Tag: history

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Boeing accused of putting the pursuit of profit over passenger safety 

rrn69

The Aircraft Accident investigation Bureau in India is focusing on engine thrust. Investigators have discovered in the preliminary investigation into the Air India Flight 171 crash which killed 260 people on 12th June 2025. Just seconds after take-off both of the 12-year-old Boeing 787 Dreamliner’s fuel-control switches abruptly moved to the “cut -off” position, starving the engines of vital fuel and triggering total power loss. Switching to “Cut-off” is a move typically done only after landing. The Cockpit voice recording captures one pilot asking the other why he “did the cut-off”, to which the other pilot replies that he didn’t. The … Continue reading Boeing accused of putting the pursuit of profit over passenger safety 

Uncategorized1 Comment

Britain’s flagging corporate economy

rrn69

The CEOs of Britain’s largest companies wield immense power, but we know very little about them. How did they get to the top? Why do they have so much power? Are they really worth that exorbitant salary?  Two academics from Queen’s Business school, Belfast, Michael Aldous and John Turner lift the veil on Britain’s corporate elite and provide the answers by telling the story of the British CEO over the past century. From gentleman amateurs to professional managers, entrepreneurs, frauds, and fat cats, they reveal the characters who have made it to the top of the corporate ladder, how they got … Continue reading Britain’s flagging corporate economy

Uncategorized1 Comment

Pursuit of hidden source of nuclear power

rrn69

One afternoon in 1942, in a squash court beneath the stands of University of Chicago’s football stadium, a group of scientists watched as Enrico Fermi coaxed the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction from a pile of dusty carbon bricks, unlocking the enormous energetic possibilities of the atom’s nucleus, completing Manhattan Project’s mission the construction of a war winning atom bomb. There’s no satisfactory answer to the risks of nuclear conflict, those consequences that gave physicist Eugene Wigner an eerie feeling. Destroyer of the Worlds is the story of how pursuit of this hidden source of nuclear power, which began … Continue reading Pursuit of hidden source of nuclear power

Uncategorized1 Comment

Lucid, ambitious, and provocative

rrn69

Indian historian, 1990 Kerala-born, Manu Pillai’s Gods, Guns and Missionaries is a survey of four centuries of Hinduism’s interaction with other faiths to explore the myths of true Hinduism. When European missionaries arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: a worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned woman alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But it quickly became clear that Hindu “idolatry” was far more layered and complex than European stereotypes allowed, surprisingly even sharing certain impulses … Continue reading Lucid, ambitious, and provocative

Uncategorized1 Comment

Transformation of the World’s largest democracy

rrn69

Indira Gandhi’s ascent as prime minister in 1966, and ruled for fifteen years, which was unforeseen and soon emerged as one of the most powerful political leaders of her times, who transformed the world’s largest democracy.  Historian Srinath Raghavan, tells the story of Indira Gandhi’s political career and the momentous changes that India experienced under her leadership. From her tentative start in high office to her remarkable electoral victories, the dark days of the Emergency of 1975-1977, and her assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Raghavan sheds new light one her politics and government, as well … Continue reading Transformation of the World’s largest democracy

Uncategorized1 Comment

Dreaming of a fragile future and misfortunes of a teen Naples bandit

rrn69

So People Know It’s Me, set in the winter of 1991, is a unforgettable novel which unleashes Zeno’s luminous, unguarded and defiant voice- dreaming of a fragile future, set in the juvenile prison island of Nisida. Zeno is fifteen years old, a minor by law, but he grew up long ago in the dusty heat of Naples.  The novel follows one man’s self-realisation in a foreboding juvenile prison. Winding down cobbled streets on his motorbike, he delivers baggies and picks pockets, doing whatever it takes to put food on the table and steal a few precious moments of freedom with his … Continue reading Dreaming of a fragile future and misfortunes of a teen Naples bandit

Uncategorized1 Comment

Wolf in Sheep’s clothing

rrn69

Historian Dalrymple whose visceral understanding of India, in Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. This relentless rise of in August 1765, the East India Company, who defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army- what we would now … Continue reading Wolf in Sheep’s clothing

Uncategorized1 Comment

Blurring of public and personal space, amid social media’s constant scrutiny

rrn69

Private life is now in mortal danger according to acclaimed cultural historian Tiffany Jenkins, who takes readers on an epic journey, from the strict separations of public and private in ancient Athens to the moral rigidity of the Victorian home, and from the feminists of the 1970s who declared that “the personal is political” to the boundary-blurring demands of our digital age. Strangers and Intimates is both a celebration of the private realm and a warning as social media, surveillance and the expectations of constant openness reshape our lives, Jenkins asks a timely question: Can private life survive the demands … Continue reading Blurring of public and personal space, amid social media’s constant scrutiny

UncategorizedLeave a comment

Apprenticeship dominated training and skill in early modern Europe

rrn69

Apprenticeship dominated training and skill formation in early modern Europe. Years spent learning from a skilled master were a nearly universal experience for young workers in crafts and trade. In England, when apprenticeship reached its peak, as many as a third of all male teenagers would serve and learn as apprentices. In the Market for Skill, Patrick Wallis, professor of economic history at the London School of Economics, shows how apprenticeship helped reshape the English economy. He shows non-agricultural work in England was “anything but hereditary between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries”. Some historians see apprenticeship as a key ingredient … Continue reading Apprenticeship dominated training and skill in early modern Europe

Uncategorized1 Comment

Updating modern corporate finance

rrn69

“Stagflation” of the 1970s – the improbable combination of high unemployment and runaway inflation-  proved painful and protracted, but explains the U.S. stock market’s remarkable forty-year run of 12 per cent average annual returns since then. Why is Japan still mired in a decades-long recession- and the Chinese economy in a tailspin? What account for the resilience of U.S. stock and labour markets in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and in the face of the Fed’ record interest rate hikes? Donald H Chew, editor of the journal of Applied Corporate Finance, traces the revival moment of America’s corporate and stock … Continue reading Updating modern corporate finance