At 8:15 a.m. on August 6th, 1945, the Japanese port city of Hiroshima was struck by the world’s first atomic bomb. Built in the US by the top-secret Manhattan Project and delivered by a B-29 Superfortress, a revolutionary long-range bomber, the weapon destroyed large swaths of the city, instantly killing tens of thousands. The world would never be the same again.
The Hiroshima Men’s unique narrative recounts the decade-long journey towards this first atomic attack. It charts the race for nuclear technology before, and during the Second World War, as the allies fought the axis powers in Europe, North Africa, China, and across the vastness of the Pacific, and is seen through the experiences of several key characters: General Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project alongside Robert Oppenheimer; pioneering Army Air Force bomber pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets II; the mayor of Hiroshima, Senkichi Awaya, who would die alongside over eighty-thousand of his fellow citizens; and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Hersey, who travelled to post-war Japan to expose the devastation the bomb had inflicted upon the city, and in a historic New Yorker article, described in unflinching detail the dangers posed by its deadly after-effect, radiation poisoning.
This thrilling account takes the reader from the corridors of the White House to the laboratories and test sites of New Mexico; from the air war above Nazi Germany and the savage reconquest of the Pacific to the deadly firebombing air raids across the Japanese Home Islands. The Hiroshima Men also includes Japanese perspectives – a vital aspect often missing from Western narratives – to complete MacGregor’s nuanced, deeply human account of the bombing’s meaning and aftermath.
Fergal Keane, award-winning BBC foreign correspondent and author of Road of Bones: The Siege of Kohima 1944 writes, “I can think of no more important book for our time. Written with moral clarity, tremendous verve, and the ability of a truly great historian to render the immensity of a moment through the smaller voices as well as being faithful to the facts. I recommend this magisterial, haunting book to all generations.”
Giles Milton, author of The Stalin Affair adds further praise for the book saying, “The nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one of the most iconic moments of the twentieth century. Yet little has been written about the individuals whose actions led to Japan’s unconditional surrender. Iain MacGregor’s The Hiroshima Men is epic in scale yet intimate in detail, its pages filled with mavericks and geniuses who forever changed our world. A meticulously researched and compellingly written tour-de-force.”
Iain MacGregor has been an editor and publisher of nonfiction for thirty years working with esteemed historians such as Simon Schama, Michael Wood and James Barr. He is himself the author of the acclaimed oral history of Cold War Berlin: Checkpoint Charlie and his writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Express, as well as the Spectator and BBC History magazines. As a history student he has visited East Germany, the Baltic and the Soviet Union in the early 1980s and has been captivated by modern history ever since. He has published books on every aspect of the Second World War. Iain is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and lives with his wife and two children in London.
In this diagnosis of contemporary Indian society, with a tinge of dark humour, acclaimed writer Manu Joseph explores why the poor don’t rise in revolt against the rich despite living in one of the most unequal regions of the world.
The poor know how much we spend in a single day, on a single meal, the price of Atlantic salmon and avocados. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘do they tolerate it? Why don’t they crawl out from their catastrophes and finish us off? Why don’t little men emerge from manholes and attack the cars? Why don’t the maids, who squat like frogs beside kitchen sinks, pull out the hair of their conscientious madams who never give them a day off? Why is there peace?’
Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us shows in pitiless detail just how hypocritical and exploitative people of privilege are, and it also shows how and why they get away with it. It’s a sharp, at times searingly witty, but a very perceptive critique of the many faults of the India we live in.
Why The Poor Don’t Kill Us has also evolved into a stand-up act by Manu Joseph. He prefers to call it ‘stand-up anthropology’.
Manu Joseph is the author of the novels Serious Men, The Illicit Happiness of Other People, and Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous. He is the winner of the Hindu Literary Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, whose jury described him as ‘…that rare bird who can wildly entertain the reader as forcefully as he moves them’. He has been nominated for several other prizes. He is also the creator of the Netflix series, Decoupled.
He was the editor of Open Magazine and a columnist for the New York Times. This is his first work of non-fiction.
I interviewed Snigdha Poonam on her second book, Scamlands (published by Penguin Random House India), for Moneycontrol. It was published on 19 November 2025.
Snigdha Poonam is the author of Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World. It won 2018’s Crossword Award for nonfiction in India and was longlisted in 2019 for the PEN America Literary Awards. For fifteen years, her work has shown how major global phenomena shape human lives, often by focusing on a single person, group or event to reveal how transformative forces act on society.
Her work has been published in Granta, Financial Times Weekend, Guardian Longreads, New York Times Arts, The Economist’s 1843 magazine and Bloomberg’s Businessweek. In 2023, she received a MacDowell fellowship for creative nonfiction to finish Scamlands. She lives in Oxfordshire.
Her latest book is Scamlands: Inside the Asian empire of fraud that preys on the world. It is published by Penguin Random House India.
Snigdha Poonam’s Scamlands is a gripping account of scams from the rural heartland of Bihar, where she grew up and ending in a shining city by the South China Sea. Her reportage is fascinating as she follows the networks of deceit, creating a shadow economy, that thrives on inequality, technological change and the erosion of trust.
The following interview was conducted via email.
Why did you choose to write about scamsters? What triggered this intense interest that engaged you for more than five years in this project?
I actually began this journey with my previous book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World, so to be precise, I’ve spent closer to a decade immersed in the underworld of scams and fraud.
That earlier book, Dreamers, followed young men and women in small towns and villages in some parts of India. It traced their quest to become rich, famous, powerful, whatever it was they aspired to. It was meant to be a portrait of a generation that felt very different from mine, even though I was only a few years older. They were mostly in their twenties, but their worldview, their sense of possibility, seemed dramatically different.
As a journalist, I travelled constantly and met young people everywhere. I was curious about how they thought about their lives, their country, and their future. And again and again, our conversations returned to their dreams. Even in the poorest villages, young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds would tell me they wanted to be the richest person in the world, or the local Member of Parliament, or a Bollywood star. I followed some of these journeys for years.
But over time, it became clear that despite their ambition and enterprise, the barriers they faced—barriers that had existed for generations—were not going to dissolve just because they wished them away. A few who already had some advantages (family connections, caste privilege, certain forms of cultural capital) managed to advance. But they were the exception. I began to see them drift, and in some cases, make moral compromises (as they entered politics, or other fields) because the straightforward route simply wasn’t taking them where they wanted to go.
By the end of that reporting, I noticed something more disturbing: those who were desperate to find a job were being pulled into scam centres that were springing up across the big cities. I saw an entire shadow infrastructure rising in places like Delhi, Gurgaon, parts of Mumbai and Bengaluru. Thousands of young people worked in scam call centres targeting victims mostly in the West.
