Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee was an educationist, politician and patriot who often opposed the official narratives of his time but fought consistently for India’s independence and pre-eminent position in the world. His life has remained largely unexplored until now.
In the book, Syama Prasad Mookerjee: Life and Times, author Tathagata Roy aims to rectify that omission by examining his life in detail and shedding light on the turbulent and contentious events of his times.
Here is an excerpt from the book that talks about his entry into politics in 1939.
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Dr Mookerjee’s political career had begun in a small way. When he entered the Bengal Legislative Council in 1929 as a Congress candidate from the Calcutta University constituency, it was a projection of his growing reputation as an educationist. In a sense, this was not really a political move, because his intention behind entering the council was to act as a watchdog for the interests of the university in the legislature. When the Congress gave a call for boycott of councils in 1930, Dr Mookerjee duly obeyed and resigned from the council. Perhaps he was confident that he could walk into the council any time he wanted to. As a matter of fact, he was re-elected to the council as an independent candidate from the same university constituency. The primary reason behind Dr Mookerjee’s entry into fulltime realpolitik lay in the treatment meted out to the minority Bengali Hindus by the rabidly communal Muslim League– Krishak Praja Party coalition government of Bengal. It was a coalition for namesake, with the Muslim League calling all the shots, and the Krishak Party (including the Prime Minister and the Hindu ministers) meekly following. As always, the Congress, which was roundly supported by the Hindus of Bengal, chose not to take up their case for fear of losing the vote of a particular community, and Dr Mookerjee was persuaded that he, of all persons, could not stand and idly watch the situation. Those who blame Dr Mookerjee today for not doing ‘inclusive politics’ are rather unaware of the political realities of that time. It is important to recontextualize his life in the context of the political realities of that time. The Government of India Act of 1935 came into effect in 1937, and in the same year, Dr Mookerjee was again elected to the Bengal assembly. So he had the opportunity to study the working of provincial autonomy from close quarters. Nevertheless, since his tendencies lay in the sphere of educational administration, Dr Mookerjee did not feel attracted to the ‘noisy and dusty career of a politician’. Rather, he felt that the best way for him to serve his country would be through the path of education. The major factor that drove him into politics was the political situation, particularly the aftermath of the Government of India Act of 1935. The minority Hindus of Bengal (about 47 per cent) had already been crushed under Ramsay Macdonald’s Communal Award of 1932, which reduced Hindus to political impotence. The Congress’s reaction to the Communal Award was of ‘noncommitment’— they neither supported it nor opposed it. It is difficult to see how the premier political party of India refused to take a position on an important pronouncement by the British Prime Minister. This refusal turned out to be a grave blunder. In the 1935 Act a separate electorate was provided ‘with a vengeance’ for giving special protection to the majority Muslim community in Bengal. In his diary written much later (1944), Dr Mookerjee records some of the glaring instances of Hindu suffering, such as the ratio of communal representation in respect of the services, the defilement of Hindu images, the suppression and supersession of better qualifications in respect of Hindus, and preferential treatment of Muslims in educational and other technical services, the passing of laws specially jeopardizing Hindus, the encouragement of riots and attacks on Hindu women. Almost identical sentiments were expressed by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who trod a very different path from Dr Mookerjee.
Category: Excerpts
How to be Human by Manjeet Hirani – An Excerpt
Manjeet Hirani is a senior commander and trainer with Air India. Fascinated by all things philosophical, she is also an influencer and a speaker across various platforms. Manjeet blogs at manjeethirani.com. In this book, How to be Human: Life Lessons from Buddy Hirani, she writes through her personal experience with her dog, Buddy, about attachment, parenting, and karma, among other things. This is a charming and heart-warming book that, with its light touch, will make you look at life from a less cynical standpoint.
Let’s read the foreword by Dia Mirza
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Sultan, my beautiful golden Labrador, would know when my car would reach the junction that led to my apartment building. He’d run to the front door and lie down in front of it, wagging his tail well before I would even reach the porch! There was never a day in his eleven years of life that he didn’t make it to the door in time to greet me.
Sultan always knew when I was coming home or leaving on a long trip. He knew everything. He knew when I was happy or sad or angry. He would find an endearing way to let me know that he was around. He would sit by my side with his head on my lap, or put a paw on my foot, or prance around wagging his tail.
