What is this Ego and why is there so much of it everywhere?' is what Get the Ego Advantage examines?

Our ego is like an invisible but tangible bubble which we project around ourselves, based on our own impression of our abilities and worth. This book shows how our abilities and sense of worth combine in the ego to determine our actions and interactions.

Suffering toxic emotions while nursing ego-wounds, reacting, and regretting can all be prevented. Get the Ego Advantage! Outlines a simple approach that can easily be applied to real-life situations to help us understand the puzzling reactions we come across in other people. It also explores ego clashes in professional life, ways to balance individual and team identity, leadership, and issues such as rigid attitudes, prejudice, and alienation. The author provides illuminating insights into complex concepts like self-esteem, true love, parental love, arrogance, and narcissism.

With Abu, an original cartoon character, to guide through the book, it will be an entertaining as well as useful read for both the general and the professional reader.

 Description:

Anjana Sen, an Emotional Intelligence (EI) consultant and a medical physician who has authored this extremely interesting book, helps us to understand our reactions and feelings in the constant interplay of ego in our personal and  professional lives. She has likened the ego to a suit, which each personality wears much like a skin and describes the  ego as an invisible but very tangible bubble, which we project around ourselves like a hologram based upon our own impression of our abilities and worth.

 The author also provides insights into the convoluted concepts of:

 - Self esteem;

 - True love and parental love

 - Arrogance;

 - Happiness has now become a thing constructed. It is no longer intrinsic.

 "Self-esteem is not everything, but without it there is nothing." That is the essence of this short 14-chapter book, replete with illustrations by the author.

People in positions of power and responsibility particularly need to hone their EI skills. Says Sen: "As you go higher in the ladder, you need emotional competencies much more than technical competencies. Society is equipping people to get jobs; we are not equipping them to keep jobs."

Science of it

"Ego is wrongly interpreted as arrogance. Instead, Ego is inside us. When we bring it to consciousness, it is self esteem."

Even though it is based on science, Emotional Quotient (EQ) itself cannot be measured, though there are many instruments to measure it.

By Nidhi Jain

Brandon de Souza, managing director, Tiger Sports Marketing, is one of the most recognized figures on the Indian golf scene. In his 32-year association with golf, he has viewed the game from every possible angle. He tells Nidhi Jain about his taste in books.

Who introduced you to reading?
Runs in the family - mom, dad and two elder sisters being voracious readers. Before retiring to bed a few pages from a book was the order of the day so from Noddy & Big Ears, Famous Five, Billy Bunter etc., all became a habit.

Kind of book collection you have
Limited now to ones I have particularly enjoyed and still find practical in my day to day life. Mark McCormack's 'What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School, What they still don't teach you at Harvard Business School'. Jack Welch's 'Straight from the Gut', Shiv Khera's 'Winners Don't Do Different Things, They Do Them differently'.

Taste in books
Easy to read from Sheldon to Ludlum.

What do you think of self help books?
Do not subscribe to them.

Money and time spent on books
Limited as my friends' circle ensure we share all books worth a read.

Your reading pace
Really quick, mostly at airports waiting for planes.

Your first book
Noddy.

Browsing and e-reading
Often.

Currently you are reading
Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt.

Books that do not hold you
Science fiction.

About the Author - Anand Bhaskar Halve has over 25 years of experience in advertising and is a founder member of chlorophyll brand and communications consultancy, Mumbai. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), he also conducts advertising workshops there, and has been a visiting faculty a the Mudra Institute of Commnciations, Ahmedabad (MICA).

About the Book

With more than 50 million mobile phones beeping around the country, mushrooming brands at the supermarkets, and sprawling shopping malls all over, the challenge clearly for advertisers is to create powerful advertising that helps brands stand out in the crowd.

The book is step-by-step guide to producing a sound foundation for advertising : one that will serve as the springboard to inspire powerful creative expressions. Rich in cases from the living Indian context, Planning for Power advertising offers an understanding of how strategic advertising is created. It takes the reader through cases and analyses of what worked or did not work in the marketplace.

Anand Halve involves the reader throughout in exercises with Action Points at the end of most chapters - an approach that brings alive the concepts within, and helps readers discover the theory in practice.

Participatory and pragmatic in its approach, the key issues discussed are competition and the changing nature of the markets. Understanding differentiator and motivators - discovering what changes the consumer's mind. How to look, bend positioning and identify what can make your brand unique.

