2014 - In a nutshell

After 4 years of writing about ‘This Year in a Nutshell’ blogpost, I skipped 2013. 2013 was one big year for me with a big career and personal move. I’d moved back to India after 7 years and 7 months in the US. And that was for good, and life has been good!

So here’s 2014 in a nutshell:

- The year with most travel to date! Thanks to work-related travel primarily and professional travel. Personal trips to Srilanka, Costa Rica, Amritsar, and Pondicherry; work-related trips to Nagaland (yes, you read it right!), Assam (again right!), Chandigarh, Jalandhar, Delhi, Indore, Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kochi. So much air travel that the flight seat has become of one of my favourite reading chairs!

- The year of reading books! Finished my Goodreads yearly challenge of 20 books by reading 56 books (and counting). I can lose myself in books completely anytime. @NameFieldMT was one big motivator for me on this front. Thanks A!

- The year that I became a book review blogger! Thanks to @blogadda and @vivekisms, by sending in many many books for reviewing. You made me both read and write! The book review blog (I do crosspost on this blog, at times!)

- The year where I successfully completed two 10k runs! TCS 10k and Ajmera Thump, with a personal best of 59:22! Thanks to Bengaluru Runners and GS for the motivation.

- The year the Siblingeshwari got married and also left home to head to Bombay for studies (both being independent events).

- The year with increased traveling on public transport! Boo to traffic woes and dust! :D

- The year I moved past TV shows (hopefully!)! Have a huge backlog of TV shows to watch and I continue to read books.

- The year with two recordings including this 90stalgia! Hope I get back to music more and get better! Thanks @sdhrshn for that 90stalgia and making me sing some of my favorite songs by my God! Thanks @amaravind and @_curses too!

Okay, I think I have had a great year! Let me stop here before I cast nazar on myself! ;-)

Rabda: My Sigh... My Sai [Book Review]

Rabda: My Sigh . . . My Sai by Ruzbeh N Bharucha


It is not often that I go into an experimental phase with respect to reading, though I’d like to count a lot of the reads that I have done this year as experiments to see how my taste has evolved. When I got a chance to review ‘Rabda: My Sai… My Sigh,’ by Ruzbeh N. Bharuch I was not too sure if this book, given the spiritual read it was described to be, would be my cup of tea. I carefully navigated through the first few pages and had multiple false starts before I sat and completed the book in almost one go. While I am not too sure if I will go back to this type of reading, I must say that reading this was an experience in itself.

The premise of the book is a very simple one where a patient Rabda who is very very close to death gets to interact with Baba Sai. Baba Sai looking at this devotee of his from a previous lifetime begins to talk about his life, from the time he got to Shirdi, how he treated his devotees, what he thinks of life, and more. This interaction more or less turns out to be a discourse of sorts and there is definitely a lot of philosophy, spirituality and some common sense in it.

While the writing is pretty much to the point such that a reader is not bogged down by the vocabulary especially considering it is a spiritual read, the use of abusive words that are found in Baba’s speech is something that definitely leaves a bad taste in the reader. It is true that Baba was a man who had a colourful vocabulary and used words at his will especially given his temper. However, the same set of words and same provocations and reactions from Rabda were done to death after a while.

For me, the read was mostly material that I think I would listen to in a discourse/lecture. And the fact that the author Ruzbeh is able to put in a book is impressive. I am sure people who are into spiritual reads will enjoy this book.

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The Ripple Effect

I was in Class 3. Due to some family constraints, I was put in a ‘local’ school close to home for two years, before I went on to one of the ‘bigger’ schools in the city from Class 5. Class 3 is where you more often than not associate a kid with a happy-go-lucky lifestyle without bothering as much. You still are in a nascent phase of your life and do not have a clue of what happens in life anyway. This school that I was in did have a lot of students from the lower economic background and a few of them did go hungry through the day filling their ever-growling tummies with the tap water during lunch and headed out to play. There were many such classmates of mine, and the fussy eater that I was would end up passing on parts of my lunch or at times in entirety to one of those classmates.

