Gurcharan Das
Showing all 10 books
How did the Kachchhi traders build on the Gujarat Advantage? In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, during the dying days of the Mughal empire, merchants from Kachchh established a flourishing overseas trade. Building on a rich legacy of free trade in premodern times between the many ports of Gujarat and the Middle East, the Kachchhis dealt in pearls, dates, spices and ivory with the faraway lands of Muscat and Zanzibar. The Kachchhi merchants behaved ...
Even in ancient India, money is always a good thing and everyone wants it. The stories in The Mouse Merchant selected from the Sanskrit universe, from the period of the late Rig Veda to the twelfth century tell us how money was dealt with in everyday life in ancient and medieval Indian society. At the heart of these tales is the merchant. Sometimes gullible, sometimes greedy, ingenious at some moments, dim-witted at others and hopelessly in love with courtesans ...
Arthashastra (literally, ‘the science of wealth’) is a study of economic enterprise; specifically, Kautilya’s treatise advises the king on the business of creating prosperity. This ancient text provides a fascinating window into the social and economic structures of the time, and into the intricacies of statecraft-for the Arthashastra also addresses the question: what makes a good leader?
This book is intended to be an introduction to the ...
In India Unbound, acclaimed columnist Gurcharan Das offers a comprehensive view of the economic and social transformation of India from independence to the new millennium. It is the riveting story of a nation’s rise from poverty to prosperity and the clash of ideas that occurred along the way. Das shows how India’s policies after 1947 condemned the nation to a hobbled economy until 1991, when the government instituted ...
The Elephant Paradigm: India Wrestles with Change is, quite simply, about an ancient civilization’s reawakening to the spirit—and potential—of its youth. Following up on the success of India Unbound, which examined the process of India’s transformation in the 1990s from a closed to an open economy, The Elephant Paradigm ranges over a vast area—covering subjects as ...
India Unbound is the reveting story of a nation's rise from poverty to prosperity and the clash of ideas that occurred along the way. Today's India is a vibrant free-market democracy, and it has begun to flex its muscles in the global information economy. The old centralized, bureaucratic state, which stifled industrial growth, is on the decline; the lower castes have risen confidently through the ballot box; and the middle class has tripled in the last two ...