Mary helps get a sense of Trump

Mary Trump, a trained clinical psychologist who holds a Ph.D. from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, unveils the trauma and toxicity that shaped her uncle, Donald Trump. Fueled by her memories, she shines bright light on the dark history of a family that created the world’s most dangerous man. Too Much and Never Enough is a scathing attack on a person whom Mary has “no problem calling a narcissist – rather a malignant narcissist – as he meets all nine criteria of mental disorder outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM-S).”

The author asserts that the book was neither written to cash in nor a desire for revenge, but an effort to let readers know that expecting anything pleasant on the alter of Donald’s hubris and willful ignorance will be at a huge cost. There are specific incidents and patterns that created the damaged man who occupied the coveted office, not once but twice. As the family members were often engaged in questionable business dealings, it allowed Donald’s failures to go unchecked. In fact, only a clinical psychologist could decipher such traits as causes of personality disorders.

Having learnt that ‘lying and cheating’ were legitimate business tactics, Donald built a reputation for success based on ‘bad loans, bad investments, and worse judgement’. Rather than the self-made billionaire he claims to be, he comes across as a beneficiary of his family’s immoral practices. “Donald had only his ability to spin father’s money to prop up an illusion”. Throughout the book, Mary expertly dismantles the myths around Donald’s success.

The book implores readers to recognize how personal histories shape public outcomes, drawing a direct link to Donald’s dangerous leadership. His fragile ego that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be. Curiously, he makes his insecurities and vulnerabilities other peoples’ responsibility. Mary adds “that’s what sociopaths do, they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends — ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance.”

Nothing is ever enough. Donald goes far beyond the garden-style-narcissism. He is not simply weak. He makes his insecurities and vulnerabilities other people's' responsibility. Mary’s candid exploration serves a warning. The powerful narrative urges readers to reflect how personal becomes political, and how it influences the global geopolitical landscape. 

There is so much to infer from the narrative, which refers to traits such as chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others. According to Mary, “Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behavior so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of neuropsychological tests.” Till such time such tests are conducted, casual dehumanization of people will continue across his dinner table. More so, he has surrounded himself with sycophants to ensure that his own mediocrity remains concealed. 

But as the pressures of his position continues to mount, his mediocre delusions are emerging more starkly than ever before. Though his character flaws and aberrant behavior have been remarked upon and joked about, his hegemonic behavior is becoming unbearable at the global level. But he doesn’t seem to care. Instead, his approach is: “if he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.” 

In her compelling narrative, Mary has no hesitation to postulate that ‘a second term to him would be the end of (American) democracy’. 

Too Much and Never Enough
by Mary L. Trump
Simon & Schuster, New York.
Extent: 225, Price: $17.99.

Is it the Era of India?

The India growth story is fascinating. During the middle of the Mughal regime in 1700s, India accounted for 24 per cent of global GDP. In the next 190 years of brutal British colonialism, it had become an impoverished economy accounting for just 3 per cent of global GDP. For half a century after gaining Independence in 1947, India had too small an economy worth taking note of. However, after several years of steady GDP growth since, it overtook Britain and is on track to overtake Japan and Germany as the world’s third-largest economy by 2030.

Using empirical data and research evidence, Minhaz Merchant argues that there won’t be any European country among the world’s three largest economies. The US believes that as India is on economic ascent, it will be the third economy alongside China to drive global growth. Much will, however, depend on how towards the middle of this century, India upgrades itself with digital technologies and artificial intelligence to lead the world. It is expected that by year 2030, an estimated 70 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will have their capability centers located in India. Its technological infrastructure and expanding consumer market will provide a perfect ecosystem for these companies, and through them India to grow.

It isn’t as linear as it may seem. The ongoing trade and technology war between the US and China is recasting global alliances. In such a situation, will India act as a balancing pivot between the two-warring factions? At this crucial time when the US is pushing ‘America First’ policy for seeking revival of its hegemony and China is rising as both an economic and military power, not much can be expected from a third party. The geopolitics of global change is turbulent, with the US playing a vital part in its strategic calculations.