Even after Dreamers was published, I couldn’t detach myself from this underworld I had stumbled into. Around the same time, India’s digital infrastructure was expanding rapidly — a massive push to digitise everything: bank accounts, payment systems, wallets. And with every new digital touchpoint came a new opportunity to scam someone.
The scam economy proliferated extraordinarily fast. And since I was already deeply inside it, it felt natural, almost necessary, to keep going, to explore how vast it was, how deep it ran, and how many people it was drawing in. That’s really where this project began.
What are the broad categories of scamming that exist? You mention many exploit the loneliness of the victim by offering love and partnership especially the Chinese scamsters netting gullible victims in the USA. Are there specific schemes to geographical territories?
Snigdha: Anything you need, anything you desire, or anything you fear can be turned into a weapon against you. Depending on the territory they are operating in, or the market they are targeting, they adjust their scams to match how desire or fear works in that particular society.
For example, love, sex, romance. These are universal desires, so those scams work everywhere. They work in India. They work in the United States, in China, in Poland.
In India, job scams are among the most common and people fall for them very easily. We have millions of people who would do anything to land a job. Many job scams begin with data leaks. Someone at an employment portal leaks the CVs, including contact details. Or, in a similar scenario, someone at a bank leaks data of people who might need a loan or have applied for one in the past. That information becomes the basis of loan scams.
Then there is greed. That is how the book begins, with lottery scams. A scammer called me and told me I had won a lottery of twenty-five lakh rupees. If someone calls and says you have been chosen to receive twenty-five lakh rupees under some invented scheme, many people want that money. And if they are told that they need to deposit twenty-five thousand rupees into a bank account to process paperwork or pay a supposed tax, many people pay it. The scammer can keep adding more fees and taxes. Sometimes they gain access to your bank account and take everything.
There is also fear. This is what we see with the digital arrests in India, which are now among the most prolific and frightening scams. They work on a simple idea. If an ordinary person in India gets a call from someone pretending to be the police, or the judiciary, or the government, they become very scared. This is especially true for people from minority communities. If they are told that their address or bank account or Aadhaar number is somehow linked to criminal activity, they can be overwhelmed by fear. If the scammer tells them they cannot call anyone because the government is watching, and that they must stay on the line and transfer all the money in their account to another account that is supposedly being held by the authorities during an investigation, many victims do exactly that.
Scamming is a large-scale industrial complex business. It cuts across international boundaries. The evidence points to horrific torture chambers of the individuals who are made to scam overseas victims. Many of these individuals are poor migrants from other countries, in search of better economic prospects. Your narrative seems to suggest that these are mostly to be found in China and Southeast Asia, but don’t we have these in India as well? How does this form of labour hiring and exploitation work?
Snigdha: That’s right. The Chinese-origin cyber-crime cartels have built a vast infrastructure across Southeast Asia, and they traffic young people from lower-income countries—often from English-speaking regions—with the goal of targeting victims anywhere in the wealthier parts of the world. That includes places like Singapore, which has a large population of affluent individuals, as well as the United States and other Western countries.
There are similarities in how job seekers end up in these scam operations, whether they’re domestic or transnational. At the core of the system is usually a simple hook: the promise of a job that doesn’t exist. It almost always begins with a fake job offer.
These offers can show up in multiple ways. A person might see an ad on a Facebook page, or be contacted directly on social media, or through a private channel like Telegram. Sometimes the approach comes through someone they know—a recruiter in their community, a friend of a friend, or a local middleman who appears trustworthy.
What makes the transnational side so much more frightening is how organized and anonymous the recruitment networks are. The system operates through multiple layers of human traffickers. At the top level are recruiters based inside the scam compounds in Southeast Asia, who almost never reveal their identities. They outreach to a second layer of traffickers—people who operate through WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook and who specialize in trapping jobseekers. That layer, in turn, connects with individuals on the ground in countries like India—people who might know the job seekers personally or who have access to local networks.
One victim of scam slavery told me that he had received a job offer from a recruiter in his village. Following that lead, he ended up moving through a long trafficking chain that eventually delivered him to Sihanoukville in Cambodia—where he was held hostage. Once he arrived, his passport was confiscated, and if he failed to carry out the scam work required of him, anything could happen: denial of food, solitary confinement, beatings, even death.
Scamlands shows that scamsters in India work mostly individually but at times the local community/neighbourhood is “civil” enough to not encroach upon each other’s territories. How is this enforced? Isn’t there a mastermind to these operations? Have I understood this correctly?
Snigdha: The hinterland scams often involve entire communities. What I found particularly striking in Barpeta in Assam was how many different people, within the same village, were connected to the scam economy in some way. There isn’t always a single mastermind, but everyone knows their role. They may not be full-time scammers, yet they still play a critical part in keeping the ecosystem running.
For example, there’s a doctor at the local Public Health Centre who has a legitimate job, but he also makes a side income by signing fake death certificates—fake in the sense that they show someone dying on a date, months or even a year after the person actually passed away. In that particular story, the entire scam economy revolved around fake deaths. The scam typically starts when someone dies. Then an insurance scammer steps in, impersonating a family member—or bribing the real family member—so that a life insurance policy can be taken out in the deceased person’s name. Months later, they present the fabricated death certificate to claim the payout.
They also need someone who can produce forged birth certificates for people who never existed. Just like in Jharkhand, the Panchayat system is often involved; the village chief is someone who signs off on official documents. They need the local customer-service centres, because that’s where the bank accounts are opened to receive the insurance payout. These individuals may not be full-time scamsters either—they also deal with legitimate customers, but their services are embedded in the scam economy.
Even e-commerce delivery workers end up playing a role. Once scammers gain access to a victim’s bank account (often through OTP fraud) they don’t want the stolen money going into their own accounts, which would leave a trail. So, they use the funds to buy expensive items online and have them shipped to fabricated addresses in their village. The house number doesn’t exist, but the delivery worker knows exactly where to bring the package, because he gets a cut. Again, it’s not his primary job, but he benefits from the system.
And you’re right: in areas where multiple scams run side by side—an e-commerce scam, a phone-wallet scam, a credit card scam—territory matters. One community might “own” a certain scam, and others don’t encroach on it. There is an internal logic and a kind of informal order that everyone understands.
Is there a code of honour amongst scamsters? What is their rule book?
Snigdha: There is no single rule book, but some patterns are common.
One is the importance of distance. Many scammers think about the distance between themselves and their victims. Someone in a rural area, for instance, often does not want to steal from another person in a nearby village. Even if they are calling numbers at random and do not know who will pick up, they hope to reach someone in a city. As I argue in the book, scamming is not only a way to earn easy money. The instinct can also be to take revenge on what feels like an unfair or uncaring world or system. So, a scammer in a village may feel less guilty if the victim is a prosperous individual in a big city. Similarly, a scammer sitting in a call centre in Delhi or Chandigarh feels less guilty if the target is in the United States or the United Kingdom. It is not only the physical distance. They are also aware of the huge inequality between their own lives and the lives of those they are scamming. That helps lighten some of the moral burden.
