now on, the word ‘Rohingya’ is prohibited. It no longer exists. We no longer exist.

I am three years old and am effectively erased from existence. I become a foreigner to my neighbours: they believe that we are Bengali invaders who have entered their country illegally and now threaten to overrun it. They call us kalars, a pejorative term expressing scorn and disgust for dark-skinned ethnic groups. In a different time and place, under different circumstances, kalar would have meant wog or nigger. The word is like a slap in the face; it undermines us more with each passing day. An outlandish tale takes root by firesides in thatched huts across Burma. They say that because of our physical appearance we are evil ogres from a faraway land, more animal than human. This image persists, haunting the thoughts of adults and the nightmares of children.

I am three years old and will have to grow up with the hostility of others. I am already an outlaw in my own country, an outlaw in the world. I am three years old, and don’t yet know that I am stateless. A tyrant leant over my cradle and traced a destiny for me that will be hard to avoid: I will either be a fugitive or I won’t exist at all.”

Habiburahman’s First, They Erased Our Name is an urgent, moving memoir about what it feels like to be repressed in one’s own country and a refugee in others. It gives voice to the voiceless.

The Encounter Specialists: An Excerpt from ‘The Class of 83’ 

Posted on by Penguin India

At a time when Mumbai was plagued by underworld gangsters like Dawood Ibrahim, Iqbal Kaskar and Chhota Rajan, the batch of 1983 from the Police Training School (PTC) in Nashik-trained by the legendary Arvind Inamdar-produced a group of prominent encounter specialists who have been credited with bringing back the rule of law in the city.

Famed even within this batch, trigger-happy senior police inspector Pradeep Sharma understood that to save the city from the clutches of the underworld, he would need to dilute rival gangs. The Class of 83 delves deep into the most famous (or infamous) encounters conducted by Sharma and his batch mates. Pradeep Sharma was arrested by the same department he had served for two-and-a-half decades. He faced the ignominy of jail, clubbed in the same cell as the criminals he had arrested. However, he fought for his honour, was acquitted and reinstated into service.

Here is an excerpt from this one-of-a-kind story of a policeman’s triumphs, struggles and redemption-

 

‘I will get you this man, sir,’ Sharma said, even though he was not sure how he was going to do so.

‘Shabaash,’ Karkare said. ‘Keep it confidential, Pradeep. This is a matter of national security.’

Initially, Sharma’s search for Abdul Latif led him to many dead ends. The phone number turned out to be a prepaid number which had been issued without proper scrutiny of the address. These were early days for the mobile service providers in India. Document verification was not stringent. Sharma tapped his entire network of informants but gave them only the details they needed to know without revealing the context.

Sharma’s hunch was that Latif was in a Muslim dominated locality near a mosque. The possibilities of this theory were endless. In fact, every Muslim dominated locality would have a mosque nearby, similar to other religions and their places of worship. Yet, Sharma made one of his most trusted informers, Saleem, speak with many imams of mosques in the suburbs to find out if any suspicious person had turned up for offering namaz at their mosque recently. Saleem also got in touch with several real estate agents to see if any untoward person had rented out a flat in their locality. But unfortunately, no leads emerged from these efforts.

In 1998, Mumbai Police had come across a bizarre case of a bleeding man walking out of a toilet of a masjid in south Mumbai. It turned out that the man was trying to assemble explosives in the toilet, and it had detonated accidentally and injured him. The bleeding man abruptly left his device in the toilet and escaped on foot, while his white clothes were drenched with blood and he was bleeding all over his face and neck. Then Police commissioner R.H. Mendonca and Crime Chief R.S. Sharma had stepped into a Mumbai masjid for the first time to inspect the spot. However, the crime branch eventually found out that it was a Pakistani who had been staying in a Muslim locality in Nirmal Nagar in Santacruz for six months with a different name.

Sharma presumed that people who visited mosques frequently would notice a stranger and they would share this information with the police. But this time Sharma drew a blank. The only fall-back option now was the mobile number Karkare had given him. Back then there weren’t any sophisticated cellphone tapping capabilities, but Sharma had managed to procure a crude telephone tapping equipment from his sources in the department and set it up in the CIU office at Andheri. Over a listening period of two days, Sharma had figured out that Latif was in an area which had a mosque nearby because the azaan of morning prayer which could be heard distinctly in the background. The area also had a cowshed nearby because the mooing of cows and buffaloes was loud and clear. Sharma called a team of constables into his cabin.