With a robust advertising brief, for students of advertising and marketing, planning for power advertising is a stimulation exercise from which they will learn how to apply the principles that will help them in their future careers.

Subhajyoti Ray, president of the Internet and Mobile Association of India, has already penned two books and is getting ready for a third. And no, it's not the virtual world that his pen traverses but the historical one. 'Historian Subho' takes Nidhi Jain on a journey back through time.

What made you write this book?
My first book was Transformation of Bengal Frontier. Spanning a period between 1750 and 1940, this book analysis the socioeconomic changes brought about by colonial rule in a frontier area of Bengal, Jalpaiguri.

It started as a chore as it was my PhD topic and the project grew on me and I became so fond of it that at the end of the day I thought I had written a second PhD. I didn't want it to confine it to a library shelf as a PhD thesis. I went out of my way to get it published. When one is working on a PhD it's like a baby and the final delivery is when the book comes out.
 

The second book was more interesting, it was co-authored with Sharmila, my colleague at CII, and is called India Building Partnership for CII. The institution was founded in 1985.

Book and Character
I am a historian, interested more in things of the past than present. I wanted to write a corporate history with a different feel of the process and perspective at CII.

Crux of the book
First, it questions certain beliefs, prejudices regarding the agrarian labour industry in the country. It looks at the national movement, management control of labour, agrarian relations.

What's next on your agenda?
Translating a book, an autobiography by a Bengali author. It's a fascinating account of 50-60 years of his life. How he left his home in Uttar Pradesh, lived in Calcutta, then Mumbai, before the First World War. It will give you more insights into Mumbai than many other books written on the city.

"I have just finished reading an old classic: "Confessions of a Thug" by Philips Meadows Taylor. The book was first published in Britain in 1839 to make the Victorian readers aware of the menace of the "Thugee". Essentially, the book is, as the title mentions, confessions of a Thug who had a long career in the business and was finally captured by the British and turned approver.

To those of much younger generations, Thugs were secretive groups of people who under normal circumstances were settlers in a village, purportedly engaged in normal trades and crafts. But during the travel season [in those days that would be after the monsoons and before the onset of summer], Thugs in organized bands took to the roads and highways with the express intention of looting travelers. The modus operandi too was very interesting. They disguised themselves as ordinary travelers and became a part of the convoy they planned to loot, and at an opportune moment in the journey they would strangulate unsuspecting travelers, bury them and move on with the booty. Each band would have specialist informers who would collect information of potential victims and their travel itinerary], specialist killer [who would strangulate the victims with their rumals] and specialist grave diggers [who were responsible or disposing off the bodies of the victims.

Because of the highly secretive nature of their business and connivance of the local rajas and landlords [who shared a part of the booty, this became a "menace" in large swathes of central, south and north India, till the British under Col Sleeman systematically hunted down thugees and gradually put an end to this form of banditry.

Confessions?. is the autobiography of one such Thug leader Amir Ali and covers his active life as a Thugee. It is a fascinating book to read for many reasons. First of all, it is the only such account which exists today in the written form. Secondly, it gives a vivid account of the political and social confusion that prevailed in most parts of India in between 1800 and 1850. And, finally, although a gory account of cold blooded murder and loot [Amir Ali himself is said to have strangulated over 700 people], it is a remarkable account of the syncretic nature of the popular culture of the age. To give just one example, although a devout Muslim, Amir Ali's best friend and confidant was always a Hindu and he and his fellow Muslim thugs never forgot to invoke Goddess Bhawani, who was the presiding deity of the Thugs.

It is a very rich autobiography on two counts: First it captures much more about the flavor of the period than many formal books on that period of Indian history. And secondly, it reflects the deep seated emotions, mental dilemmas, compromises and indeed principles of a man whom more civilized and genteel society would not have credited with such finer human expressions.

"Well, it would be difficult to get hold of a copy. But you can download the whole book from Google. Read it if you are interested in your past and I promise Amir Ali will not let you down".

"Rimbaud stopped writing poetry at nineteen? Jesus was crucified at thirty-three; Jack Kennedy was shot?at forty-six. I am twenty-nine years old. What have I done? What am I capable of doing? Who am I? "This is possibly the best line that describes Sasthi Brata's ulterior turmoil.

Story of a boy, a man and the main protagonist of "My God Died Young". Penned in the late 1960s, this autobiography has been immensely popular and successful, largely due to its unassuming style and youthful angst spoke to a whole generation of those times and perhaps does that even today with ?lan and ease.