Another pattern is how the ability to scam someone can earn respect within a community. If a scammer manages to cheat someone who is not only wealthy but influential, they gain status. There are real cases where people have scammed the wife of a police commissioner, the brother of a former chief minister, even a former chief minister or a member of parliament. When that happens, the scammer becomes a sort of local hero within their network.
You document a class and caste shake up in the making, due to the new socio-economic mobility offered by mobile phone technology. Case in point being these scamsters, many of whom come from impoverished and/or disadvantaged backgrounds. Also, many of the stories are from the rural hinterlands of India. Do you think that the monies accrued in this manner will be sufficient for them to get rid of their caste discrimination, especially in the context of the Dalits whom you put in the spotlight? What did you glean?
Snigdha: The caste system intersects with these scams in some obvious ways and in some very surprising ones. But no, I don’t think the money earned through scams can be a sustainable way for communities to uplift themselves in any lasting sense.
For some individuals, or even for tightly knit networks, it can look possible for a while. Many of them do earn a lot of money in a short span of time. Some scams run for years, constantly evolving. With phone-based scams or text-based scams, the context keeps changing, so the scammers keep updating their skills, their knowledge, their scripts.
Some individuals did earn a great deal. But it never seemed like a way to end entrenched inequalities. At most, it can look like the playing field is being levelled for a brief moment. Very quickly, though, you see how class and caste tensions reassert themselves. Jealousies start to surface. Sometimes it is a neighbour. Sometimes it is someone from an upper caste community. Sometimes it is a collaborator who feels cheated. Many people are waiting for a chance to bring you down, especially those along the caste and class spectrum who cannot accept the idea of someone they once employed as a farm labourer now building a large house in the same village. These are the same people who might once have paid them not in cash but in leftover food or a bundle of straw for a leaking roof. And now they are reporting them to the police.
Even when scammers keep updating their methods, it gets harder over time. Some scams become so common that people begin to recognise the signs. There are YouTube videos demonstrating the scripts. Banks run awareness campaigns. People get arrested.
And whatever money they make, they also spend. They build large houses. They make luxurious purchases. The money does not usually last.
Of course, there are exceptions. I did come across villages where scam money funded a school or helped build a pond for fisheries. But these were occasional stories, not the norm. More often, you would walk into a village and see mud homes and dirt roads, and then suddenly five or six lavish houses with bright colours, tall gates, and huge balconies. And everyone knew exactly who lived in them. When police arrived for raids, they went straight to those houses. They would seize music systems, fixed deposits, even remote-controlled curtains.
So yes, there is upward mobility at the individual level. But I don’t think it is enough, or stable enough, to break the deeper structures of caste. Some scamsters invest in their children’s education, and perhaps that will create openings in the future. But for now, I think we have to wait and see.
Chasing the truth is a dangerous proposition. How do you verify the details mentioned to you? What was your methodology? While investigating these stories, did you own a different mobile phone to your personal device?
Snigdha: Parts of the book might make it seem as though I was chasing the truth, but in reality, I was simply following a story, and I went wherever it took me.
It was dangerous in parts, but I generally managed to stay out of harm’s way. Scamsters are criminals, of course, because what they do is criminal, but not all of them are frightening. Some were perfectly willing to sit down and talk to me, though not in public and not in their homes. One individual, for instance, would only meet me in my car at a distance from his village, where no one could see us, and I did not feel threatened by him at all.
I usually had someone from the area with me. That made a big difference. But yes, in other situations I did have to take many more precautions.
For instance, when I was reporting in Southeast Asia, I was faced with scam lords who acted like dangerous gangsters. Violence was routine. They shot at people. They threw the bodies out on the streets. People had been murdered for crossing them, exposing them, or trying to escape from the scam compounds. They had armed criminals working for them, and the threat was very real. In those situations, I took every precaution I could. I left my number and location with someone I trusted. I informed local activists about where I was going and followed their advice on how to stay out of their way.
And yes, I did use two phones. At first it was simply practical: one phone for speaking with scamsters, especially in situations where I was trying to understand their work by pretending to be a scammer. They would give me tasks to do on that phone. I never scammed anyone, of course, but they needed to believe I had a separate device that wasn’t my personal one.
Later, when reporting in Southeast Asia, having two phones became a safety measure. One activist insisted that if I were kidnapped, my main phone would be taken from me. So, I kept a second phone hidden in my clothes. That was the phone I would use to call for help to be rescued, or to reach the Indian embassy, or anyone else who could get me out.
What is the total estimated value of the money swindled by scamsters, across sectors? Is there any way of measuring it? What is the rate of growth of this shadow economy? In India, bank transactions are mostly done digitally. These scamster rely on this modus operandi too. So, what percentage, if any at all, of the recipient’s account can be traced by the authorities while tracking the stolen money? The impression that I got from your book was that many managed to get away scot-free with the money. Is there any government regulation in the offing for scamsters?
Snigdha: By definition, it is a shadow economy. Because of this, I don’t think there is any reliable way to measure the total value of the money swindled by scamsters, certainly not across all the scams in circulation at any given time. That was never my aim either. I entered the story as a writer trying to explore what happens to society when scamming becomes a way of life, when trust breaks down.
But while following the trail, I kept coming across official data about how much money people were losing. These estimates were based only on reported cases; people who actually go to the police. As you can imagine, that is a very small percentage. Many victims feel ashamed. Many do not want to get into the legal process or file an FIR. They simply stay quiet.
Even so, shocking numbers would surface. With digital scams, for example, the Home Ministry had a figure of around 2.7 billion dollars, or roughly 22,845 crore rupees, lost in the past year alone in India. They also reported a 400 to 500 percent jump from the previous year.
But I am still cautious about putting any definitive numbers on record, and that is because a major theme in the book is that these scams are no longer contained within the borders of any one country.
Some scams do operate within a specific region in India, and you can get a sense of the money involved there. But that does not apply to the full picture the book lays out. Technology, the internet, and a vast labour force willing to work for anyone anywhere mean that you cannot always know who the victims are, who the scammers are working for, or where the money is going.
In one of the book’s stories, the scammers are based in India but are working for entities they themselves cannot identify or locate. Those entities turn out to be in a completely different part of the world. The victims are in yet another region. As I went deeper into the story, I saw this more and more: the entire system becoming more global and more underground.