‘How many mosques in Mumbai have a cowshed nearby?’ he asked.

His men were stunned by the question. They were unsure if Sharma was testing their knowledge as many Mumbaikars take immense pride in knowing trivial details about the city like the routes of the BEST buses, the famous delicacies of each area, renowned roadside shops located in the many by-lanes of Mumbai. The constables merely smiled and stared back at Sharma.

‘No one is allowed to go back home until I have this information,’ Sharma said, looking serious.

The constables rushed out of his room. In a few hours, they reported back to Sharma. There were five possible areas matching his description: Cheetah Camp in Mankhurd, Kurla Pipe Road, Amrut Nagar in Mumbra, Thane, and places in Jogeshwari and Goregaon.

Sharma had been continually discussing the case with Hemant Karkare, who was aghast to hear that the terrorists had bigger plans up their sleeves. Kandahar was being tracked by media across the globe. Already, India was being portrayed as a soft state which had been forced to the negotiating table by a rogue group of terrorists. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had climbed down from his aggressive posturing that the Indian government would not engage in any negotiations under the threat of the gun. Now, the government was seeking solace in the fact that the terrorists had apparently scaled down a lot of their demands. India’s image was being tarnished by the international media.

But the government was also concerned for the lives of the 190 civilians. The Indian national whom the hijackers had stabbed had bled to death. The innocent man was returning from his honeymoon trip with his newly wed wife. The pressure on the government was immense, and it was understandable that the lives of the citizens were being made a priority over other considerations. Indian agencies like RAW had also taken a severe beating that an incident like this had occurred in the first place. Meanwhile, Sharma briefed Karkare about the four locations he had zeroed in on. But launching a manhunt at these locations required sizeable manpower which could compromise the secrecy of Karkare’s mission.

‘We can’t take any more damage,’ Karkare told Sharma.

‘Sir, I am close to catching our man.’

‘Pradeep, only the result will count!’ Karkare said. ‘What is your next plan of action?’

‘I’m tapping my resources in the telecom operator to get a tower location on Latif’s number.’

‘Time is against us,’ Karkare replied. ‘Arrest Latif at all costs and soon.’

Hussain Zaidi takes us deep into the brutal world of the men in uniform who put their lives on the line to fight terror.

Read The Class of 83 to meet the men who made dreaded criminals fear death by encounter!

An Excerpt from ‘Unstoppable’

Posted on by Penguin India

How do you go from being a shopkeeper to multi-billionaire in forty years?

Kuldip Singh Dhingra, the patriarch of the Dhingra family and the man credited with building Berger Paints, has remained a mystery. He is low-profile, eschews media and continues to operate from a small office in Delhi. In this candid and captivating biography Kuldip reveals his story for the first time – Unstoppable by Sonu Bhasin narrates what a man can achieve if he pursues his dreams relentlessly.

Read an excerpt from the book below:

——————————————-

The collapse of the Soviet Union was the last thing on Kuldip’s mind when he sat down to have his coffee and opened the financial daily for his morning update one late January morning.

‘I saw the news about Vijay Mallya selling Berger and I knew immediately that I had to buy that company,’ said Kuldip. ‘We had oodles of money. How much of property could I buy? We had to buy a business,’ he continued. He had been speaking with Gurbachan over the last few months about their future. The Rajdoot business had grown during the last ten years, but it was still in the range of Rs 10–15 crore annually.

‘We had many small factories, all under Rs 1 crore to reap the benefit of small scale. But the name Rajdoot was not a premium brand,’ explained Gurbachan. The two brothers had been bouncing around ideas about buying a running paints business.

‘We had been in discussions with some other paint companies.I even went to London to discuss the matter with the foreign owners of a well-known paint company,’ said Gurbachan. UK Paints was not a known company, Rajdoot was a small brand, and the Dhingras were low-profile people. The foreign promoters had a large business worldwide and were selling only their Indian operations. They did not like the idea of selling out to what they thought was a smaller company run by someone who did not understand corporate culture and had been running a shop in Amritsar till a few years ago.

