April 23, 2009 | 4:27 pm

Hitler ... he’s huge in India

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Speaking of Nazis, Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is getting new life in India, where business students are turning to it as an essential self-help guide.

What!?!

The Telegraph reports:

“Students are increasingly coming in asking for it and we’re happy to sell it to them,” said Sohin Lakhani, owner of Mumbai-based Embassy books who reprints Mein Kampf every quarter and shrugs off any moral issues in publishing the book.

“They see it as a kind of success story where one man can have a vision, work out a plan on how to implement it and then successfully complete it”.

Jaico Publishing House, one of the publishers in India, said it reprints a new edition of the book at least twice a year to meet growing demand.

“We were the first company to publish the book in India and there are now six other Indian publishers of the book, although we were first to take a chance on it,” said Jaico’s chief editor, R H Sharma, who dismissed any moral issues in publishing Mein Kampf.

“The initial print run of 2,000 copies in 2003 sold out immediately and we knew we had a best-seller on our hands. Since then the numbers have increased every year to around 15,000 copies until last year when we sold 10,000 copies over a six-month period in our Delhi shops,” he added.

Best seller ... that’s an interesting choice of words. I can only guess that “Jewish Wisdom for Business Success” is not doing as well in India.

As far as the wisdom of “Mein Kampf,” Management Today, via the Huffington Post, reasons that it isn’t exactly “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”:

Even if you can stomach the vitriol, paranoia, militarism and crude racism, the book is so long and tedious that even Hitler’s ally Mussolini didn’t manage to plough his way through it, once apparently dismissing it as ‘a boring tome that I never been able to read’ (Churchill concurred, calling it ‘turgid, verbose [and] shapeless’). So its credentials as a management text seem rather dubious.

Wait, so just blaming the Jews isn’t the way to get ahead in the working world? I have so much to learn.