BACK OF THE BOOK

Simon says, 'technology rules, okay!' Gray says, 'Nothing doing!' Just a whiff of what ultrasound is doing to India's gender balance could put you under the spell of a man challenging current notions of 'progress'. Until, that is, you find out more about this book's author. Despite its de Bono-esque multicolour jacket, Al Qaeda And What It Means To Be Modern bears all the Eurocentric conceit of a book written by a professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics (LSE), as also the subversive fervour of a one-time Free Market advocate turned against Capitalism so utterly as to dismiss it as a short-lived delusion. In his last book, Straw Dogs, Professor Gray described humans as 'animals' labouring under the delusion of Humanism being humane, progressive and myth-free. Fiction-writer Will Self described that book as a "simple tool wielded effectively to devastating effect".

Nobody has been half as effusive about this book. Is this because it has rocked the 'modern' world? Or because it's lousy? Actually, because of the title, one suspects; it's still not the done thing to treat 9-11 as a spur for an intellectual trip-as this book does. Yet, this is precisely why it deserves a read.

AL QAEDA AND WHAT IT MEANS TO BE MODERN By John Gray Faber & Faber PP: 145 Price: Rs 610.23

What 9-11 has really destroyed, Gray argues, is the West's "ruling myth" of historical determinism as encapsulated in the Positivist view that increasing scientific knowledge will converge mankind towards a universal culture of enlightened values. "Western societies," he sighs, "are ruled by the myth that, as the rest of the world absorbs science and becomes modern, it is bound to become secular, enlightened and peaceful-as, contrary to all evidence, they imagine themselves to be."

History, Gray asserts, just happens-and it's silly to ascribe attributes of omniscience and omnipotence to science.

As witness to history, Gray tries offering testimony to the collapse of the 19th century Positivism of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte that envisioned science as the modern means of deliverance-the thinking that can count utopian visions of both the Marxist and Free Market variety among its intellectual inheritors, not to mention Logical Positivism, with its emphasis on reason, empiricism and objectivity.

Dramatic. Very dramatic. It's when Gray applies such breakaway thinking to economics and war that he exposes his inadequate understanding of arenas beyond his own. Sure, there may be no value-free way to define 'efficiency', but does that make the IMF a "slave to the Positivist inheritance"? Sure, everyone may be an unwitting hostage to centuries-old thoughts, but is the US a "less secular regime than Turkey"? Among other facile throwaways, he dismisses millennium-old advancements as a matter of geographical accident, and traces almost every revolutionary idea to Europe-making one wonder if this is really a whack-on-the-head book or some linear extrapolation of old European thoughts.

The blue-sky task, however, is to ponder what's 'modern'. It's not always benign, to Gray, nor just one thing; Europe's enlightenment values alone need not constitute what's modern-which is obvious. As a secular option, he offers the capacity to "generate new knowledge" as modern. Good. But what could also qualify, at least as an enabler, is what Gray employs as his own attitude (and so should you in reading either this book or this review): the refusal to mindlessly accept any other mind's output.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ELECTRONIC TRADING By Brendon C. W. Seeto John Wiley & Sons PP: 217 Price: N.A.

Written by an investor/dealer claiming experience on trading markets across the world, this book starts with a thriller-sequence description of a livewire electronic trade executed minutes after 9-11 (you know, September 11, 2001, the day that "the standing icons of the international financial community draped a dramatic portrait of flame and debris"). But that's not why Templeton's Mark Mobius, who has written its foreword, says he "started reading it with some suspicion". It's the word 'psychology' that apparently did it-till he satisfied himself on the worth of this book.

You don't have to have hurt yourself in the computer programme-induced crash of 1987 to acknowledge that electronic trading is something else altogether-calling for a revision of one's notions of market psychology. That Mobius vouches for the book's quality (it's not mumbo-jumbo), then, should be added reason to go for it. If you have followed Kahneman & Tversky's 'Prospect Theory', read Andrei Shleifer's Inefficient Markets or engaged in the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) debate in any way, this book could be of special interest, too.

Remember, electronic trading is spooky. Unlike open outcry floor trading, all you hear is the pitter-patter of keyboards, depriving us of the audio-visual "cues"-such as hand signs and other non-verbal expressions-that have long helped understand what's really going on inside people's heads. The book explains what goes on anyhow, with details on Selective Attention, Social Comparison, Persuasion Effect and Cognitive Dissonance.

It all affects trading more than you'd acknowledge. The book has its fun moments too, with quotes strewn around the pages from Peter Bernstein and Sigmund Freud on gambling ("substitute for masturbation" to the latter), Richard Thaler on lottery tickets ("50 cents for a fantasy") and even frazzled ol' Albert Einstein ("our technology has exceeded our humanity").

THE ON-TIME ON-TARGET MANAGER By Ken Blanchard & Steve Gottry Harper Collins PP: 126 Price: Rs 125

This is a parable about a guy called Bob, the Last Minute Manager, who has obviously missed Ken Blanchard's topselling The One Minute Manager. It is a parable on procrastination, specifically, and how it can be conquered by the '3Ps' process for career renewal. The first P, as Bob discovers, is Priority. Figuring out what "we want to do and have to do", "have to do and don't want to do", "want to do and don't have to do", and "don't want to do and don't have to do": four categories of tasks.

The second P: Propriety. Doing the right thing. This is where 9-11 makes its appearance in Bob's little story, via a "We will never forget" billboard and the sacrificial example of passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 as inspiration. The third P: Commitment. Yes, Commitment (see, it's a C, a trick so you commit it to memory): "ya gotta wanna", as the book puts it, borrowing this paragon of linguistic propriety from a high school janitor's sense of priority. So figure out what you 'gotta wanna do'. This is the stuff that keeps poor Bob up all night. And then there's a surprise fourth P (marketers should be pleased): No. Just that. When, that is, to say 'No'.