Usama Ihsan

As the topic suggests, this book holds pretty interesting combination of history, economy and politics. Providing a gist of the entire book in a summarized way is difficult but appealing to do. This book is written by Ha-Joon Chang; he is a South Korean Institutional Economist. Other than that he has a multi-disciplinary background in academia (Economics, politics and development) for writing such a book comprehensively. The main objective of this book is to present the real face of Now Developed Countries (NDCs) and their historical experience about development. The author historically explains how developed countries hide the way they themselves developed, their motives in hiding and what they dictate to developing countries. The author uses secondary sources of data to explain historical perspective. Author defines how industrialization occurred in Britain first and then it was done in other countries afterwards and how different factors helped them in doing so. A detailed histo

Let’s start this with a real life example. Once during a lecture on inequality measuring techniques at my university; teacher had drawn supposedly a graph of unequal society, a student passed a comment “This should be of Pakistan”. Doesn't it shows how we think of our mother land? Pakistan is doing or not doing well as a country is a different story. But here comes a question: Why Pakistan is not doing good in our minds? We from our childhood are sensitized in a way that if a person does anything bad, we relate it to Pakistan; "Pakistani awam". Let's get into the depth of it. I read a quote in a book named "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" by Milan Kundara; You begin to liquidate a people," Hubl said, "by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and wha