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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This volume presents Scanlon's classic essays in political philosophy written between 1969 and 1999.