He always found a way to show that he cared, that he loved me no matter what. He never judged me or found fault with me.
Sultan was also a great teacher. I think much of who I am today is courtesy the many lessons of compassion and love that he and the other pets we’ve had taught me.
Dogs are healers; I think they are the non-human form of saints. They are often found assisting in all kinds of recovery programmes to aid human beings in overcoming seemingly insurmountable (physical and emotional) problems across the world. They are a part of security squads and protection groups. It is not without reason that dogs are called man’s best friend.
The thought of a life without knowing the love of a dog seems incomprehensible to me. Thank goodness for children and their inherent love for animals! They are born with knowledge that ensures their response to nature, i.e. pets, is instinctual. If it weren’t for Vir’s incessant pleas and his deep desire to bring a dog home, then perhaps this remarkable discovery unfolding each day would have gone undiscovered in the Hirani household.
Manjeet Hirani has written one of the most honest accounts of what it means for a person to embrace a pet. To me, what remains the most fascinating aspect is her willingness to share how much she is learning from this incredible new member of their family. Manjeet is a mother, daughter, wife, sister, friend, pilot, and now a dog lover.
This book is a beautiful journey of discovery and learning—a journey of love that has made its way into every day and into every moment. It is about the deep abiding joy that Buddy has brought into the Hirani home. But above all it is a book that will help even the non-believer become a believer.
8 Facts about the Islamic Flows between the Gulf and South Asia
Over the last fifty years, pan-Islamic ties have intensified between the Gulf and South Asia. Gathering together some of the best specialists on the subject, The Islamic Connection, edited by Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurence Louër, explore these ideological, educational and spiritual networks, which have gained momentum due to political strategies, migration flows and increased communications. At stake are both the resilience of the civilization that imbued South Asia with a specific identity and the relations between Sunnis and Shias in a region where Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting a cultural proxy war.
Here are some facts about the Islamic Flows between the Gulf and South Asia:
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The Fever by Sonia Shah – An Excerpt
Humans have suffered from mosquito-borne diseases for more than 500,000 years. Not only do they still plague us, but they have also become more lethal. In The Fever, journalist Sonia Shah sets out to address this concern, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of malaria and its influence on human lives. In her book, she mentions the delayed study of a drop of blood that lead to the discovery of the microbe responsible for malaria.
Here is an excerpt from her book about the accidental discovery of the microbe.
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One day in the late 1870s, two pathologists, Corrado Tommasi-Crudeli and Edwin Klebs, collected air and mud samples from the Roman Campagna. From the samples, they isolated ten-micro millimeter-long rods, which from the vantage point of their crude microscopes, seemed to develop into long threads. When injected into lab rabbits, the long threads soon had the bunnies heaving with chills and fever. Inside their slaughtered bodies, the pathologists found the ten-micro millimeter-long rods, once again.
The two scientists decided that they’d found the microbe responsible for malaria. It was a germ, it lived in the soil and the air, and they called it Bacillus malariae. They announced their findings in 1879.
The scientific method is not infallible, of course, and such mistakes are made, even when the entire economy of a newly formed nation depends on the results.
Counterevidence soon emerged.
In November 1880, Alphonse Laveran, a French surgeon stationed in Constantine, Algeria, peered at a crimson blob on a glass slide. How he found what he did is a bit of a mystery. Most nineteenth century microscopists soaked their slides in chemicals, their cutting-edge techniques thus unknowingly kill ing the malaria parasites in their samples and rendering them all but invisible amid the scattered debris of the magnified blood. Those who did examine blood from malaria victims while still fresh, as Laveran did, presumably did so more promptly than he did on this particular day. The blood was still warm when Laveran excused himself from its notice. What precisely he did upon abandoning his slide nobody knows, but whatever it was, it took about fifteen minutes. Maybe it was a cup of coffee.
In any case, during the lull, the drop of malarial blood on the glass cooled. The change in temperature roused the parasites in the sample, which now considered that they had left the warm-blooded human for the cool environs of a mosquito body. Male forms of the parasite would soon be called upon to fertilize female ones, and each started to sprout long flagella and wave them about, in lascivious preparation. Laveran returned to his microscope expecting yet another static scene. Instead, the shocked surgeon caught sight of tiny spheres propelling themselves with fine, transparent filaments, wrigglingly alive.
