Archive for the ‘BookWise’ Category
Has India Downloaded the ‘Killer Apps’?
Harvard historian Niall Ferguson’s ‘six killer applications’ theory is the latest attempt to unravel the mystery of the decline of Western civilization. Ferguson in his recent work Civilization: The West and the Rest, chronicles the rise of the Western Civilization during the past 500 years and explains how China and the east may soon overtake the Western countries. According to Ferguson, “what distinguished the West from the Rest – the mainsprings of global power – were six identifiably novel complexes of institutions and associated ideas and behaviours…” The distinguishing features of the Western Civilization, which Ferguson refers to as ‘killer apps’ include competition, science, property rights, medicine, consumer society and work ethic. In Ferguson’s analysis “we are already living through the twilight of Western predominance. But that is not just because most of the Rest have now downloaded all or nearly all of our killer apps. It is also because we ourselves have lost faith in our own civilisation.”
The Godfather Doctrine
The Godfather is a classic American movie centered on the rise, confrontations and adaptations of the Corleone family. The Godfather Doctrine is a book by John C. Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell to communicate, through the plot of the movie, the current state of U.S. foreign policy. Rather than attempting to explain the U.S. foreign policy through the complex theories of the disciple of International Relations, Hulsman and Mitchell use the analogy of The Godfather to connect to a wider audience. The reader may choose to agree or disagree with the authors, but this experiment at presenting a foreign policy parable is commendable.