And this brings me to another part of your question. It is very hard to trace the stolen money. The ecosystem of digital transactions makes it extremely easy to move and hide funds once they have been taken. Cryptocurrency has become a common and convenient way to push money out of the reach of authorities.
Most countries do have regulations, but there are also enormous levels of political corruption. These scam networks are often closely connected to systems of political patronage or other forms of localised corruption. All of this makes it very difficult for the scams to be uprooted completely.
In the many years of investigation, did you ever figure out why would the scamsters put so much effort into these elaborate schemes despite living with fear on a daily basis?
Snigdha: I think I did, at least to the extent that I could through spending time in their world and talking to them. It is all there in the stories. And sometimes the scammers themselves articulate it much better than I ever could, but I can try to give you the gist.
In many of the scenarios I encountered, the starting point was that they had nothing to lose. They were starting from a place of having no opportunities at all. Someone pulls them into a network, gives them a small part in a scam, or they see someone else doing it and get the idea that they could try something similar.
At the beginning, it is mostly a means to earn money, to support their families, to meet basic needs. But very early in the process, it mutates into something else. They see how much money can be earned through these schemes if they become more ambitious or form a larger network. Unlike a traditional career path, where you wait years for a promotion, in this world two months can completely change your life. You go from having nothing to building an enviable bank balance. So even though fear becomes a daily companion, they continue. They know that if they can simply live with that fear, they can make a huge amount of money.
And it is not only about money. In rural settings, money is also power. It is influence. It changes your position in the marriage market. If you are an established scammer in a cluster of villages, people want to marry their daughters to you. Politicians come to you for funding before an election. The police will release you for a bribe even if you are arrested. Someone will put up bail. I saw cases where even the village head, the panchayat chief, would arrange bail because the scammer’s family would pay him lakhs of rupees to do it.
There is a whole system that makes it harder and harder to walk away from this way of life. And the hardest part is that none of the scammers I met ever lost awareness of what lay on the other side — if they stopped. Nothing waiting for them. The money comes and goes. A big house is built, but that is not the end of it. They have children in English-medium schools. Their wives start cooperatives in the village that need funding. They open small shops that also require support. They cannot simply step away. Walking away would mean falling back into that same emptiness.
So, despite the constant fear, they keep going. It becomes a vicious cycle.
Will the AI tools increase the scourge of scamsters and their elaborate schemes?
Snigdha: Artificial intelligence is already a force multiplier for a new wave of transnational fraud: It can generate scripts, fabricate composite identities across text, voice and video, and enable hyper-personalized manipulations that make scams more convincing and more profitable.
Economica: A global history of women, wealth and power by Dr. Victoria Bateman charts the course of women’s contribution to their national economy and acknowledges work done as being within and without the house too. Quite contrary to what Adam Smith believed that only paid work outside the home was construed as a contribution to the economy. Whereas Dr Bateman shows through empirical evidence marshalled from as far as the Stone Age to the present, the AI age, that women’s contribution, paid or unpaid was an essential part of the economy. Her book is packed with facts, anecdotes, histories, archaeological evidence, data sets etc. For instance, marriage contracts signed between the 11C and 15C included a clause wherein the woman could state she had the right to work after marriage. There are so many bits and pieces of information to share but the most enlightening was her use of the word “overlooked”. To use it constantly in the context of new evidence that confirmed the value of a woman’s work in the past is very empowering use of a simple word. It gives the reader the opportunity to reflect upon situations that they themselves may have been, where their evidence and work is overlooked whereas they are on the right path. It is new evidence so others cannot see it, recognise it, value it, or understand it. Developing faith in oneself and growing from there is what this book helps to achieve. It is not just a revisiting of inherited economic history narratives.
Humanity’s journey from poverty to prosperity is filled with men who have become household names. But how many female entrepreneurs, merchants and industrialists can you name?
Economica places women at the centre of the story of economic growth. Starting in the Stone Age and continuing to the present day, it takes the reader through the key economic milestones of the past twelve millennia — from the birth of farming to the advent of computing — all told through the experiences of women as well as men.
Historian Victoria Bateman weaves a thrilling, globe-spanning narrative that proves women weren’t ‘missing’ from economic life, they were merely hidden from view. We discover the female workers who helped to build the Great Pyramid of Giza, and to plumb the city of ancient Rome; the silk weavers who made a vital contribution to the development of the Silk Road and global trade; the women who dominated London’s brewing trade during medieval times; and the brave twentieth-century pioneers who fought to make our economies not just richer but fairer.
Dr Bateman is an economic historian, author and historical consultant. Her latest book, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, is the first major economic history of the world to be told from the perspective of female wealth creators.
Victoria has twenty years of experience teaching macroeconomics and economic history at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, including as Director of Studies in Economics at Gonville and Caius College. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is currently a visiting academic at Gresham College, London. Victoria has spoken extensively on radio and television, providing historical context for current events, including as resident economic historian for BBC Radio 4’s “Understand: the economy”. In addition to her writing and speaking, Victoria also works as a historical consultant for period dramas on TV and screen. Victoria is passionate about communicating economic history and believes in using our knowledge of the past to inform the present and to build a better future.
Victoria has been profiled by The Times, has written for the Guardian, The Telegraph and Bloomberg, and has appeared on numerous occasions on the BBC and ITV. Her previous books include the acclaimed Naked Feminism: Breaking the Cult of Female Modesty (2023) and The Sex Factor: How Women Made the West Rich (2019). In her spare time, you can find Victoria enjoying tea and cake after a walk in the countryside.
A groundbreaking book about how to harness the power of collaboration and work most effectively in groups – coauthored by Getting Things Done‘s David Allen. It is published by Hachette India.
When Getting Things Done was published in 2001, it was a game-changer. By revealing the principles of healthy high performance at an individual level, it transformed the experience of work and leisure for millions. Twenty years later, it has become clear that the best way to build on that success is at the team level, and one of the most frequently asked questions by dedicated GTD users is how to get an entire team onboard.
By building on the effectiveness of what GTD does for individuals, Team will offer a better way of working in an organisation, while simultaneously nourishing a culture that allows individuals’ skills to flourish. Using case studies from some of the world’s most successful companies, Team shows how the principles of team productivity improve communication, enable effective execution and reduce stress on team members. These principles are increasingly important in the post-pandemic workplace, where the very nature of how people work together has changed so dramatically.
Team is the most significant addition to the GTD canon since the original, and in offering a roadmap for building a culture of sustainable high performance, will be welcomed by readers working in any sized group or organisation.