‘I got the feeling that he was not even happy talking to us about it,’ said Gurbachan without any self-pity. The foreign owners eventually sold their company to a better-known and a bigger industrial family of Delhi.

‘But could you not use the money to focus on Rajdoot Paints which was your own company anyway?’ I asked Kuldip.

‘But Rajdoot would have to be managed by me if I wanted it to become even half as big as what Berger was then. And I simply did not have the time. Berger was a professionally managed company and had a good team—at least that is what I thought at that time. I believed that once we bought the company, apne aap chalti rahegi [it will run by itself],’ explained Kuldip.

Kuldip certainly did not have any time to manage any other business except his export business. The export business had given him ‘oodles of money’ as Kuldip put it, and it had also given Kuldip a world view of business. He was dealing with a cross section of professionals from around the world and he had become used to large businesses. Rajdoot, though one of the fastest-growing paint companies in India in the late 1980s, was at best a regional company. It was not a star or even an emerging star on the horizon. Kuldip, on the other hand, had become used to being a star! He was feted as an important businessman in the Soviet Union and was known as a big exporter in India. Should the export business wind down, he knew that he would continue to be very wealthy but he would feel stifled by the small, regional business of Rajdoot. He did not want to be clubbed in the ‘Others’ category in the domestic paints business. He realized he needed a larger canvas for his domestic business dreams.

‘I was doing business in hundreds of crores with the Soviet Union. And the total turnover of Rajdoot then was just Rs 10–15 crore,’ said Kuldip.

While he was exporting a variety of items to the Soviet Union, at heart he remained a paints-man. ‘There was only one business I understood well and that business was the paints business,’ said Kuldip. So when he saw the headlines about Berger Paints being sold, the instinct bulb in his head burnt bright.

Unstoppable narrates what a man can achieve if he pursues his dreams relentlessly.

An Excerpt from ‘Awakening Bharat Mata’

Posted on by Penguin India

Awakening Bharat Mata seeks to identify the nature of Indian conservatism and identify its similarities and differences with political thought in the West and generate an informed discussion that goes beyond electoral politics and governance to focus on its continuing relevance in contemporary India.

Read an excerpt from the book below:

—

It is apparent that the loyal core of the BJP, and indeed the wider Sangh Parivar, has a distinctive understanding of India’s history and civilization, and the post-Independence experience. Nehru too grappled with these issues unendingly, even agonized over them and some of his tentative conclusions formed the basis of the secular consensus as it has prevailed. The BJP leaders, whose perceptions of India’s civilizational ethos flowed from an understanding of Aurobindo, Vivekananda, Savarkar, Golwalkar and Upadhyaya, often as imparted through the boudhik sessions of the RSS, had divergent perceptions.

The departures centred on the centrality of Hinduism—both as belief systems incorporating the Sanatan Dharma and as a way of life—in the ‘idea of India’. According to his biographer’s description, Nehru felt that India’s heritage transcended faith: ‘If all Indians had been converted to Islam or to Christianity, their culture would still have remained the same.’ This assessment was sharply different from Savarkar’s who believed that a departure from the Hindu fold was also accompanied by a change of nationality. To those who grew up offering a prayer to the bhagwa dhwaj at RSS shakhas each day, Hindutva or Hindu-ness was at the core of India’s nationhood, not necessarily as a religion but as a culture. The BJP sees itself as a Hindu party, but this rarely meant a commitment to religious practices, only to a larger cultural ethos. Its disagreement with the ‘secular fundamentalism’ of the Nehruvians was not over the freedom of faith and the non-discriminatory features of the Constitution, but on the centrality of Hindu cultural forms in the symbolism associated with the state. This was coupled with unrelenting hostility to any special treatment or affirmative action for religious minorities. The mantra of ‘justice for all, appeasement of none’ has guided the movement since 1947. The tirade against ‘biryani for terrorists and bullets for kar sevaks’ that the BJP used quite effectively in the 1990s was a crude but telling articulation of how it perceived the double standards of the secularist Congress. The BJP was perhaps the only sustained voice against the secular squeamishness over the ethnic cleansing of Hindu Pandits from the Kashmir Valley in 1990. Its stated hostility to ‘vote bank politics’ practised by the ‘secular’ parties was a coded invitation to Hindus to assert their numerical clout and vote as Hindus.

