Shelf Life

Pages: 319

Bankerupt,the latest thriller from The John Grisham of banking aka Ravi Subramaniam,begins in 1999,with Bill Clinton,then President of the United States,sitting at the Oval Office a day after the Columbine High School massacre,staring tearfully at a portrait of Thomas Jefferson. He blames it for the rampant gun violence in America. This is pretty much the high point of the book. Following this cheerfully rational depiction of the the leader of the free world,the book follows the story of Aditya Raisinghania,an ambitious,unscrupulous banker and his wife,Cirisha Narayanan an ambitious,scrupulous academician. You know Raisinghania is unscrupulous because,early on in the book,he bribes a liquor store owner to get a bottle of whiskey on a dry day. And you know Narayanan is scrupulous because she objects,vigorously. The moral character of its lead characters established,the book devolves into a thriller in the loosest sense of the word concerning academic rivalries,a lot of banking fraud,the villainous National Rifle Association and you thought Bill Clinton was apropos to nothing and a couple of murders. One begins to see a pattern here,no? The plot,despite having some interesting elements such as the NRA lobbies and contemporary businesses like emu farming,has all the grip of the steering wheel of a decades-old car and pretty much the same pace. All in all,the book is very similar to a banking document. You wish you didnt have to read it.

Plummeting Fortunes

Pages: 295

If youre looking for the story of how Air India became what it is today kept alive through government doles from being a trendsetter in the international skies this is not the book for you. It does not answer the fundamental question why the government should be involved in the running of an airline. The result,of course,was a tedious trail of unfair demands on the airline by politicians and bureaucrats and their hangers-on over decades,which made it lose its competitive advantage. The author has plenty of details to offer on the people who crippled Air India but surprisingly,for a former journalist,pays little attention to repetition. It makes the reader swing back and forth across years,but does not help the narrative. The elements are there for a great story,but Bhargava does not build upon it.