In Getting Things Done, David Allen revolutionised individual productivity – and now, he and Edward Lamont show us how to transform teams and organisations. This is a masterful guide for any team striving to navigate the complexities of collaboration in today’s fast-paced world — Dorie Clark, bestselling author of The Long Game and executive education faculty, Columbia Business School
Ed Lamont and David Allen have captured the best practices for working with people to produce the best possible results. Team is a no-nonsense manual for doing just that, no matter what your goal is or who you’re working with to achieve it. If you’re invested in making good things happen, and need others to assist, this is a must-read — Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive Global
The world needs this book . . .This is not a book to read once, and extract a few ideas. Team is a guidebook, outlining the step-by-step process to team effectiveness. My advice is that you keep this book on your desk. Use it and re-use it, until Team structures your day-to-day activity as a team . . .and get amazing things done, together — Tony Crabbe, business psychologist, author of Busy
If you regularly get things done with others, here’s your new productivity bible. In Team, David and Edward masterfully break down how the principles of GTD work for all team settings – whether you have a corporate, sports or family team. At its best, working in a team feels effortless. This book helps get you to this magical place, so you can accomplish more with others while actually enjoying the process — Chris Bailey, international bestselling author of Hyperfocus, The Productivity Project, and How to Calm Your Mind
David Allen is an international best-selling author who is widely recognized as the world’s leading expert on personal and organizational productivity. Time Magazine called his flagship book, Getting Things Done “the definitive business self-help book of the decade”.
Edward Lamont is co-founder and Senior Partner of Next Action Associates, the GTD partner for the UK and Ireland. He has over 25 years of experience in executive coaching, training and consulting in the areas of leadership, productivity, and motivation. Since 2009, he has founded and grown the most successful GTD franchises worldwide by using the principles in this book. Before moving into consulting, he worked covering commodities markets, and was a freelancer for the Financial Times.
The Dark-Coloured Waters is as much the story of a river as it is of a man shaped by its course.
Danesh Rana has had a profound connection with the Chenab. As a child, it flanked family road trips to Kashmir. In the 1990s, it ran through the newspaper headlines of bloodshed and militancy. And in 2002, it flowed past his police station in Ramban during a tense posting in the heart of conflict. In 2018, on election duty in Himachal Pradesh, Rana arrived at the river’s source – a symbolic homecoming that compelled him to write this book.
Spanning decades and landscapes, The Dark-Coloured Waters traces the Chenab from its mythic origins to the violence-scarred landscape of Jammu and Kashmir. Along the way, Rana blends memoir, travelogue and keen observation to chart the river in all its complexity. Every bend reveals something new – culture and conflict, memory and myth, power and resistance. The Chenab is also a river of diplomacy, enshrined in the Indus Waters Treaty and entangled in the acrimony of India–Pakistan relations. From Bollywood to bloodshed, spiritual quests to statecraft, the Chenab reflects the many Indias that surge along its banks.
This is no linear chronicle, but a riverine journey – restless, reflective and deeply human.
Danesh Rana is an Indian Police Service officer of the AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram, and various Union Territories) cadre. He has served for 25 years in different capacities in the three regions of (the erstwhile state of) Jammu and Kashmir. Presently, he is on central deputation with CRPF. His debut novel, Red Maize, won the Tata Literature Live! First book award for fiction in 2015. His second book, a work of non-fiction, As Far as the Saffron Fields: The Pulwama Conspiracy (2022), is a definitive work on the deadly Pulwama blast of 2019.
This volume marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the defining moments of Indian history. It examines the Emergency and its aftermath from diverse perspectives – political, historical, legal, economic, philosophical, experiential and cultural, among others. Bringing together leading scholars and writers, it explores how the Emergency transformed Indian polity, and shaped law enforcement and penal practices, the media, student movements, judicial responses, subaltern politics and literary expression, and examines why analysis of the Emergency is still relevant to political discourse in India today.
The extract published on Moneycontrol is from the chapter “Many Meanings of Freedom: The Dandawate Prison Letters” by scholar Gyan Prakash. It is about a set of letters exchanged between the socialist leader Madhu Dandavate (1924–2005) and his wife Pramila Dandavate (1928–2002). 50 Years of the Indian Emergency: Lessons for Democracy is published by Orient Blackswan.
‘. . . a probing and kaleidoscopic reassessment of the origins, . . . the book prompts us to reconsider the multiple dimensions and layers of a compacted historical period and the many frameworks that continue to influence our understanding of it. . . .’ Srinath Raghavan, author of Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India
Peter Ronald deSouza is Senior Research Associate, African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (ACEPS), University of Johannesburg, and Trustee of the Institute of Social Studies Trust. He was Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, for two terms (2007–13).
Harsh Sethi worked as Consulting Editor of the monthly Seminar for two decades. Earlier he was with Sage Publications as Acquisitions Editor. He also held positions of Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and Deputy Director at the Indian Council of Social Science Research.
Music is not only widely discussed but also the most readily available form of art known to mankind. At just the click of a button, one can now listen to any song of any genre – even from the last century! But it wasn’t always this way.
In this brisk, breakneck journey across millennia, award-winning musician and broadcaster Andrew Ford paints a glorious picture to show what really draws us to this sonic art form and how it has evolved. He traces the inventions and reinventions that have contributed to the popularity and accessibility of modern music; early oral forms; the invention of notations; the first recording technology and record companies, and explores how the multibillion-dollar industry we know today came to be.
Andrew Ford’s music has been performed and recorded around the world, played by ensembles such as the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Brodsky Quartet and the New Juilliard Ensemble, and sung by the likes of Yvonne Kenny, Katie Noonan and Iva Bittová. He presents The Music Show on ABC Radio National and has written ten books ranging from a study of sound in film to the songs of Van Morrison to the compulsion of composers to explore the primitive in their music.
For Moneycontrol, I interviewed Priyamvada Mehra on her recently published memoir The Cost of a Promised Afterlife: My Escape from a Controversial Religious Cult in India. It is published by Simon & Schuster India. I am ever so grateful that Priyamvada replied in the detail that she did as this is not an easy past to revisit. Later, she very kindly wrote, “Thank you for the gentleness and care you’ve put into this interview process, I really appreciate it.”
Here is the interview.
Priyamvada Mehra’s memoir, The Cost of a Promised Afterlife, has been published by Simon & Schuster India. At the age of nine, she was led into the fold of Rampal, a self-proclaimed godman who promised miracle cures and salvation in exchange for submission. What began as her parents’ desperate attempt to save her mother’s life from a brain tumour soon became something far more sinister—a world where faith became a cage, obedience a virtue and control, absolute. By thirteen, Priyamvada was a devoted follower. In 2006, she was inside his ashram, used as a human shield during a deadly clash between Rampal’s followers and a rival sect. Questioning was forbidden, loyalty was everything and defiance came at a cost. She endured heartbreaking losses and grew up with a twisted logic of miracles, bans on medical treatment, and violent sermons.
