Leaping from the past into a global present
Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems map a wobbling world, trying to find its axis in a season of change. Fabrics tear, lands splinter, stances harden, loved ones die, names dissolve. But wandering through these pages are some extraordinary women – women who vault nimbly over borders, walk naked, walk aslant, and sometimes upside down.
Leaping from the past into a global present, these exuberant voices offer tips on how to retain one’s spine through life’s giddiest roller coaster rides. Blurring the divide between the mundane and the magical, the historical and the imaginary, they point to a new world that might lie within the folds of the old. A world that requires a new set of skills: how to find the right nicknames, how to ‘gatecrash into the present’, how to ‘go skinny-dipping in the self’. These are songs of bewilderment, insight and startling freedom.*
A delectable history of the king of fruits
From the royal Alphonso to the lip-smacking Chausa, nothing can beat the rush of pleasure from biting into a ripe mango. With its endless varieties, differing in colour, size and flavour, the fruit inspires an astounding cultural devotion.
The mango is the Indian subcontinent’s gift to the world – its roots in northeast India expanding globally over 60 million years. Appearing in the verses of Hindu epics and Ghalib’s poetry; the food habits of the Harappans and the travelogues of Ibn Battuta; the horticultural experiments of Mughal emperors and Jesuit priests, the mango has shaped South Asian culture far beyond its culinary uses. Its long history is intertwined with European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade, even gaining symbolic importance during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and continues to drive innovation in food sustainability and preservation.
{{/usCountry}}The mango is the Indian subcontinent’s gift to the world – its roots in northeast India expanding globally over 60 million years. Appearing in the verses of Hindu epics and Ghalib’s poetry; the food habits of the Harappans and the travelogues of Ibn Battuta; the horticultural experiments of Mughal emperors and Jesuit priests, the mango has shaped South Asian culture far beyond its culinary uses. Its long history is intertwined with European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade, even gaining symbolic importance during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and continues to drive innovation in food sustainability and preservation.
{{/usCountry}}Plunge into the juicy details and surrender to the summery nostalgia of this beloved fruit with Mango: A Global History. Complete with beautiful illustrations and recipes, this is a flavourful journey across epochs of human civilization.*
On emerging tech hotspots
The US is the source of just about all the technologies that define modern life: personal computers, operating systems, smartphones, e-commerce, web browsers, email, search engines, social networks, electric cars and the rest. And most of the tech companies that created and monetized these technologies are also in the US.
In this book Mehran Gul, the winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize, asks: is that changing?
Less than a decade ago, the sentiment towards Chinese tech companies was often dismissive and complacent. Now the alarm bells are ringing. But as the commentariat pontificates how the US–China tech battle will play out, an equally interesting question to ask is: are there more Chinas out there? Places no one is taking seriously now that might turn out to be massively competitive sooner than we think.
Samsung, a South Korean conglomerate, competes with Apple to be the world’s largest manufacturer of smartphones. Arm, founded in the UK, develops chip designs that are used in more than 90 per cent of all mobile devices. Spotify, based in Sweden, is the most popular music streaming service in the world.
That’s not all. The world’s most important semiconductor company, TSMC, is in Taiwan. The other most important company in the semiconductor industry, ASML, is in the Netherlands. Some of the world’s best-known games like Minecraft, Candy Crush and Angry Birds came from gaming studios in the Nordics. Nearly all the major electric battery manufacturers like CATL, LG, and SK On are in Asia.
This is a story about technology and the places where it finds its way into the world. Silicon Valley has for half a century been unrivalled in spinning out technologies and fast-growing, high-value, billion-dollar-plus tech companies, the Apples, Facebooks, Googles of the world, that made it the centre for the most rapid creation of wealth in human history. Its secrets are spreading to more places.
The geography of innovation is shifting. The world has a lot more high-value tech companies than ever before, growing a lot faster than ever before, in a lot more places than ever before. This is a book about these places.*
*All copy from book flap.