Читать книгу India and Asian Geopolitics - Shivshankar Menon - Страница 4

Like every book, this one owes debts of intellectual and physical gratitude to many friends and institutions.

The book was conceived at Ashoka University outside New Delhi. A huge debt and many thanks to Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Srinath Raghavan, Rudra Chaudhury, and Joanna Korey at Ashoka. Also thanks to my 2018 students, whose fresh eyes brought back some of the wonder of seeing familiar things for the first time.

Much of the writing was done at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, where Gopinath Pillai, Raja Mohan, and many others gave me the perfect environment to write and to try out ideas. Two reviewers helped to clarify some of my confusions and greatly improved the text with their suggestions and comments. I could not have asked for more encouraging yet rigorous guides than Bill Finan at the Brookings Institution Press and Ranjana Sengupta at Penguin Random House India, who kept the faith in this manuscript and whose suggestions vastly improved it. My thanks also to Janet Walker Chirlin, whose painstaking hard work made this text readable.

Several friends, colleagues, and students have suffered my ideas and set me straight while I was working on this book, but I am solely responsible for what is in it, good, bad, and indifferent.

But most of all I am grateful to Mohini, who keeps me real and true, and without whom this book would never have been done.

This book is for my grandchildren, Kabir, Amaara, Samira, and Ahren. Their world will be quite different, and I hope that this book will give them a sense of what my generation’s times were like.