She witnessed her family fall to pieces under the weight of indoctrination and diseases. For two decades, she stumbled between two treacherous worlds, one ruled by cultic control, and both shaped by patriarchy, caste and class, and the systemic violence they breed.
In The Cost of a Promised Afterlife, Priyamvada Mehra finally tells her story. The memoir exposes how cults take root in a nation of 1.4 billion, and how godmen wield unchecked power. In India, godmen are everywhere. They exist. Their photos hang on walls, their voices fill television screens and their names are spoken in both prayers and scandals. But the word ‘cult’ is rarely used. It stays unspoken until another scandal breaks out, only to be buried under silence again. This silence allows blind faith to thrive and logic to crumble. Deeply intersectional in its lens, it lays bare the psychological and physical toll of being led into blind faith as a girl and the long journey of dissenting as a woman in a ‘man’s world’.
While reading it, I had to put it down many times and take a break. When an individual narrates a traumatic incident, a self-defence mechanism automatically kicks in, and the person recounts the incident(s) in the third person. It is delivered in a deadpan style. It is a self-preservation act to prevent themselves from any further harm while recollecting. This is evident in oral and written narratives. So, to read this memoir that is written in the first person but in a manner that it hammers the reader’s head with a nonstop single dull beat is quite unusual. Read the memoir for yourself and judge. In Sept 2025, Rampal was granted bail, but remains in Tihar Jail as he is considered a “risk to public order” by the Hissar district court.
This interview with Priyamvada Mehra was conducted via email. She now lives between India and Amsterdam, delicately exploring the idea of home and identity.
1. What was the genesis of this memoir? Why did you feel the need to document this story?
After moving to Europe in 2022, I found myself unable to adapt or function as what you’d call a “normal adult”. That failure pushed me to look inward, and that introspection led me straight back to my past, something I thought I had long left behind. To make sense of what I was feeling, I began reading everything I could: books, memoirs, research papers, anything that could bring me closer to understanding my own experiences and help me name them.
Somewhere in that process, I also began pouring my memories out onto paper. It felt like a flash flood. It was overwhelming, intense, and unstoppable. Before I knew it, I was staring at a few hundred pages of what I called “angry notes.” That’s when it struck me, maybe this was a story. So, the memoir wasn’t planned; it was born out of an excruciating process of introspection, a journey I was forced to take in order to move forward in my life.
2. What did it entail to write about your experiences? Did you require your family’s consent to include them in the story?
I tried finding people in India with similar experiences but couldn’t find much that resonated, or any literature on it, barring some investigative work. The only memoirs or academic writings on cults I came across were mostly by Westerners, especially Americans. The first book I read while coming to terms with my reality was Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships by Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias. It gave me a language I didn’t have. It laid out the anatomy of a cult, the profile of a cult leader, and the long-term psychological damage caused by indoctrination and abusive relationships. It was a revelation. I hadn’t known I’d grown up in one. I hadn’t realised the relationships I was still chasing were rooted in abuse. That book cracked something open. No one had ever educated me about cults. No one used that word, even in a country like India, supposedly the world’s spiritual centre, where hundreds of thousands of self-proclaimed godmen and godwomen command the devotion of desperate millions. It forced me to see the desperation we lived with; how broken people cling to anything that promises certainty, even if that certainty comes from a ten-year-old boy in saffron robes calling himself a divine messenger when he should be in school, or from gurus protected by politicians, global celebrities, and power.
I returned to that book again and again. From there, I kept reading: memoirs, survivor accounts, research papers, anything that brought me closer to understanding my own experiences. I studied cults and their generational impact, the quiet struggles of those with disabilities and illnesses, and the heavy toll of caregiving. I uncovered the deep scars of caste and class, and traced the violence born of gender and patriarchy. Through that process, I finally found the vocabulary to articulate my own experience, and that’s how the writing began.
Unfortunately, consent wasn’t possible or practical, because my family remains deeply under the sway of the very cult I escaped from.
3. When and how did you find your voice to write this memoir/ your testimony? Recalling these facts could not have been easy.
The long process of introspection and reflection out of which my memoir was born took me through all five stages of grief, perhaps even more. First came the shock and disbelief that this was actually my life, that my entire family, our opportunities, our very existence, had been systematically eroded by a godman who, even while incarcerated, continues to exert control. The realisation that I was the only one who had made it to the other side of that religious dogma, the only one seeing things critically, was both liberating and devastating.
Then came another truth. The realisation that I had been at the receiving end of abuse and violence based on gender and caste. It sucked the soul out of my body. Abuse had been so thoroughly normalised for me for years that it took time to even recognise it for what it was. Then came anger. Each memory ignited such a seething fury within me that I wanted to claw my way back through time to throw the punches I never got to land. That’s when I began purging it all out on paper. All my traumas surfaced in ways I hadn’t expected.
I sought therapy for the first time in my life and was soon diagnosed with Complex-PTSD (please note: I was orally diagnosed and wasn’t prescribed any tests for diagnosis).
I continued to confuse scraps for love, to look for empathy in the wrong places, in the wrong people, hoping they would understand my pain, not realising they were, unfortunately, the source of it. It took immense emotional labour, therapy, and both physical and psychological safety before I could finally see clearly and muster the strength to break free from the chains of fear that had bound me for so long.
It’s hard to put into words how excruciating the entire process was. There were times I felt I was losing my mind. But I learned to take pauses when my mind and body signalled me to. I would return after a week, or a month, or more, whenever my gut told me I was ready again.
4. Writing is cathartic. Even for PTSD survivors. Did revisiting old traumas heal you?
If I had the choice, I would probably have preferred to just enjoy my new life in Europe, the travel, the nature, the quality of life. But I simply couldn’t. Even while exploring, even while trying to distract myself, I couldn’t shake off the emotional and psychological ache. My body kept giving me sensations that made me feel unsafe at all times. It was as if I were constantly confronted by a wild animal, even though, in reality, I was safe and loved.
I didn’t have the option but to try and figure out why I was feeling that way. My sole intention was to feel and act like a “normal,” functioning adult. I hadn’t thought of catharsis at that point because I didn’t even know what was wrong in the first place. When I eventually was able to put a name to my experiences, I still didn’t attach myself to the idea of catharsis or closure, because there was no guarantee it would give me that. So, I wrote, free from the expectation that it would heal me.
Writing or purging my past onto paper had always been my way of confronting difficult times when I had no one to talk to, no one to help me make sense of the dysfunction around me. This time too, I turned to writing without knowing how it would help. Only now, holding the book in my hands, do I feel proud of having stood up for my younger self. I feel deeply satisfied that I was able to find my voice, my identity. It has given me immense hope for the future, and a belief that I can slowly undo the harm.
Revisiting old traumas, again, wasn’t a choice I made. The traumas revealed themselves in their full force and I had no option but to confront them.