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12 Rules For Life by Jordan B. Peterson – An Excerpt
Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Formerly a professor at Harvard University, he was nominated for its prestigious Levenson Teaching Prize. In this book, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, he combines ancient wisdom with decades of experience to provide twelve profound and challenging principles for how to live a meaningful life, from setting your house in order before criticising others to comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not someone else today.
Let’s read an excerpt from this fascinating book.
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RULES? MORE RULES? REALLY? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?
People don’t clamour for rules, even in the Bible . . . as when Moses comes down the mountain, after a long absence, bearing the tablets inscribed with ten commandments, and finds the Children of Israel in revelry. They’d been Pharaoh’s slaves and subject to his tyrannical regulations for four hundred years, and after that Moses subjected them to the harsh desert wilderness for another forty years, to purify them of their slavishness. Now, free at last, they are unbridled, and have lost all control as they dance wildly around an idol, a golden calf, displaying all manner of corporeal corruption.
“I’ve got some good news . . . and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells to them. “Which do you want first?”
“The good news!” the hedonists reply.
“I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!”
“Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?”
“Adultery is still in.”
So rules there will be—but, please, not too many. We are ambivalent about rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency and our pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according to another’s rule?
And judged we are. After all, God didn’t give Moses “The Ten Suggestions,” he gave Commandments; and if I’m a free agent, my first reaction to a command might just be that nobody, not even God, tells me what to do, even if it’s good for me. But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.
And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us—in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way. The old Hebrew story makes it clear how the ancients felt about our prospects for civilized behaviour in the absence of rules that seek to elevate our gaze and raise our standards.
One neat thing about the Bible story is that it doesn’t simply list its rules, as lawyers or legislators or administrators might; it embeds them in a dramatic tale that illustrates why we need them, thereby making them easier to understand. Similarly, in this book Professor Peterson doesn’t just propose his twelve rules, he tells stories, too, bringing to bear his knowledge of many fields as he illustrates and explains why the best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives…
Order is where the people around you act according to well understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity. The state of Order is typically portrayed, symbolically—imaginatively—as masculine. It’s the Wise King and the Tyrant, forever bound together, as society is simultaneously structure and oppression.
Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens. Chaos emerges, in trivial form, when you tell a joke at a party with people you think you know and a silent and embarrassing chill falls over the gathering. Chaos is what emerges more catastrophically when you suddenly find yourself without employment, or are betrayed by a lover. As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it’s presented imaginatively as feminine. It’s the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar. It’s Creation and Destruction, the source of new things and the destination of the dead (as nature, as opposed to culture, is simultaneously birth and demise).
Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.* Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white— and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.
For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way.
And that’s much better than happiness.
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The Diary of a Domestic Diva by Shilpa Shetty Kundra – An Excerpt
Shilpa Shetty Kundra is a renowned film and TV actor, businesswoman, author of The Great Indian Diet, entrepreneur and health enthusiast. She has always been a trendsetter, whether it be fashion or ideas. In her latest book, The Diary of a Domestic Diva, the actor and entrepreneur brings you fifty of her most special recipes-some of which feature in her popular Sunday Binge videos on Instagram.
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to this book by Sanjeev Kapoor.
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What I like most about Shilpa’s approach to food is that it’s very honest. She belies the notion many of us have about stars: that they live by strict diets and don’t eat as they please. Shilpa, as you will discover through this book, is a dedicated foodie and loves to eat. I have known her for a long time now and I can tell you that she certainly knows when to stop eating too, one of the key factors in maintaining a healthy body weight.