The reason I mention this is because I have seen at least a dozen of my classmates faint during the physical training (PT) classes which were usually held after lunch. The reason why that happened is not difficult to trace back to. This would in turn mean the student would miss the classes at least for the rest of the day, and at times for multiple days in a row. It is not rocket science that this definitely disrupts the learning of the student.

So hunger fuels bad health. Bad health in turn leads to the student missing his classes. This in turn leads to a less-than-perfect learning for the student. This may very well continue to haunt him for the rest of his life particularly considering the impact that education has on one’s career and life.

I’d rather be seen as a person of action than that of words. One way that I along with my family has acted on this is by shunning all forms of celebrations for birthdays, anniversaries, and success. We instead contribute to an orphanage closely which though managed well is quite short of funds. Rather than spending a good Rs. 2000 on getting a few pizzas, I’d use the same to feed the 20 kids in the institute three times a day for two days. This has been the case for close to 10 years and we will continue to do so in the years to come.

BlogAdda, as innovative as they are, are supporting the AkshayaPatra foundation and I am happy to be a part of this cause since the ripple effect that a mid-day meal scheme for children has is indeed amazing. Kudos to you, BlogAdda!

I am going to #BlogToFeedAChild with Akshaya Patra and BlogAdda.

The Magician who lost his Wallet [Book Review]

(I received this book from the author Gautam Acharya as a part of Goodreads First-Reads giveaway program. Thank you Gautam!)

I have always been fascinated by the first book of an author, mainly because I am curious to see how the author pens down his thoughts and sustains his ‘first-book’ enthusiasm through the course of the book. Gautam Acharya, the author of ‘The Magician who lost his Wallet,’ had me intrigued with the title of the book itself and he moderately succeeds in having me glued to the book till the end.

At less than 190 pages, The Magician who lost his Wallet is an easy read with mostly simple and conversational language with a semi-compelling premise. The premise is that of a person who finds a wallet and tries to trace down the owner of the wallet, while there are others who are onto doing the same thing. In the process, we learn about a person who finds a way to work on what he thought was his true calling, his complex with his neighbor, his relationship with his brother-in-law and the like. The word ‘magician’ in the title is where all the mystery is shrouded in and Gautam handles this mystery in a pretty safe and tested manner.

As mentioned, the book has its premise in a lost-and-found setting while incorporating quite a few characters into the premise. While Gautam builds up a good background for most of the characters including Debu, Rana, Ritvik, Pandey and others, he could have perhaps emphasized a little more on the other three characters around which the novel is centered in the last few pages. As a result of this, the mystery is not an easy guess, especially considering the detailing that goes into most of the characters. This is where Gautam wins (and perhaps falters!). You seem as though you are led into believing something and then there’s a perfect foil to what you thought might be the ending. Of course, there are a few loose ends which do not seem to matter in the larger scheme of things.

Gautam Acharya in his first books seems to have treaded a safe line quite successfully without indulging in many a fancy writing. But it would be good to see how he gets out of this safe zone aka. comfort zone and voices his thoughts in the near future. 

The Mahabharata Quest: Alexander’s Secret [Book Review]

The market is definitely flooded with a lot of the mystery thrillers which borrow their themes from some form mythology and weave around a story with a search for something precious. Dan Brown, one of the authors who tasted great success with this type of premise, opened up this market to the mainstream readership. In India too, there have been authors like Ashwin Sanghi and Amish Tripathi who’ve experimented with genre and tasted commercial success. Christopher C Doyle, who debuted with The Mahabharata Secret last year, seems to have gotten the ingredients for this thriller right.