To this divergence on the features of nationhood was a belief that India had been in a state of servitude since the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the eleventh century. Like the early nationalists, the BJP’s pantheon of national heroes included Maharana Pratap, Shivaji, and Guru Govind Singh who had waged war against Mughal rule. Whereas the Nehruvians were inclined to view the Mughal experience as high point of a syncretic and composite culture—what is often called the Ganga-Jamuni  tehzeeb—Hindu nationalists yearned for a recovery of Hindu honour and self-esteem that never quite happened after Independence. The Muslim that Hindu nationalists have profoundly admired has been the former president of India A.P.J. Abdul Kalam who combined his contribution to India’s missile programme with deep reverence for Hindu cultural forms.

Swapan Dasgupta’s Awakening Bharat Mata   is a collection that attempts to showcase the phenomenon of Hindu nationalism in terms of how it perceives itself. AVAILABLE NOW.

 

 

Sip your Way towards Good Health! A Special Tea from ‘The Magic Weight Loss Pill’

Posted on by Penguin India

What’s the one remedy common to controlling diabetes, hyperthyroidism, kidney and liver stones and excess weight? Lifestyle. Luke Coutinho, co-author of The Great Indian Diet, shows us that nothing parallels the power and impact that simple sustained lifestyle changes can have on a person who’s struggling to lose excess weight or suffering from a chronic disease.

The first part of the book concentrates on the reason we get such diseases in the first place, while the second is filled with sixty-two astonishingly easy and extremely practicable changes that will have you feeling healthier and happier and achieving all your health goals without the rigour and hard work of a hardcore diet or fitness regime.

Here’s a simple recipe from the book to aid your weight loss!

********************************************************

The Magic Weight-Loss Tea

Add this magic tea to your daily regime and lifestyle. You can use a base of black or green tea, or just makean infusion with water and the following ingredients:

™™ 1 square-inch piece of fresh ginger root
™™ Squeeze of a lemon
™™ 2 cups of water
™™ 2–3 peppercorns
™™ 1 cinnamon stick
™™ 2 cardamom pods, crushed
™™ 2 cloves

Boil, simmer, reduce to half, strain and serve hot with or without pure honey.

This amazing potion is detoxifying and highly anti inflammatory, and has the power to rapidly decrease Candida and yeast infections that inhibit weight loss. Ginger is essential to this magic tea recipe due to its amazing benefits. It helps in boosting immunity and cellular health, controlling high blood pressure, lowering cholesterol and stimulating blood rush to sex organs. It also prevents and treats the flu, digestive issues, menstrual pain, PMS, cancer (by building immunity and cellular health), arthritis, joint/ bone pain and ageing.

Get a kickstart to reaching your fit self with Luke Coutinho and Anushka Shetty’s The Magic Weight Loss Pill

How did Abhinav Bindra win an Olympic gold medal? Read the story in his own words

Posted on by Penguin India

Bright-eyed aspirants in sports-from badminton to gymnastics-are training across the country. Homegrown leagues are attracting the world’s best athletes and professionals. The country boasts multiple World No. 1 teams and athletes, and sporting achievements are handsomely rewarded.

Go! features a never-before-seen collection of essays by leading athletes, sports writers and professionals, who together tell a compelling story of India’s ongoing sporting transformation.

Read an interesting excerpt from the chapter, “Building Indian sports Champions in India”, written by Abhinav Bindra:

——————————-

Sourcing yak milk, balancing on the top of a pole 40 ft high, using screwdrivers and Allen keys, shaving off a few millimetres on a specially sourced shoe sole, eye-tests and matching sights, excess-baggage payments carrying special equipment, the colour of a wall, the wattage of a bulb, Bollywood movies, the right meal, a mother’s love, a father’s resolve, a sister’s belief, a coach’s patience.

What have these motley elements got to do with high performance?

Most often, nothing.

And, as my own journey shows, sometimes it means everything!