The Diary of a Domestic Diva is straight from her kitchen and offers a mix of healthy recipes, favourite recipes, famous recipes with a twist and guilt-free desserts. The idea behind the book is very heartening. It features recipes that do not take much of your time and leave you free to do other things. Through this book, she touches upon a beautiful point: Women need not be tied to the kitchen stove all day. Give a woman nutritious and fast-to-cook recipes and she will have the time to step out to do what she pleases. It’s a cookbook with a message: Women ought to have some ‘me’ time. In my conversations with her, she has often mentioned the way, back in the day, her mother (a brilliant cook) would cook with the paucity of time as she was a working woman. I know it is all this that has led her to put together this book for the working woman. Being a family person, every aspect of her life draws from her experiences with people close to her. Her father’s love for food and yet his fitness is another inspiration that has worked so well for her. The recipes mentioned here have been tried out by her and I can vouch for their deliciousness. The fact that I drop everything when there’s an invite to her lovely ome for a meal is proof! The twists she adds to traditional recipes are delightful to say the least. The Diary of a Domestic Diva is about indulging your love for good food. And when such a message comes from one of the fittest people in town, you do sit up and take notice. Shilpa maintains that good food makes us happy and we shouldn’t feel guilty about something that makes us happy, and over the years this is something I have come to believe too.
With this sure-to-be-a-bestseller cookbook, Shilpa also enters the space of celebrity cooks and it delights the chef in me to see the world get so interested in food. It is indeed one more brownie point for the food industry.
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5 Vignettes that will make you Reminiscent of your Teen Years
Swati Kaushal is the bestselling author of five highly acclaimed novels, including Piece of Cake, Drop Dead, Lethal Spice, and her most recent work, A Few Good Friends. An alumna of Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi, and an MBA from IIM Calcutta, Swati has worked with Nestlé India and Nokia, India. Her book, A Girl Like Me, is the story of sixteen-year-old Anisha Rai, packed with the breathless exuberance of teenage life.
Let’s read through 5 poignant instances from the book that will immediately strike a chord!
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Catalyst by Chandramouli Venkatesan – An Excerpt
Chandramouli Venkatesan is a corporate veteran with over twenty-six years of experience in the industry. He has worked with Asian Paints, Cadbury/Mondelez, Mirc Electronics/Onida and Pidilite. He has served in various senior capacities, including as CEO and managing director. He has conducted numerous speaking sessions, which have benefited over 1000 people, and mentored and guided many others to be successful in their careers. His book, Catalyst, will arm you with the right tools to succeed at your workplace and get the most out of every moment, every day.
Let’s read an excerpt from this life-transforming book.
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In all my experiences and travels across the world, the one thing that stands out is the hunger for success that most people have and, in particular, Indians have. Often that hunger for success can be simplified by most people as success and growth in careers. That success in life is equal to success in careers is often the operating assumption of most people. In the latter portion of the book I do try to give a more holistic dimension to success in life to include values, character and other related aspects. However, in the first half of the book I focus primarily on giving what people want—the keys to success in careers.
I have a simple equation for career growth
Career growth = Real Individual growth +_ Environmental aspects
What this equation tries to say is that career growth is driven by two factors—real individual growth and environmental aspects. Real Individual growth is the growth we experience in the duration of our careers; how much each one of us grow our knowledge, our skills, our judgement, our influence, our communication etc. The second factor is Environmental aspects, which covers things like buoyancy of the job market, industry related factors, relative availability of talent in your skill areas etc.
Let me first cover the impact of environmental aspects on career growth. Our careers are typically 40 years long, we start in our 20s and wind up in our 60s. During these 40 years we will have both environmental tailwinds and headwinds to our careers. An example of a tailwind would be the times in your careers where the job market is hyper hot for the skills you have, there is a shortage of the skills you bring and people tend to get jobs and salaries bigger than what they deserve, sometimes going all the way to bubbles. Another example of a tailwind is when your boss quits the company, you are not yet fully ready to take that role, but the company decides it would rather go with an insider and hence gives the job to you even when you are not yet fully ready. Such tailwinds are bound to support most of us at times in our careers.
Similarly, we have all experienced headwinds in our careers. There are times when the economy is dragging, the job market is weak and there are very few opportunities for people to grow. Another example of a headwind is when you have been steadily getting ready for a big job, equipping yourself with the right experiences, apprenticing under the right leaders and preparing yourself for the opportunity and when the opportunity comes the company in its wisdom decides it wants to drive change, wants new thinking and a change in strategy and hence prefers to hire an outsider into the role as opposed to promoting an insider. Nothing you did wrong, but the dice did not roll your way.