The premise has three to four equally important protagonists, among whom Vijay is seems like the main one, who are working against (and perhaps later, for) something called The Order. The Order has been working towards gathering some information which is rooted in the Macedonian mythology from the times of Alexander and his mother Olympias. The ‘secret’, if obtained, will work as a perfect cure for many a thing. What is this secret, how is it connected to Alexander, why does The Order have so much of significance, why do the Intelligence Bureau and characters like Vijay, Irfan, and many others matter to The Order is the premise of the story.

At 350+ pages, this book is an easy read and a page turner and manages to sustain the reader’s interest quite a bit. However, it has its slow moments when there is a lot of talk about the biotechnology aspect and also due to the repetitiveness with respect to the mythological aspect. The author tries to reach out to the average reader and hence over-explains a lot of things which could have been avoided. The language is definitely above average.

What really is to be appreciated about the book is the fact that the author, despite the convoluted premise, has researched quite a bit on the Macedonian history, the Mahabharata, and a little bit of the geography. At times, there is a mention of things from the previous book in a few places to help the author understand the rapport that a few of the characters share. But the book easily stands out as standalone book and the author has taken care to introduce mystery elements in the premise, which he says he will address in the subsequent books in the series. The book ends with some form of closure that the ‘good’ guys are still looking forward to something and the ‘bad’ guys have gotten the secret for now.

What the author could have worked on is on shortening the premise, as explained earlier. With some good editing, the book could have been a fast paced 250 page thriller. In addition, stretching a premise over multiple books sort of weakens the premise as such unless there is indeed a ‘WOW’ moment in each of the books. There are many such revealing moments in this book, but they all fall short of the WOW factor. Perhaps, the next few books can work towards that.

Overall, the Mahabharata Secret: Alexander’s Quest is a mostly decent thriller read with some interesting historical trivia and biotechnology lingo. 

This review is a part of the biggest Book Review Program for Indian Bloggers. Participate now to get free books!

The Innovators [Book Review]

Title: The Innovators

Author: Walter Isaacson (Twitter)

It was 1994. My parents had brought home a Dolphin home computer, which had just a keyboard and possibly a small CPU in there which could run LOGO. Having been exposed to a computer just a year earlier, the 9-year old me was fascinated to see how that piece of keyboard connected to the television and the way I could draw on the monitor. I tried to form my own form of a treasure hunt (without even knowing what the term meant) and was half-successful in that. Reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, the author of the best-selling autobiography on Steve Jobs, I was reminiscent of those times in addition to being in awe of each of these ‘inventions’ or ‘innovations’ presented in the book.

The book follows a mostly linear perspective to show how Digital Revolution evolved from the early half of the 19^th century to the second decade of the 21^st century. The title caption says ‘How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution’ and indeed without a doubt one can say every one of these innovators was a genius in his own right. In addition to being a genius, the innovators fell into various categories including generous, eccentric, selfish, workaholics (for sure), childish, loners, and more. Above all, as Isaacson mentions in his book, they were all (mostly) wonderful collaborators. There are a couple of statements in the last chapter of the book that read: ‘People don’t invent things on the internet. They simply expand on an idea that already exists.’  The whole book is a wonderful piece of well-researched history on how the ideas from one time moved to another influencing innovations when people worked collaboratively.

From Lady Ada Lovelace to Charles Babbage to Shockley to Gordon Moore to Bill Gates to Steve Jobs to Larry Page to Evan Williams (I sure have missed many important names in between), the book gives a great insight into their background, what ticked them intellectually, their shortcomings, their contributions to the world the way it is today, and most importantly how each of them collaborated, despite their differences, with their peers and contemporaries.

The book also lists a variety of disputes including the ones on who took the credit for the invention of the transistor, the Apple and Microsoft issue on GUI based operating systems which was originally designed by Xerox, the patents for microchips, and many more. It is to be noted that despite a lot of the idea springing up at the same time, the population remembers the name of the person who was either most influential or the one that the media portrayed as its maker. It was news to me, an Electrical Engineer, that Shockley was not the only one to be responsible for the creation of a transistor.

