Short Takes
Making of a go-getter
Randeep Wadehra

Agony and Ecstasy
by T.R. Kakkar. Siddharth Publications. Pages: 196. Rs 250

He was merely four years old when his family was uprooted from Pakistan during the Partition. He was orphaned when very young. He toiled in a factory, but his never-say-die spirit impelled him to better his lot. He failed to get a bus conductor’s job with the DTU. Poor physique disqualified him for the Army. But he succeeded in enlisting in the IAF. There, his officers, impressed with his intellect, encouraged him to study and become an officer. Soon he got commissioned into the Indian Army, where he was posted out of the elite parachute regiment to the Dogras for being a teetotaller. With the passage of time he left the army and became a senior police officer. This is a poignant, rollercoaster chronicle of a simple, honest soul who successfully tackled the complexities of life. A real-life inspirational saga.

 

How to be a High Performance Manager
by Rajesh Chadha, Unistar, Chandigarh. Pages: 151. Rs 125.

Management guru Peter Drucker once remarked, "Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision." And for taking such a decision, one needs to have certain special traits – foresight, self-confidence and business sense. In order to be a good manager, Chadha says, one ought to learn and develop certain qualities, skills and attitudes. He has classified them under four heads or stages, viz., I command of self, Learning, Growing with knowledge and Changing to leadership from manager.

While reading this book you’ll understand what it takes one to become a successful manager, and then evolve into a leader of men.

 

The Feminist Sensibility in the Novels of Thomas Hardy
by Manjit Kaur. Sarup and Sons. Pages: ii + 147. Rs 300.

Feminism had its first stirrings in the early 19th century. Initially (1800-1930s) it was mainly concerned with getting equal status for women vis-à-vis men. Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928) must have been influenced by the movement. But feminist literature as a genre appeared in the 20th century only. Some of Hardy’s works do deal with female psyche, but whether these qualify as feminist literature is arguable. Manjit Kaur rightly describes Sue Bridehead of Jude the Obscure as a woman of "complex sexuality" who felt that she was being treated as a she-ass to be given away in marriage. But here Hardy was more concerned with marriage-as-institution rather than solely with women’s rights. However, it’s in Tess of the D’Urbervilles that he comes up with a better defined woman protagonist whose evolution’s marked by events and stages that John Holloway describes in Darwinian terms: organism, environment, struggle, adaptation, fertility, survival and resistance.

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