Era of India provides an immensely readable perspective on the social, religious, political and economic history of the world. It traces the rise and falls of civilizations from antiquity to the present. History has been complicated as the weapons of war allowed for invasion and colonization. Much has changed since then; the stockpile of weapons is used instead to influence and enforce change. The book goes a step further to assess the shift in power, triggered by the decline of the West and the rise of the rest. It is an engaging assessment of shifting global power.

History will come full circle, argue Merchant, and apply growth data to prove that three countries — the US, China and India — will exert centripetal force in world affairs in 2050. However, despite economic and military superiority the three may not be without their own weaknesses and vulnerability. Counting India in this global power triad will favor the US. With India being a major consumer of a variety of products, the US will explore the markets by enforcing favorable tariff regime to dump its products. Incidentally, India may not have any choice.

As the title suggests, Era of India narrates all that favors the rise of India. But the questions worth asking are: where does India stand in this emerging world order? how can China’s role in reshaping the world be ascertained? The homogeneity of Chinese society should be an advantage in taking decisions whereas the noisy multicultural societies in the US and India may act as deterrents. Understanding China is critical, strategically. It has not only lifted more people out of poverty faster but is also the only economic power that has moved closer to the size of the US economy.

How India leverages its soft power will determine its status amongst the triad? Merchant leaves it for the reader to take a call. Era of India offers insights on the geopolitical imagination of India’s rise as an economic power. Recent debates around trade have put the spotlight on the deep structural challenges that the power triad may need to address. In addition, it should seek to address equity, territorial resilience and ecological sustainability. Just counting numbers (pertaining to economy) alone would not add value to the power triad.

Without fail, the world will be integrated economically and technically in a way it could be scarcely imagined. Therefore, exerting military supremacy or enforcing trade restrictions may remain a strategy of the past. Will India emerge as an architect of change by leveraging its soft power? Merchant leaves the reader to imagine such a scenario and argues further that nations rise and fall to the levels guided by their history. Need it be said that the balance of global power will shift decisively over the next few years.

Era of India is an ambitious undertaking on the geopolitics of change that the world has gone through in the past. It views history, geopolitics, economics, and demographic sociology from a socio-cultural lens in presenting the civilizational evolution of nation-state. It examines human society as interlinked civilizations set living standards. It is readable as it helps capture the finer nuances of change, but to forecast a future on the basis of the past may remain elusive.

Era of India 
by Minhaz Merchant
PenguinVintage, New Delhi. 
Extent: 501, Price: Rs. 999.

First published in Hindu BusinessLine dated on March 23, 2026.

In defence of a language

As long as a language is yoked to a particular faith—as Urdu often is with Islam—it neither grows freely nor is understood in its fullness. Yet Urdu today is widely seen as a Muslim language, partly because it is the national language of Pakistan. Such identification carries political overtones, though there is little empirical evidence to suggest that Urdu and Muslims are mutually exclusive categories. Can a language belong to a religion? Or can it be claimed by geography alone? Writer Rakhshanda Jalil addresses these questions in Whose Urdu Is It Anyway? a collection of sixteen Urdu short stories written by non-Muslim authors that challenge persistent stereotypes and misconceptions.

A supple and expressive language, Urdu emerged from cultural hybridization in the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth century. What we recognize as Urdu today carries influences from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, languages that reached the region through waves of trade, migration, and conquest. Over time, it became the preferred medium for poets and writers, who deployed its elegance not only in literature but also in the performing arts.

In the collection, stories by progressive writers such as Krishan Chander and Rajinder Singh Bedi, alongside film writers like Ramanand Sagar and Gulzar, reflect the remarkable thematic and tonal diversity of Urdu literature. The careful selection underscores a larger cultural idea: that Urdu literature, vast and layered, still has the potential to reach the far corners of the popular imagination.

The book poses a quiet but loaded question about a hybrid language that drew from many linguistic streams and once served as the elite lingua franca of medieval India. Over the course of its evolution, it was known by several names — Hindavi, Hindi, Rekhta, and eventually Urdu.