My experience is that in a 40-year career, the headwinds and the tailwinds balance each other out. You will have some headwinds in your career as well as some tailwinds. You have to be a very lucky person for the tailwinds over 40 years to be greater than the headwinds and similarly you have to be very unlucky for the headwinds over 40 years to be greater than the tailwinds. For most people the two does balance out. Hence going back to our career growth equation, it means that the environmental aspects will not be deciding factor in driving career growth.
The catalyst of career growth tends to be real Individual growth. Simply said, in your career you will experience as much career growth as you are able to grow yourself as an individual and as a professional, what I call real individual growth. If you manage to grow your skills, your knowledge, your decision making, your judgement, your influence on others, your communication etc. then you will experience career growth. Career growth is directly proportional to and is a function of the real individual growth. You experience career growth if you manage to grow yourself during your career, if you stop pushing yourself at any stage the career growth also comes to a screeching halt.
Hence the equation of career growth can be simplified to
Career growth = Real Individual growth
One way I like to state this is the expression, “you get what you deserve”. Far too often in our careers we focus on the getting part of it, we focus on getting the promotion, getting the new job and getting career growth. We do not focus on deserving more, increasing our capabilities, our skills etc. In a career, you get what you deserve. It is useful to remember what is in our hands—focusing on deserving more and driving our real individual growth.
‘Taslima and Bhimsen steal the show’: Scenes from an award night
Taslima Nasrin is an eminent writer and secular humanist who has been subjected to forced banishment and multiple fatwas. She has been living in exile since 1994. For her powerful writing on women’s rights and uncompromising criticism of religious fundamentalism, the Bengali original of this book, Split: A Life, was banned by the Left Front in West Bengal as well as the Government of Bangladesh. Bold and evocative, Split: A Life opens a window to the experiences and works of one of the bravest writers of our times.
Here’s an excerpt from this powerful book.
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I asked for forgiveness because I had dared to accept such an exalted award despite being such an insignificant entity, for having shown the audacity even though I was utterly undeserving. Who knew if anyone forgave me in the end! After the event many writers and artists came up to congratulate me and I spoke to people I had never imagined I would have the opportunity to speak to. The day after, the news of the award ceremony was published on the front page of Anandabazar Patrika along with the headline ‘Taslima and Bhimsen steal the show’. Celebrations were being held all around me. Soumitra Mitra was very happy with how things had turned out and he was taking me to various places to meet various people. He surprised me with a visit to Rabindrasangeet exponent Kanika Bandyopadhyay. I was an ardent admirer of Kanika and standing in front of her was like a wave of euphoria had swept over my entire world. Ashesh and Mona, my companions during the Basanta Utsab trip, came to see me and took a bunch of photographs. I was suddenly an important person who no longer had to walk hunched along the corridors of Anandabazar and everyone knew who I was. Sagarmoy Ghosh offered me a chance to write a serialized novel for Desh. Floored by the offer I confessed I did not know how to write a novel. He smiled but did not rescind his offer. Nikhil Sarkar invited me to his Salt Lake residence and gave me a bunch of letters with which to go and meet a number of well-known people. Dutifully, the small writer with the big award took the letters with her and hesitantly went to pay a visit to the big guns. Mahasweta Devi, Meera Mukhopadhyay and many others—stars one was meant to show respect to when reaching for the sky. Whether I was even near the sky or I was where I had always been, I could scarcely tell for sure; I stood in front of the celebrities with all my insecurities and remonstrations intact. There was a trend in Calcutta to touch the feet of senior writers and artists to pay them one’s respects. Unused to the custom, I could not help but stand stiffly in front of most people I met. I had never managed to grasp the Bengali Muslim version of the same ritual either, the kadambushi. Though my heart was full of respect, I refrained from touching people’s feet and this must have irked many a senior, made them think of me as an upstart. But there was hardly anything I could do about it. If I was suddenly asked to till the field was I not supposed to stand there dumbstruck? It was impossible for me to abruptly start doing something I had never done before.