In this explicit and irreverent autobiography, Sasthi Brata tells his life story, his increasing sense of alienation from his wealthy and extremely conservative Brahmin family, his traumatic experiences at school where the housemaster's moral lessons almost made a psychological wreck of him, his intense love affair with a girl whose parents married her off to the man of their choice, and his agonized search for roots which took him to England. Alternately tender and brutal, he lays bare the shams of tradition-bound society in India as well as in the West with his no-holds-barred honesty and astonishing insight and understanding. -- It was quite difficult back in those times to have raised issues, with a tinge of disgust, like faith and superstition, logic and science, fatalism and the freedom of choice but when I read this masterpiece in the present times I find it so relevant and I cant help but admire the genius of Shasti Brata. With due apologies to most of the contemporary writers, Shasti Brata and My God Died Young is one in a million example of a writer who doesn't have to pretend to be a writer.

"Thanks to the twin pressures of a Brahmin home and a nonconformist upbringing," Brata notes, "Most of the time I move around in the steel braces of subconscious inhibitions." Most Indians will be conversant with this feeling. Indeed, one of the arguments advanced by Brata's book is the extent to which our adult lives are in thrall to conceptions and attitudes formed in childhood. University at Presidency College in Kolkata, and a love of debating, freed him somewhat of these shackles. He studied science, flirted with fashionable Marxist ideas, believed he was a young genius and prophet, fell in love, agonized about religion, and contemplated his place in the world. Later, unhappy in enclosed, stratified India, he moved west, and decided to pursue a path as a writer. Everywhere he found that obstacles to his dreams lay not just in the conventions of society and the shape of his personal destiny - as some people like to believe - but also in something marshy and tortured in his own nature, even more generally human nature.

Brata's confessional language has a powerfully persuasive air. "I hated my family and since I was a part of them, I hated myself too." "My outward actions were frenzied and daring because the inner man was so tame and ordinary." "Even the most genuine emotion [I felt] was centripetal, tending towards myself in the centre, with the other person as an incidental circumference. I don't believe I had any real feelings. I sometimes wonder if I do now." "I move about in a thick viscous cloud, always looking over my shoulder to see if anyone is watching." "I was the shadow of a shadow. It is always hard to build a life on such foundations."

Some of Brata's phrases - fusty Britishisms, and curious analogies to English examples rather than native ones of the kind one can still find in, say, a professor of English in Kolkata - are a mark of his time and place and his education. The old midwife who delivered him "looked as close to the Witches in Macbeth as Shakespeare could have imagined them to be." How could Brata know how Shakespeare had imagined his witches?
My God Died Young culminates in a beautifully realized scene in which Brata, having returned to India for a visit, is persuaded by his parents to "view" a potential bride. Reluctant but also curious, he submits to all the rituals of the arranged-marriage experience, driving to the would-be bride's home with his parents, listening patiently to her father reeling off a list of her achievements, scrutinizing and being scrutinized by the gathered women of the girl's family. He asks the shy, veiled girl a couple of questions in front of the entire company, and hears her sing a song at his mother's request. Despite his reservations he is impressed with, even entranced by, the girl. At the same time the curious scene in which he is the chief player arouses in him a strange horror and repulsion expressed in these beautiful sentences that simultaneously evoke both a burgeoning, thriving life and a kind of moral blindness:
"The girl sat there like a Goddess. And for a moment I felt that no one but a Goddess could have her forbearance, her beauty, the sweet maddening melody of her voice. Restively, my eyes swung round to her, so calm, so removed, so enchantingly graceful like the swift green curves of spring. Then over the rest of those hard deadening faces, severe and resolute, presiding over the closing cries of an auction mart".

Many of my friends call My God Died Young a pensive, cranky book of a writer being both impatient with the hypocrisy of the world and despairing himself. Brata is always asking the question: "Why do we live in this way and not in any other?" This is why I feel reading someone's autobiography is a responsible job. Someone's upbringing may shake your sensibilities and cause a conflict and a war within thus creating minds that do more damage than any good. A word of caution, if you don't have a strong head on equally strong shoulders - just leave the book alone! "I wrote this book to try and understand myself," Shasti Brata says at the beginning (he was not even thirty when he wrote it), and autobiography, he knows, "demands honesty". This is the way every writer of any times must be able to write about his work and when you read that you know he means it. Frankly, I read it (and continue to do so) because I wanted to understand myself.