Some stories address the notion of proprietorship over language. Jalil’s selection remains largely representative of both the time and the people they depict. Many narratives foreground the small, often overlooked individual living on the margins, struggling to survive in a society where gender discrimination was a norm. Most stories are set in the early years after Independence, when a newly formed nation was grappling with questions of identity, belonging, and nationhood. In many ways, these concerns echo the present moment, when a surge of nationalism shapes public discourse.

The stories also demonstrate that language is shaped far more by region than by religion. Muslims in Kerala speak Malayalam, while those in West Bengal are at home in Bengali. The language, therefore, cannot be confined to a single religious identity. “It belongs to whoever is willing to embrace it,” Jalil writes. She allows readers the space to absorb the essence of these stories at their own pace. Urdu, after all, evolved through the voices of ordinary people.

Whose Urdu is it anyway?
by Rakhshanda Jalil
Simon&Schuster, New Delhi. 
Extent: 180, Price. Rs. 499.

Published in New Indian Express on March 22, 2026.

The queerness of desire

Our society may forbid transgressive desires, but it has non-hesitatingly preserved such expressions in murals, paintings and artifacts since time immemorial. While Shiva’s Ardhanareswara captures the synthesis of masculinity and femineity, the stone carvings in Khajuraho temple reflect protofeminist past that is quintessentially queer. The fascinating thing about queerness is that it permeates time. Either it is suppressed by societal norms or expressed as myriad human desires, but an ounce of femineity or masculinity is present in each one of us. It emerges and locates itself when the time is compatible. Queerness manifests itself as a gender identity that is beyond societal norms. It is as normal as breathing because human bodies and minds do not fit into prescribed templates of gender identity. 

Due to rapid social, economic and political change the world is going through, many of the traditional gender binaries have been rendered increasingly dysfunctional and obsolete. Even in ancient, medieval, and early modern times, polyamory, polygamy, and polyandry were well recognized. Draupadi may seem the only polyandrous woman in mythology, however, the polyandrous practice has been real across many communities in the subcontinent. Polyandry, the keeping of multiple husbands, was permitted in the remote mountain regions as late as the 19th century. Anthropologists have come up with socio-economic reasons for such arrangements, but ‘human desire’ has been the pivot that sustained these relations.

Ancient mythology is full of gender fluidity. Gods have been included; divinities transcend their gender. Shiva is often depicted as hyper masculine whereas Vishnu is quite feminine to start with. These are predominant examples but social practices relating to gender identities had a subculture that persisted through ages. Indian society was pretty cool about it but to the prudish Victorian eyes this was scandalous. As a consequence, the colonial rulers conveniently erased south-Asian queer sub-cultures. Colonial authorities passed a posy of laws to criminalize them, and the society was indoctrined to think of the past as necessarily regressive.  

A doctorate from the University of Strathclyde, Sindhu Rajasekhran considers herself ambiguous and acknowledges the decriminalization of Section 377 which spared the headache of justifying her being what she claims to be – sapphic, fluid, ambiguous, bisexual. Digging deeper into the subject of gender identity she found that gender fluidity is not a foreign fad and the fact that it doesn’t easily fit into the Victorian idea of gender binary led to its decolonization. Forbidden Desire places the categories of gender identity in cultural perspective. She further argues that queerness has the potential to dismantle patriarchal patrons, and perhaps the predominant reason for the new gender identities (LGBTQ+) yet to gain social acceptance. 

It goes without saying that patriarchy is petrified of gender fluidity, because it alone has the potential to dismantle hierarchical pyramids. The patriarchy is built on a solid foundation of masculine thinking, which fetishizes the feminine. As androgyne expressions are gaining widespread recognition, there is a reason to believe Rajasekaran’s assertion that future is turning femme. It is so because long forbidden (and suppressed) desires are beginning to surface. In this context, she believes that mxn could be the right gender expression that is neither man nor woman. With this being the new perspective, everyone is free to express in a manner that reflects their true selves.