Given the type of life I have led over the last twenty years, I won’t blame you for believing that I might have some secret recipe for ‘being a champion’. But honestly, I don’t. I have experimented with my diet, overcome my fears, tweaked my equipment, modified my environment and surrounded myself with the right mix of people who have challenged and supported me unconditionally.

As you can probably tell, I spent a lot of my time experimenting. Trying to be the best shooter I could be. Ask me how this shooter became an Olympic gold medallist and I will happily tell you my story. I can only hope others will find it interesting.

It is true that I have lived the quest to be perfect on the imperfect day. In doing that, I have sometimes succeeded and most times failed. It has been a journey of ups and downs from day to day, season to season, Olympics to Olympics.

Let me tell you a little about the only subject on which I can call myself an expert—myself!

Twenty-two years of competition, 180 medals, five Olympics, three Olympic finals, one Olympic gold. All of it seems a daze. Until it doesn’t.

Looking back, I can now see it all much more clinically and dispassionately. I am no longer a stakeholder in my shooting career. I have exited my investment, as venture capitalists would say. That is my past. And I have a future to think about. But that makes retrospection all the more interesting for me.

I was not a natural athlete. In fact, I was a reluctant sportsperson. Introduced to shooting by my first coach, Colonel Dhillon, I instinctively felt that this was for me. This was something I could see myself doing, making a life of and a career from. For this chance, I navigated my way from dream to reality and built the personal skills that were necessary to win. What do I consider to be the skills that made the difference?

In my early career, I was extremely focused. I was trying all I could to make a name for myself as a young shooter. Inexperience meant that my quest was for perfection, and in my mind, that objective was a stationary target. You can’t blame a shooter for that, can you? To my mind, the goal was clear and the ‘system’ a perfect one. All I needed to do was understand the system and crack the code.

Athens 2004 was a wake-up call. In perhaps the most defining incident of my career, I came a disappointing seventh in the Olympic final after shooting what I thought was the perfect game. Only much later did I find out that the lane position I was allotted had a loose tile underfoot, which reverberated every time I shot. In a game of millimetres, it was amazing that I even hit the target! I went into a depression (literally) after Athens. Months later, I had two obvious choices—one, quit the sport or, two, carry on and accept the incident as a case of ‘bad luck’. I chose a third, and it defined me.

I chose the quest for Adaptability—to try to be perfect on the imperfect day. I started training under deliberately imperfect conditions, even installing a loose tile in my home range and practising regularly while standing on it. I trained in low light and under bright lights, adjusted bulbs and added peculiar shadows, painted the walls the same colours as the relevant Olympic ranges. Extreme behaviour perhaps. But it worked for me and even came to my rescue at Rio 2016, when my carefully chosen rifle-sight, through which I focused on the target, broke just a few minutes before my event. I was able to remain composed and made it to fourth. Had I chosen option two after Athens, I would have probably accepted it as fate and given up! Did I ever again encounter a loose tile? Honestly, I don’t know, and it was not something I thought about ever again when competing. Adaptability gave me versatility and the ability to not latch on to excuses, external conditions or stimuli. My attitude changed to acceptance of the fact that the only thing within my complete control was my own performance—but I was also ready for all the rest that wasn’t!

Go! features a never-before-seen collection of essays by leading athletes, sports writers and professionals, get your copy today!

Delve into the Universe of Algorithms with Kartik Hosanagar

Posted on by Penguin India

In his new book, A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence, Kartik Hosanagar surveys the brave new world of algorithmic decision making and reveals the potentially dangerous biases to which they can give rise as they increasingly run our lives. He makes the compelling case that we need to arm ourselves with a better, deeper, more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon of algorithmic thinking. The way to achieving that is understanding that algorithms often think a lot like their creators-that is, like you and me.

Here is what the author has to say about his journey towards writing the book!

Tell us what your book is about.

If you read the news, you have probably heard the term algorithms: computer code that seem to control much of what we do on the internet, and which are landing us in all sorts of jams. Elections are swayed by newsfeed algorithms, markets are manipulated by trading algorithms, women and minorities are discriminated against by resume screening algorithms — individuals are left at the mercy of machines. There is a lot of fear mongering and we hear terms such as “weapons of math destruction.” But a key question remains unanswered: what are we supposed to do about it? We can’t wish algorithms away – and, frankly, we wouldn’t want to. But they come with huge implications to our personal and professional lives that we need to understand if we’re going to attempt to offset the challenges they pose. This book offers us a way in.

