the Elephant, the Tiger & the Cellphone

The Elephant, The Tiger, and the Cell Phone: Reflections on INDIA - The Emerging 21st-Century Power Arcade Publishing このアイテムの詳細を見る

The author (Shasi Tharoor) served at UN for a long time and write novels as well as non-fiction.
He is a smart fella.

I liked the first 60 pages, but then it become hard to keep on reading　because
there was no picture yet the author kept adding new people who
are not as widely recognized as Gandhi or Nehru.....I mean it is
really hard to keep reading a news paper articles for hrs.
I suppose many Indian readers are okay with this type of reading　because
they know the topic person and also they seem to enjoy wordy readings.

The author knows hell of a lot about India. That is for sure.
I think a smart man like the author is the source of the power of India.

Of the pages I actually read, two things kept being emphasized:
Diversity and Indian secularism. The latter does not surprise a Japanese like me.

And a few things I found particularly interesting:
One goes something like "when there's a true statement about India,
the opposite is also true."

10 = 35 at call center.
It is taught that 35 American is as smart as 10 year old Indian.
This is a good one.

SOFTER POWER
This notion is something to learn.
I've come across this before somewhere, but this book is the first one that gave a definition.

P23 - It is relatively new in international discourse.
Coined by Joseph Nye of Harvard
To quote Nye, "Power is the ability to alter the behavior of other to get
what you want, and there are three ways to do that: coercion (sticks),
payments (carrots) and attraction (soft power). If you are able to attract
others, you can economize on the sticks and carrots "
Another quote of Nye, "the soft power of a country rests primarily on
three resources: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others) its
political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its
foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority"

How it is actually used?
The US uses its soft power to persuade others to adopt the US's agenda,
rather than relying purely on the dissuasive or coercive military force.

and US has the biggest soft power in the time of Nye's writing.

Lastly on soft power, three ways to gain soft power, those whose dominant
cultures and ideals are closer to prevailing global norms, (which now
emphasize liberalism, pluralism, autonomy); those with the most access to
multiple channels of communication and thus more influence over how
issues are framed; and those whose credibility is enhanced by their
domestic and international performance.