Sunday Reads - Microsoft’s Odd Couple & India's superpower dreams
In the regular Sunday Reads column, I publish a collection of four reads and a slideshow. However, today's collection is rather different, with just two incisive reads. But I am sure this two-article collection of reads will keep your mind occupied for the next few days.
- Microsoft’s Odd Couple. Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, writes on his stormy relationship with Bill Gates and how MS was built.
Paul Allen
One day he showed me the magazine’s special annual issue and asked me, “What do you think it’s like to run a Fortune 500 company?” I said I had no idea. And Bill said, “Maybe we’ll have our own company someday.” He was 13 years old and already a budding entrepreneur.
[...]
I’d occasionally catch Bill grabbing naps at his terminal during our late-nighters. He’d be in the middle of a line of code when he’d gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard. After dozing for an hour or two, he’d open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely where he’d left off—a prodigious feat of concentration. (End of excerpt)
I strongly recommend this illuminating six-page excerpt from the memoir of Paul Allen at Vanity Fair.
- In his remarkable piece, Think Again: India, Sumit Ganguly, raises a pertinent question: India can help the U.S. contain China. To this, he says:
Hardly. Because of its longstanding disputes with Beijing, U.S. policymakers have hoped that New Delhi would join Washington in balancing against China. But though India has had significant quarrels with China, it remains extremely skeptical of the U.S. "pivot" to Asia and of playing any part in an American strategy of containment. Many Indian elites fear that joining the U.S. effort would simply provoke China's wrath, and their obsessive concern with policy independence, deeply rooted in India's political culture of nonalignment, reinforces the unwillingness to make common cause with the United States.
Read the complete piece on the Foreign Policy website.