Despite not being one for formalities, I loved giving the small gifts I had brought from Bangladesh to my friends and well-wishers in Calcutta. Aveek Sarkar had handed the Ananda Puraskar to me and it was only right that I gift him a small token in return. So I took the multi-coloured jamdani sari I had worn for the award function, got its ornate border cut and had it framed in the best golden frame from a renowned framing shop on Park Street. When I reached the Anandabazar offices with my gift, Nikhil Sarkar was astounded by my daring. What I had failed to grasp was that for an art connoisseur and a man of such refined tastes as Aveek Sarkar, the limits of what he preferred among Indian art objects was probably defined by the Maqbool Fida Husain I saw adorning the walls. Otherwise, everything else was surely works by famous Western artists and painters. A jamdani sari border, no matter how beautiful, was not something that could possibly hope to be displayed in his room. I could not help but think to myself that the women behind such exquisite work were no less great artists, but the tasteful and the rich hardly considered them worthy of their attention. It was fortuitous that I had not turned up at Aveek Sarkar’s office directly with the framed piece of jamdani. Nikhil Sarkar advised that if I was bent on giving the gift to someone I should give it to Aveek Sarkar’s wife. Swallowing my discomfiture I did exactly that and managed to save Sarkar, the giant of Anandabazar, from any further embarrassment. A leading bureaucrat of the Bangladeshi consulate invited me and some authors to his place, primarily in my honour. As soon as I arrived the poets and writers of Calcutta surrounded me and inundated me with questions. So many questions of so many kinds— renaissance, revolution, feminism, backlash, modernism, postmodernism, my literary ideology, political beliefs, class struggle and so on. They waited for me to reply with startling answers while all I could do was stare at them in wide-eyed wonder. The questions appeared incomprehensible to me and seeing my bafflement they too began glancing at each other in surprise. Embarrassed, I wanted to curl up like a snail and disappear from the star-studded gathering, simply vanish without a trace. I did not want to answer any questions because I had no answers to give.
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Coffee Can Investing The Low Risk Road to Stupendous Wealth – An Excerpt
Most people invest in the usual assets: real estate, gold, mutual funds, fixed deposits and stock markets. It’s always the same four or five instruments. All they end up making is a measly 8 to 12 per cent per annum. What if there was another way? In Coffee Can Investing, Saurabh will show you how to go about low-risk investments that generate great returns.
Here’s an excerpt from this book.
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“The ancient Romans were used to being defeated. Like the rulers of history’s great empires, they could lose battle after battle but still win the war. An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire.” – Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind 18 (2011)
Many historians take the view that the “greatness” of a kingdom or an empire should be measured by its longevity. How long did the empire sustain? How durable was the empire? By this measure the first great empire was arguably the Persian Empire. Founded around 550 BC, it lasted for around 200 years until Alexander the Great brought it to an end in 330 BC by defeating King Darius III. However, if longevity is the measure of a great empire, then the Roman Empire is by some distance the greatest empire that the world has ever seen. Whilst the first Roman republic, headquartered in Rome, lasted from 100 BC to 400 AD, the imperial successor to the Republic lasted for a staggering 1400 years before falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. So ubiquitous is the influence of this empire, the language in which we are writing this book, the legal system which underpins the contract between the publisher and the authors of this book, the mathematical concept of compounding which underpins much of this book, all of them come more or less directly from the Roman Empire!
When it comes to investing in stock markets, greatness is defined as ‘the ability of a company to grow whilst sustaining its moats over long periods of time’. This then enables such great companies to sustain superior financial performance over several decades. The Coffee Can philosophy of investing is built using the twin filters to identify great companies that have the DNA to sustain their competitive advantages over 10-20 years (or longer). This is because ‘greatness’, which the coffee can portfolio seeks, is not temporary and it is surely not a short-term phenomenon. Greatness does not change from one quarterly result to another. In fact, great companies can endure difficult economic conditions.
Their growth is not beholden to domestic or global growth – they thrive in economic down cycles as well. Great companies do not get disrupted by evolution in their customers’ preferences or competitors or operational aspects of their business. Their management teams have strategies that deliver results better than their competition can. These great companies effectively separate themselves from competition using these strategies. Over time, they learn from their mistakes and increase the distance between themselves and their competition. Often, such companies appear conservative. However, they do not confuse conservatism with complacency – these companies simply bide their time for making the right moves. These traits are common among great companies and rarely found outside great companies.
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