As mentioned earlier, the book traverses a nice story-telling approach linearly with each of the key figures of the era that ushered in the digital revolution, and packs in a lot of detail. While the book on the whole is an easy read, there are a few short chapters in the middle on the video games and the initial discussion on internet which got a little too monotonous with too many inventors finding their name there. But the author quickly gets bad into the earlier mode and pens the most important chapter of them all: Software. This included a focus on Operating Systems and spoke about the two most important people in the history of Digital Revolution: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

The book culminates with two wonderful chapters on the web, one of which included the stories of Blogger, Google, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia, among others, and the other was aptly titled Ada Forever. This spoke about how computers despite all their power could not perform one function, exactly what Lady Ada Lovelace predicted two centuries earlier: using their own intelligence to make decisions.

Overall, The Innovators is a well–researched, well-detailed, and well-written piece of literature on the Digital Revolution. While the book does have its slow moments, it is a compelling piece of read in the overall of scheme of things. If you are an engineer or a computer scientist, you’ll be amazed to see how much you do not know about the inventors and their inventions. If you are not an engineer or a computer scientist, you will see how products that you use in your day-to-day life came about to be and perhaps you’ll stop equating engineering with information technology alone, and equate it to inventions too.

Not Just an Accountant - [Book Review]

Title: Not Just an Accountant: The Diary of the Nation's Conscience Keeper 
Author: Vinod Rai 

 

Every person who has lived in India in the last 10 years has comes across the term 2G scam and the (questionable) Rs. 1.76 lakh crore that was embezzled by A. Raja. While much of this scam is still shrouded in darkness, with the ugly truth in all possibility never seeing the light of the day, one hopes that someone in authority at least points to what the major mis-happenings with the government was. Vinod Rai in 'Not Just an Accountant' just does that.

Vinod Rai, a well-known figure to those who watch the news channels religiously, pens down his experience of close to 40 years in which he serves the government in various capacities. He has most recently served as the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India and was witness to a lot of the happenings in the government from mid 2000s till almost the end of the UPA regime in 2013.

Having seen CAG as just an abbreviation in a lot news articles ranging from the Commonwealth games 2010 scam to the coal block allocation case, this book gave a wonderful insight for me into what the office of the CAG actually does. By explaining the duties and tasks of the CAG in common man’s lingo, Mr. Rai sure makes the premise of the book easy to digest in terms of vocabulary. However, the same cannot be said about the premise. For an upper middle-class individual, the magnitude of the scams described in the book, is something that is indeed unpalatable.

In the first part of the book aptly titled ‘The Journey’, Mr. Rai starts off with his journey as an IAS officer of the 1972 batch from Nagaland to Kerala to Delhi and more with the shuttles between Kerala and Delhi being of a higher frequency. He throws in instances of what he was able to perform in each of the stints he had in the administration in various capacities. This is followed by a ‘explain to me like I am five’ lesson on ‘The Role of Audit,’ which forms a basis for the the rest of the book. Short descriptions on the ‘Role of Media’ and the CBI in the current state of affairs in India complete this first part.

The second part of the book ‘Follies’ (‘Follies of whom?’, I am tempted to ask) majorly deals with the 2G spectrum allocation scam, CWG 2010 scam, coal block allocation scam, Gas explorations  and  finally the way Air India has operated in the last few years. This, to me, is the most compelling part of the book. While a lot of the material in this regard is public knowledge, Mr. Rai provides an insider’s view at what is seen by the office whose responsibility is to audit the practices of the government. The dark secrets remain dark for the most part, since Mr. Rai refuses to take names in multiple contexts, but what comes tumbling out of the closet is the fact that what we see in newspapers in mostly the tip of the iceberg.

