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Cunning, instructive, and amoral, this controversial bestseller distills 3,000 years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws. - Law 1 Never outshine the master.
- Law 2 Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies.
- Law 3 Conceal your intentions.
- Law 4 Always say less than necessary.
- Law 5 So much depends on reputation. Guard it with your life.
- Law 6 Court attention at all costs.
- Law 7 Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit.
- Law 8 Make other people come to you; use bait if necessary.
- Law 9 Win through your actions, never through argument.
- Law 10 Infection: avoid the unhappy and unlucky.
- Law 11 Learn to keep people dependent on you.
- Law 12 Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim.
- Law 13 When asking for help, appeal to people's self-interests, never to their mercy or gratitude.
- Law 14 Pose as a friend, work as a spy.
- Law 15 Crush your enemy totally.
- Law 16 Use absence to increase respect and honor.
- Law 17 Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability.
- Law 18 Do not build fortresses to protect yourself. Isolation is dangerous.
- Law 19 Know who you're dealing with; do not offend the wrong person.
- Law 20 Do not commit to anyone.
- Law 21 Play a sucker to catch a sucker: play dumber than your mark.
- Law 22 Use the surrender tactic: transform weakness into power.
- Law 23 Concentrate your forces.
- Law 24 Play the perfect courtier.
- Law 25 Re-create yourself.
- Law 26 Keep your hands clean.
- Law 27 Play on people's need to believe to create a cultlike following.
- Law 28 Enter action with boldness.
- Law 29 Plan all the way to the end.
- Law 30 Make your accomplishments seem effortless.
- Law 31 Control the options: get others to play with the cards you deal.
- Law 32 Play to people's fantasies.
- Law 33 Discover each man's thumbscrew.
- Law 34 Be royal in your fashion: act like a king to be treated like one.
- Law 35 Master the art of timing.
- Law 36 Disdain things you cannot have: Ignoring them is the best revenge.
- Law 37 Create compelling spectacles.
- Law 38 Think as you like but behave like others.
- Law 39 Stir up waters to catch fish.
- Law 40 Despise the free lunch.
- Law 41 Avoid stepping into a great man's shoes.
- Law 42 Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.
- Law 43 Work on the hearts and minds of others.
- Law 44 Disarm and infuriate with the mirror effect.
- Law 45 Preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once.
- Law 46 Never appear perfect.
- Law 47 Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop.
- Law 48 Assume formlessness.
Dear Justices Nijjar and Reddy, Many of us welcome your decision in the Supreme Court case on black money, castigating the government for its inaction and setting up an independent special investigative team. This approach needs to be institutionalized: i have long argued for an independent Police Commission, analogous to the Election Commission. However, in MORE > Twenty years ago, Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister and initiated economic reforms that transformed India. The Congress party doesn’t want to remember him: it is based entirely on loyalty to the Gandhi family, and Rao was not a family member. But the nation should remember Rao as the man who changed India, and the world MORE > Twenty years ago, on June 21, 1991, Narasimha Rao became head of a weak minority government grappling with a terrible financial crisis. Yet he initiated economic reforms that eventually transformed India, and even the world. India in 1991 was a poor, misgoverned country, derided as a bottomless pit for foreign aid. Today it is called MORE > As we approach the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union and its red empire, one minor principality of that empire, West Bengal, has also fallen. A post-election analysis by Brinda Karat shows how blind the CPM is to why first the Soviet Union and now West Bengal have fallen. British imperialists claimed MORE > If people are totally free, the most talented (and lucky) will get far richer than the dullest and unluckiest. So, freedom will create inequality. Communist countries aimed for equality of outcome through totalitarian controls, but this was hypocrisy: there was no equality of power between those laying down the rules and those forced to obey. MORE > How do we measure economic freedom, and how relevant is it for economic growth? Some answers come from Economic Freedom of the States of India 2011, a report just brought out by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Cato Institute and Indicus Analytics. The report shows that measuring economic freedom at the state level is a difficult MORE > (This is an edited version of the author’s acceptance speech on receiving the Manavata Vikas Award of the IIPM on April 15) I view myself as a freedom-fighter, who for 45 years has sought to promote every kind of freedom—economic, political and social. “Escape from the Benevolent Zookeepers”, a 2008 collection of Swaminomics columns, emphasized MORE > We are approaching the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism. This comprehensively refuted the communist claim to represent the people. Yet the claim continues, sometimes dazzling a new generation of youngsters with no inkling of why the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. In democratic capitalism, said Karl Marx, the rich became richer MORE > WITH the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become commonplace to say that capitalism has triumphed over communism. I think this is misleading and inaccurate notion. What has triumphed is the market-driven welfare state, the mixture of private enterprise and government paternalism that has become standard in western democracies. This is as different from MORE >