Why did you write this book?

I spend my days helping students understand technology; designing and analyzing studies that probe algorithms’ impact on the world; and writing code myself. And while my subject gets a lot of attention in popular journalism, I feel the public lacks the right mental models to understand algorithms and AI, and as a result the conversation is too fear-oriented, at the expense of being solution-oriented. This is my attempt to address these problems and start a conversation on what the solution should look like.

The germ of the book itself began in my research lab. I was conducting a study I thought would confirm accepted notions that the Internet was democratizing taste and choice; in fact, it showed that commonly used algorithms did the opposite. That led me to work on how to design systems to achieve better social goals and business targets. We need to do something similar here, with this broader challenge – take a forward-looking view to solve the problems, not just worry or create fear about them.

Are algorithms too complex for most of us to understand?

They are not. Many of us are overwhelmed when we hear words like algorithms and AI. But they are concepts all of us can understand and, in fact, need to understand given their growing importance.

Today’s most sophisticated algorithms aren’t simple sets of instructions; they’re black boxes too technical for most of us to get our heads around. Even the regulators trained to monitor these things are years behind the AI that underlies modern algorithms. That’s what this book offers: a way in. In the course of trying to explain why code goes rogue, I came upon a novel insight that offers not only an understanding of algorithms, but points us towards a framework for controlling their power. I found that algorithmic behavior, like human behavior, can be influenced by both nature and nurture – in algorithms’ case, this means how they are coded by their programmers and the real-world data they soak up and learn from. In other words, algorithms go rogue for some of the same reasons humans do: they’re creative and unpredictable, they’re usually wonderful, sometimes dangerous.

This way of viewing algorithms helps us understand what causes algorithms to behave in biased and unpredictable ways, and in turn helps move us away from a fear-driven conversation towards practical solutions to these problems.

So, how concerned should we be that AI and algorithms have biases?

The biggest cause for concern is not that algorithms have biases; in fact, algorithms are on average less biased than humans. The issue is that we are more susceptible to biases in algorithms than in humans. First, despite our emerging skepticism, most people still see algorithms as rational, infallible machines, and thus fail to address and curb their (so-called) “bad behavior” quickly enough. So, elections are swayed, markets are manipulated, individuals are hurt due to our own attitudes and actions towards algorithms. Moreover, human biases and rogue behaviors don’t scale the way rogue software might. A bad judge or doctor can affect the lives of thousands of people; bad code can, and does, affect the lives of billions. So I finish the book by proposing concrete steps we can take towards a solution, including an algorithm bill of rights – a set of basic rights we should all demand and that regulators should provide us.

Is there anything I can do as an individual? Or am I at the mercy of large powerful tech companies?

As individuals, the power we have is knowledge, our dollars, and votes. I have four concrete steps individuals should follow.

  1. Be aware of when algorithms are making decisions a) for you and b) about you.
  2. Understand how this might affect the decisions being made. (Reading this book will help you with this!)
  3. Decide whether this is acceptable – to you as an individual, and as a member of society.
  4. If this is not acceptable, demand changes. Or walk away from algorithms that you think undermine the fabric of society.

What would this look like in a real-life example?

Suppose you are active on Facebook and discover news stories to read on the platform. You wonder if you are getting the full breadth of perspectives on an issue or even if the news and posts are false or manipulated in some way. You can do the following:

  1. First, remember that Facebook’s algorithm has essentially decided which of thousands of stories and posts to show you.
  2. Recall what you’ve learned in my pages: that Facebook’s algorithms choose the news stories from the ones posted by your friends and prioritize them based on which friends’ posts you engage with the most. If you want a breadth of perspectives, then don’t unfriend disengage with people with whom you disagree.
  3. If you find false information has been posted by someone, inform them. Also, with one click you can notify Facebook that the information is false. Facebook’s algorithms can now use your feedback to stop circulating false stories.
  4. Finally, demand transparency from Facebook on why certain posts are shown and others are not.

