Tag: short-and-straight

Understanding the Rise of China

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Martin Jacques says that to understand the rise of China we need three building blocks:

1. It’s not a nation state but a civilisation state which is to say that it is shaped by 2000 years of history. Its culture has unity at it’s core and yet, given it’s internal diversity, different parts are ruled in different ways.

2. The Chinese conception of race is very different. 90% belong to the Han race who have a superiority complex. It’s multiracial only at the margins.

3. The relationship between the state and society in China is different. The Chinese state, despite not being ‘democratic’, enjoys more legitimacy and more authority among it’s people than any western state. The state is considered as a guardian of it’s civilisation state. For 1000 years the state has not been challenged.

The two things about any subject

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Stranger in the bar said, “For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

Difficult as it may be to accept, it might be true. Whether it is true or not doesn’t matter so much because I think the exercise of boiling down a subject to two sentences is tremendously valuable.

Glen Whitman, an economist who has compiled a list of two things ever since he met the stranger in the bar, says, “The “two-ness” is crucial. Three things wouldn’t demand such disciplined thinking; one thing wouldn’t give a truthful picture.”

The list hasn’t been updated for quite sometime.

The key to clear writing

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

…is clear thinking. From the Economist Style guide:

“A scrupulous writer”, observed Orwell, “in every sentence that he writes will ask himself at least these questions:

  1. What am I trying to say?
  2. What words will express it?
  3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
  4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
  5. Could I put it more shortly?
  6. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”