The process was painful, excruciating. It drained me, left me low and uncertain the whole time. But now that it’s out, now that it’s tangible, each cell in my body feels as though life has been injected back into it. Holding my book gives me a true sense of catharsis. It’s an acceptance of the reality of my loss: the loss of my family, my childhood, my time. And at the same time, I feel a deep, boundless hope, not just for myself, but for others who may find themselves in similar situations in their own lives.
5. In what manner did you learn to distance yourself from the cult’s teachings and by extension your family? You document some of the friction in the memoir, but please elaborate.
The process of distancing myself from the cult’s teachings was gradual and continuous. It began early in my life, around 2010, when my mother left home. But I couldn’t fully distance myself, because my family remained deeply consumed by the dogma, and I lived with them until 2020.
While reading Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein, I underlined a line that has stayed with me: “Almost anyone, given the right set of circumstances, can be radically manipulated into otherwise incomprehensible and often dangerous acts.” It’s true. The timing was cruel. My parents found the cult when they were at their most vulnerable. Only then did I begin to fully understand how religious extremism had shaped my family and by extension, me.
It wasn’t just about belief. It was tied to my parents’ disabilities, their chronic illnesses, the weight of caste and class, the pressures of marriage, and the desperation of parenting in scarcity. None of these struggles existed in isolation; they fed into one another, creating the perfect storm. And in that storm, a godman found his grip.
Throughout my childhood and beyond, I inherited their fears, their traumas, and their hopes for salvation. They passed it on unknowingly. And I carried the cost. It’s only now that I truly realise the weight of that inheritance.
In writing this book, I made a sincere effort to portray my once beautiful, fun-loving family with both empathy and honesty, to acknowledge the complexity of human beings and their choices, while not softening the harsh realities of the abuse and oppression I endured. Even though they see themselves as “the chosen ones,” I see them as victims of larger manipulative systems.
If I could make one wish today, it would be to free my family from years of religious thought reform and place them back in time, when they accepted their reality, imperfect and flawed. When they didn’t chase idealised, problem-free lives, but embraced life with authenticity, navigating it as best they could. When they refused anyone selling them the illusion of certainty. When they were adults with autonomy, critical thinking, and the ability to question authority. That’s what the cult robbed them of.
6. How much of your objectivity on this past life of living in Rampal’s cult was honed by travelling/living abroad?
Objectivity was always there, that’s probably why I could start asking questions quite early on. But the way it sharpened after I moved to Europe was incomparable. Living abroad brought a massive shift in my perspective, about identity, self-worth, race, gender, caste, the politics of everything.
In India, I never really felt like I was having it the worst. Every day I saw poverty, homelessness, hunger, disease. I saw potholes, road rage, accidents, the daily evidence of systemic failure, and it all felt normal. That social failure had been accepted and normalised; chaos had become culture.
When I moved to Europe, I was suddenly surrounded by people from all over the world who were openly talking about racism, gender, colonial history, power. I saw Black people reclaiming their power, queer people living with pride, women walking safely on streets. These were things I had never experienced before. There was a sense of accountability, of questioning authority, especially in Amsterdam, and I felt that deeply.
In India, I had always been trying to fit into a narrative created by the upper caste, the rich and elite. I was ashamed, never fully confident, always evading questions about my caste, where my parents came from, all those markers of social hierarchy. But living abroad helped me shed that shame that society had forced upon me. I began to remove shame from my caste identity, from gender-based violence, from my experience in the cult, from everything that made me feel small or unsure of myself, all of which had never been my fault.
The more I looked around and heard people’s stories, the more I realised just how abnormal my own life had been. I don’t think I would have been able to write this memoir had I not gone through that cultural shock. In a way, it became a blessing in disguise.
7. Your mother left the family to live in the ashram. Apart from her being sicklier upon her return, were there any fundamental differences that you noted in her as being a woman who had lived in a community governed by a patriarchal authoritarian figure?
Her being sicklier upon her return wasn’t just physical, it was deeply mental. It was terrifying to have my mother back, not only with a broken body but also with a fractured mind. Alongside her treatment for Pott’s spine, she also had to undergo psychiatric care. Watching that was one of the most painful experiences of my life.
She had returned completely consumed by her devotion to Rampal. Her cognitive abilities had deteriorated, and her demeanour had become almost childlike, especially in the presence of visitors. She was the textbook example of someone whose identity and agency had been completely eroded by a religious cult. Post her return, she was delusional, disconnected from reality, and incapable of functioning as an autonomous adult.
Her transformation was the outcome of years of systematic thought reform, compounded by her ill health, an illness that the cult, I believe, deliberately sustained to keep her dependent and submissive. Emotionally and psychologically, she had become unrecognisable. The mother I once knew was gone. What remained was a helpless, fearful child in an adult’s body.
When we were instructed to bring her home from the ashram, she was paralysed neck down at that point, she reportedly didn’t even want to return. She still believed that Rampal was her only saviour, that he alone could deliver her from her suffering. That’s how deeply the indoctrination ran.
What’s even more heartbreaking is that no one in the family, neither my father nor my brother, questioned her condition, or how she had ended up that way. It was just accepted as divine will. We had been so thoroughly conditioned to never question the cult leader, to never question him.
The cult left her incapable of living in society as an independent person. It robbed her not just of her health, but of her sense of self.
On being a woman who had lived in a community governed by a patriarchal authoritarian figure, it wasn’t much different. Her life was still governed by patriarchy even before the cult. The place of the husband was taken by the guru.
8. Rampal had a rule that to criticize him was strictly forbidden/ (The 15th Rule out of 23 rules). He also said that “any alternative ideology or religious teaching was framed as corrupt, further isolating them from outside perspectives”. How is this any different from any other evangelical leader or a patriarch?
Perhaps it isn’t very different at all. Cults, after all, come in many forms and names — eastern or western, religious or political, family-based or corporate. What defines them is not their label, but the methods they use to control, manipulate, and isolate people. Rampal’s system, like many others, followed the classic anatomy of a cult.
Here are some defining characteristics of a religious cult that can help identify whether an individual, group, or organisation fits that description. These have been compiled based on well-established authoritative sources in cult psychology and sociology research.:
Charismatic Leadership – The cult revolves around a self-proclaimed guru, baba, or spiritual figure who demands absolute loyalty and obedience.
Blind Devotion and Control – Followers must surrender entirely to the leader’s authority, often cutting ties with family, education, or mainstream faith.
Exclusive Teachings – The leader claims to possess a unique path to salvation or truth, unavailable anywhere else.
Exploitation – Financial, emotional, and sometimes sexual exploitation is common. Followers may be forced to donate money, perform unpaid labour, or endure abuse disguised as devotion.