It works for other examples too where algorithms make decisions about us such as whether we get a mortgage loan or which school our kids can go to. If you’re unhappy with how you’re being treated, ask whether an algorithm was used and what factors were considered. Vote for politicians who will support some basic algorithmic rights for all of us: being informed when algorithms make decisions about us, and some simple way of understanding those algorithmic decisions.

What should we expect from the government and our elected representatives?

In the book, I call for a bill of rights that would make it much easier for individuals to follow the process I describe above; our elected representatives need to support this, as well as create channels for complaints – ways for individuals to flag problematic algorithmic decisions, and ways for the government to act. The EU has incorporated some relevant provisions in its GDPR regulation including a right to explanation, where consumers can demand explanations for algorithmic decisions that affect them. GDPR may not be the right solution for all governments but we need to think hard about how we grant people some basic rights regarding how algorithms make decisions about them.

I also believe in an idea first that was put forward by Ben Schneiderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. We need a national algorithmic safety board that would operate much like the Federal Reserve, staffed by experts and charged with monitoring and controlling the use of algorithms by corporations and other large organizations, including the government itself. The board’s goal will be to provide consumer protection and minimize and contain risks tied to algorithms.

A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence is an entertaining and provocative look at one of the most important developments of our time

An Excerpt from the Prologue of The Tiger and the Ruby

Posted on by Penguin India

In 1841, Nigel Halleck left Britain as a clerk in the East India Company. He served in the colonial administration for eight years before leaving his post, eventually disappearing in the mountain kingdom of Nepal, never to be heard from again. A century-and-a-half later, Kief Hillsbery, Nigel’s nephew many times removed, sets out to unravel the mystery. Tracing his ancestor’s journey across the subcontinent, his quest takes him from Lahore to Calcutta, and finally to the palaces of Kathmandu. What emerges is an unexpected personal chapter in the history of the British Empire in India.

Here’s an excerpt from the prologue of The Tiger and the Ruby!

Your loving Nigel

“Who was Nigel?” I asked my aunt.

That would be my uncle, she said, many times removed. He had gone out to India.

I asked why.

To help those poor people, she said. “Many men did in those days.” India, she explained, had figured in the lives of several of my ancestors.

A consulship in Burma was mentioned, and there had been a couple of vicars, and someone in railway administration — no, not an engineer, of either sort. Driving a train, she informed me, was common, and as for devising a railway’s route — grades and bridges, tunnels, beds for track — a head for such figures never sat on the shoulders of anyone who bled our blood, she was absolutely sure of that.

How long were they in India, I wondered, and what was it they did afterwards, back in England, and after she told me — two or three years for the consul and the clergymen, five she supposed for the railwayman, and more or less the same as what they did in India, practised their professions — I returned to Uncle Nigel: what did he do?

“Do?”

“In England. After India.”

Actually, she said, he never came back. He stayed in the East.

“His whole life?”

“Indeed he did.”

“He must have liked it.”

“I suppose he must.”

“Was he the only one ever? Who stayed?”

“Heavens, no. Many have. Why, Mother Teresa —”

“In our family.”

No others came to mind, she said. Not for India. There was my mother, of course, who married my American father after the war and decamped across the pond.

“Did Nigel get married? Was that why? To an Indian?”

“Certainly not. Of course not.”

“He never had a wife?”

“I’m afraid not.”

The brooch had been a gift to his mother, she said. Then she changed the subject, leaving me with both a clear sense
that she disapproved of Nigel and the vague notion that there was more to his story than my aunt thought suitable for sharing with my ten-year-old self. A decade later, when I was on the verge of heading East myself for a college year abroad in Nepal, my mother confirmed my suspicions.

Nigel, she confided, had separated from the East India Company under some sort of cloud. Afterwards he had supposedly “gone native” in Nepal and lived until his death in 1878 as one of a handful of Europeans admitted to the then-forbidden Himalayan kingdom.

According to family legend, his exile was forced — he couldn’t stay in India or come back to England. But no one quite knew why. He might have been a jewel thief, he might have been a spy. He was, everyone agreed, a hunter of big game, and one story had it that he met his end in the mouth of a man-eating tiger in the Terai jungle, on the border of Nepal and India.

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