Difficulty Of Being Good

Author : Gurcharan Das
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780199779604
Total Pages : 488 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Difficulty of Being Good written by Gurcharan Das and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Gurcharan Das
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385720742
Total Pages : 434 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book India Unbound written by Gurcharan Das and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2002-04-09 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Gurcharan Das
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 8184756747
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book India Grows At Night written by Gurcharan Das and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-07-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jean Cocteau
Publisher : Melville House
ISBN 13 : 1612192904
Total Pages : 13 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Difficulty of Being written by Jean Cocteau and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 13 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflections on life and art from the legendary filmmaker-novelist-poet-genius. By the time he published The Difficulty of Being in 1947, Jean Cocteau had produced some of the most respected films and literature of the twentieth century, and had worked with the foremost artists of his time, including Proust, Gide, Picasso and Stravinsky. This memoir tells the inside account of those achievements and of his glittering social circle. Cocteau writes about his childhood, about his development as an artist, and the peculiarity of the artist’s life, about his dreams, friendships, pain, and laughter. He probes his motivations and explains his philosophies, giving intimate details in soaring prose. And sprinkled throughout are anecdotes about the elite and historic people he associated with. Beyond illuminating a truly remarkable life, The Difficulty of Being is an inspiring homage to the belief that art matters.

Author : Gurcharan Das
Publisher : India Allen Lane
ISBN 13 : 9780670087372
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Kama written by Gurcharan Das and published by India Allen Lane. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Author : Gurcharan Das
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 9351184277
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Fine Family written by Gurcharan Das and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2000-10-14 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Roger Grenier
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 9780226308272
Total Pages : 156 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Difficulty of Being a Dog written by Roger Grenier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-12 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 1429926643
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Nickel and Dimed written by Barbara Ehrenreich and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : George Orwell
Publisher : Renard Press Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1913724263
Total Pages : 15 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why I Write written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Author : Rhonda Byrne
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0731815297
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Secret written by Rhonda Byrne and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-07-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tenth-anniversary edition of the book that changed lives in profound ways, now with a new foreword and afterword. In 2006, a groundbreaking feature-length film revealed the great mystery of the universe—The Secret—and, later that year, Rhonda Byrne followed with a book that became a worldwide bestseller. Fragments of a Great Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries. For the first time, all the pieces of The Secret come together in an incredible revelation that will be life-transforming for all who experience it. In this book, you’ll learn how to use The Secret in every aspect of your life—money, health, relationships, happiness, and in every interaction you have in the world. You’ll begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that’s within you, and this revelation can bring joy to every aspect of your life. The Secret contains wisdom from modern-day teachers—men and women who have used it to achieve health, wealth, and happiness. By applying the knowledge of The Secret, they bring to light compelling stories of eradicating disease, acquiring massive wealth, overcoming obstacles, and achieving what many would regard as impossible.