Queerness isn’t out of the ordinary. It doesn’t confirm to prespecified choices and neither confine to established customs and practices. It is a period of destabilization in traditional gender roles and relationships. Forbidden Desire is a new way of approaching big questions about existence and the societies we create(d), then and now.

Forbidden Desire 
by Sindhu Rajasekaran 
Simon&Schuster, New Delhi. 
Extent: 238, Price: Rs. 799.

First published in Deccan Herald

Empire of extraction

By the turn of the current century, a 3-degree rise in a cocktail of temperature and humidity will make life unbearable for at least 3.25 billion people. By that time the monsoon cycle will be completely unpredictable, and glaciers will be viewed digitally. Much would get changed and doomsday models would erect dreadful scenarios. Nothing of the kind may happen, climate change skeptics argue. For such a change unlikely to occur, the world’s governments had agreed to keep global temperature under check from being heated beyond additional 1.5 degrees C.  

Far from mitigating an increase in temperature, the world has already heated up by over 1.4 degrees from pre-industrial times in only a decade since the world’s governments had agreed to keep heating to 1.5 degrees. Recent unprecedented floods across South and Southeast Asia may have been consequent to rise in global temperature. Much worst seems to be in store as the last two years were second or third hottest year on record. Escape from the emerging devastating reality, that is inching closer, is by no means compelling. 

Abrupt changes in climate have acted on the world being molded to serve human needs and desires. Yale University historian Sunil Amrith argues that the human destruction of nature began a long time before the industrial revolution, and which accelerated thereafter. Seeds of such transformation were sown as early as the year 1200. The Charter of Forests, issued by England’s King Henry III in 1217, acknowledged human freedom to exploit natural resources like the soils, forests, and water. Till the advent of industrial revolution, the benign climate and rainfall allowed both imperial and colonial forces to clear land, expand cultivation, and build cities. 

Industrial revolution fueled the energy-hungry economic systems that turned nature into lifeless commodities. The unshackling of fossil energy bolstered a way of seeing the world in which freedom defied any limits on what is possible for human beings to do and to make. The Burning Earth is an environmental history, in author’s view all history is environmental history, that includes both environmental effects on societies and those societies’ impacts on the environment. Taking an appropriately long view the environmental history, which is nothing short of history of the world, the long and continuous struggle for the want and desire has driven a large part of the human impact on the rest of nature. 

Amrith views the three distinct time zones in global history. From such events as the charter that led to wide-scale deforestation; the invasion of central asia and western eurasia by Mongols; and the importation of rice from China are significant global changes. Around the same time, the colonial powers initiated the slave trade which deprived the enslaved freedom as well as their vital links to land and food sources. Christopher Columbus and other Iberian conquistadors brought with them both war and deadly diseases that wiped out most of the Aztecs and Incas. All this led to many habitats vanished and species declined across the world.

All of these events speak of want and greed. Be it extraction of global trade in gold; the emergence of leading financial center; and centuries of fossil fuel dependence. However, the contest for resources increasingly now includes water. Gaining a handle on the planetary crisis is complicated by the fact that the wealthy nations have precious little moral high ground to occupy in making the case that the poorer nations need to stop their clamoring demand for wealth. 

The Burning Earth presents a far-reaching survey of the central role played by human want and desires in the destruction of the planet. As things stand, the human attempt to script and harness nature would grow more elaborate in centuries to come. In this expansive narrative, Amrith narrates how the humans not only transformed matter by taking control of technology but got transformed in return too. It is an epic exploration on human want and desire, leaves the reader with no real clarity on why everything continue to be like that and how things will ever change.  

Written with passion, the narrative is insightful and empowering. Getting slowly sucked into the world of technology; the compelling question remains whether there would be space and scope for freedom and democracy?  

The Burning Earth 
by Sunil Amrith
Penguin, New Delhi
Extent: 418, Price: Rs.799.

First published in Deccan Herald on March 1, 2026.