Chanakya And The Art of Getting Rich (Penguin, Rs 299) by Radhakrishnan Pillai belongs to that ignoble stable which tries to mask mediocrity of thought and prose with the help of spin. In Pillai’s case, this spin is the Arthashastra: he relies on the wisdom of this treatise to help readers make a quick buck, hoping to stake a claim to literary immortality in the process. Unfortunately, attempts to spout wisdom by riding piggyback on ancient texts is no longer original: several whiz kids have done this to death. The accumulation of wealth cannot be vilified. But Pillai has very little to offer by way of its equal distribution, even though consumption is certainly the bane of modern existence.