Despite his misdoings, particularly in the second UPA region, I remain a fan of Dr. Manmohan Singh, as does Mr. Rai. But the extent to which Mr. Rai goes on to prove that the PMO has sufficient information about each misdealing that have occurred in the last decade makes me empathise with Dr. Singh. A hand-tied puppet, who perhaps with all his foresight could have steered us in a direction of progress, remains tongue-tied too.

In the last part of the book ‘Course Correction,’ Mr. Rai quickly goes over what he sure sees in India as a potential superpower settling down for mediocrity. I recently read a book edited by Shashi Tharoor ‘India: the Future is Now,’ which had a collection of essays by the new generation MPs. While each of the essays read like what a high school kid would write, with some imagination all over the place, the book showed that there was still some promise. Mr. Rai, with his final words, just re-emphasises that.

A cleansing of the system is necessary. For that, a lot more people should be aware of what goes on in the government. And this book ‘Not Just An Accountant,’ where Mr. Vinod Rai manages to settle his accounts with the ‘barking dogs,’ is a good start.

7 Secrets of the Goddess [Book Review]

Title: 7 Secrets of the Goddess
Author: Devdutt Pattanaik
Reach the author at
Website: http://devdutt.com/
Twitter: @devduttmyth 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DevduttPattanaik

Buy this book from Flipkart here.

There is always a sense of fulfilment when you read a book by Devdutt Pattanaik.  He delivers what is promised. Be it Jaya, The Pregnant King or Sita (for the most part), there is a lot of research that has gone into getting the material for the book and it is presented in a way that is easily consumed. While the author’s thoughts and comments on various social practices come as a part of what is presented, it is mostly logical and not forcibly fit into the premise.

Devdutt’s latest book ‘7 Secrets of the Goddess’ is no different either, from what I mention above. Part four of a series called the 7 Secrets, this book is the first one I read in the series.

The book, in typical Devdutt style, has a lot of illustrations. However, the illustrations are artwork and photographs from various sources including temple sculptures and calendar art, in lieu of a hand drawn sketches like in Jaya or Sita. Every page of text is accompanied by a page of artwork with sufficient captions. This artwork serves as a good precursor to what may be coming in text that follows it.

The book talks about the secrets of Gaia, Kali, Gauri, Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswathi, and Vitthai. It is interesting to see how Devdutt starts off with the Goddess Gaia from the Greek mythology and weaves in the tales of corresponding Indian counterparts into the chapter. In almost every chapter, particularly the first, there is a mention of the gender ‘inequality’ and the co-existence of male Gods and female Goddesses. This is exactly where Devdutt brings up a lot of the logical reasoning based arguments on certain practices.

The book has significant borrowings, in terms of characters, from his earlier works including Jaya, Sita, Shikhandi and other stories they don’t tell you and the Pregnant King. The mythological value addition in terms of stories/anecdotes is limited compared to these earlier works, since this is more of a book that describes the existence of various goddesses, the practices related to them and the way we perceive them has changed over the centuries.

Following the first chapter, the chapters on Kali, Gauri, Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswathi were particularly very strong, while the last chapter on Vitthai did leave a lot to be desired. For some reason, it did seem forcefully fit into the scheme of things.

My favourite part of the book, all along the book, is how Devdutt visits every practice that were not favourable to women and mostly says it out aloud. One of my favourite lines from the book is on human ego and how it originated from ‘Aham’ and how we have modified to suit our requirements just to appear superior. Another noteworthy thing in the book is that Devdutt does talk about the misdoings of Brahmanas with respect to preserving the vedic wisdom and the superiority shown by that sect. And he does that without the cliched brahmin-bashing.

Overall, Devdutt Pattanaik’s 7 Secrets of the Goddess is a wonderfully educative read as his earlier books, but from a different perspective.

PS: One thing that bothered me initially about the book was the size of the book and the font sizing/spacing. It seemed like a workbook that we had in school, and a little difficult to hold. But once I saw how the artwork on the pages effectively added to the reading, I realised why the book was designed that way.