Fear and Doomsday Narratives – Members are taught that leaving or questioning the leader will bring divine punishment or disaster.
Isolation from Society – Followers are encouraged to live in communes or ashrams, severing connections with the outside world.
Political or Criminal Ties – Many cults build protection networks through political or financial influence, sometimes operating like criminal enterprises.
Cults use classic psychological manipulation techniques to recruit and retain followers:
Love bombing: overwhelming new recruits with affection and belonging.
Fear and guilt: convincing them that leaving means ruin or death.
Thought reform: constant repetition of teachings to erase critical thinking.
Us vs. Them mentality: portraying outsiders as corrupt or impure.
Gradual commitment: small acts of devotion that escalate into total control.
Public confession and humiliation: used to enforce obedience and shame
So, to answer the question, there isn’t much difference between cult leaders like Rampal, or other leaders who weaponize faith for control, or patriarchs who demand submission. They all thrive on power, fear, and dependence. The only difference lies in the language and setting, the ideology changes, but the mechanics of control remain strikingly similar.
9. With hindsight, what did you lose, what did you gain (if at all!) by spending fourteen formative years in a religious cult from the age of nine? Years later, does the incarcerated Rampal and his cult teachings still have a hold on you?
It took me two decades to realise that I was a victim of a religious cult in India. I continue to lose my family to one, and nothing hurts more. It also took me years to understand that I was a victim of patriarchy, of casteism, and of the violence that these structures of oppression breed, all of it without any fault of my own. Unfortunately, that is what we call our “culture”. The time I lost isn’t coming back. The family I lost isn’t coming back. The long-term psychological and physiological harm cannot be undone. I’ve had to rebuild my life around that loss.
If I’m honest, I don’t think I gained anything, I only lost. The deepest wound has been losing my family to this cult and its relentless thought reform. I wouldn’t wish that on any child. I want parents, especially in India, to understand this, because our culture gives parents immense control over their children’s lives. There’s rarely any real separation, even after eighteen. Their lives are intertwined, but when parents, out of fear or misplaced faith, make decisions that deny their children autonomy, it becomes selfish and irresponsible. Their intentions may be good, but intention often translates into control and fear and that harms a child’s physical, psychological, and emotional wellbeing.
As for Rampal, I feel nothing for him now. But his teachings, the sermons, the rules, the consequences that were drilled into my young mind, have left their residue. They disrupted my relationship with the idea of spirituality itself. Years of indoctrination instilled an irrational fear that something bad would happen to me because I am a “traitor.” That fear is faint now, almost negligible, and it diminishes with each passing day.
Today, I have built a life that is beautiful, authentic, and free. A life that feels completely my own. And in that, I feel very far removed from the world I was once part of.
My story, I believe, can raise awareness about religious cults in India. It can help girls and women truly stand up for themselves and create the beautiful lives they have never stopped dreaming of. My story can help start a dialogue about the rot of caste and patriarchy, in our own minds, in our families, in our homes, and in our society. My memoir offers a deep look into the social issues we remain wilfully naive or ignorant about in India. It takes you through an excruciating journey of my escape from a religious cult, but it is equally a story of hope, possibility, freedom, power, and the beauty of a girl’s rebellion. I have written this book for my nine-year-old self, whose wings were clipped before they had a chance to form. I wrote it for my sixteen-year-old self, who had only known how to exist in crippling fear. I wrote it for my twenty-four-year-old self, who was doing her best just to survive. And then, I thought of the millions of girls who are nine, sixteen, and twenty-four today, in India and elsewhere, abused, helpless, subservient, scared, yet still dreaming. I decided to take them along with me on this journey. And so, I wrote it for them too. Readers will take away inspiration, to take a deep look within, and an even deeper look around. This book will open people’s eyes to their own truths and realities, and how they wish to navigate through them. What they choose to uphold, what they choose to change, and what they choose to let go.
Economica: A global history of women, wealth and power by Dr. Victoria Bateman charts the course of women’s contribution to their national economy and acknowledges work done as being within and without the house too. Quite contrary to what Adam Smith believed that only paid work outside the home was construed as a contribution to the economy. Whereas Dr Bateman shows through empirical evidence marshalled from as far as the Stone Age to the present, the AI age, that women’s contribution, paid or unpaid was an essential part of the economy. Her book is packed with facts, anecdotes, histories, archaeological evidence, data sets etc. For instance, marriage contracts signed between the 11C and 15C included a clause wherein the woman could state she had the right to work after marriage. There are so many bits and pieces of information to share but the most enlightening was her use of the word “overlooked”. To use it constantly in the context of new evidence that confirmed the value of a woman’s work in the past is very empowering use of a simple word. It gives the reader the opportunity to reflect upon situations that they themselves may have been, where their evidence and work is overlooked whereas they are on the right path. It is new evidence so others cannot see it, recognise it, value it, or understand it. Developing faith in oneself and growing from there is what this book helps to achieve. It is not just a revisiting of inherited economic history narratives.
Here are two snippets from the book:
p. 218-9 Mary Wollstonecraft and morality
Wollstonecraft’s family’s attempts to climb the social ladder framed how she saw the world: through the lens of the section of society that lived a life somewhere between aristocrats and ordinary people. She witnessed the way in which this newly expanding class attempted to distinguish themselves from ordinary people through not only money but also morality. And how, by developing what she called this ‘insipid decency’, they could judge themselves to be ‘better’ than the libertine aristocracy. This middle-class monopoly on morality had particularly implications for women, who were expected to be the virginal angels who set a good example to other women in society. By trumpeting the virtues of female purity, the middle classes wanted to ensure that working-class girls, despite their freedom to earn, would not be able to compete with middle-class daughters when it came to attracting the wealthiest husbands. By shrouding the paid labour of women in moral shame, this purity culture risked devaluing the contribution that countless ordinary women were making to the economy, while turning middle-class women into highly-valued, ‘precious’ commodities. Since work for middle-class women was considered nothing more than a stop-gap and could not be allowed to jeopardise their marriage prospect by causing their marriage prospects by causing their virginity to be treated as suspect, ‘decency’ came at the cost of women’s dependence on men. Indeed, the very ability of the middle classes to claim the moral high ground depended on the fact that preserving a young woman’s bodily modesty – ensuring that she was untouched by men – came at a price not only to her but also to her family, who had to ensure that she was chaperoned at all times, was taught separately to boys, and did not have to work alongside men to support herself financially. It was a cost that better-off families were able to bear, but one that working-class families, be design, found unaffordable. Morality, in other words, cost money. And Wollstonecraft had little time for it.
Another one from the book:
I had the good fortune of speaking with Dr Bateman for TOI Bookmark. As soon as the link is released, I will upload it here as well.
