Book Reviews!
I found a few articles in Abhijit Bhaduri’s website funny & interesting so thought his books would be good also (He has a trilogy of sorts on M.B.A). I was proven wrong. The book is interesting only in pieces and kind of gives a perspective of how Indian businesses operated in the 80s and early 90s. Instances like the place where the protagonist yearns for a good title in his business card are indeed interesting but with none of the characters really developed well for the reader to empathize, the book falls flat. I cannot understand why Indian authors should force a few love-making scenes in their stories for no reason.
Chetan Bhagat brings his magic back with this book. It was missing after the first one. Guess stories inspired by his own life come out better than others. Let us pray his life is filled a lot of interesting events so that we get to read good stories (and not something like 3 mistakes of my life). Caution - Chetan has taken extreme liberty with the use of cuss words from Tamil in this book. The way Tamilians are stereotyped in this book is beyond imagination - It is only Tamil Brahmins (that too only Chennai based) he refers here and they form less than 3% of the population. So don’t start believing that this is how Tamilians are! By the way, I seriously wonder why Citibank should not sue Chetan for the way he has portrayed them. Overall, a very entertaining read - if you ignore the cliches and sterotypes and do not work for Citibank. Meanwhile, if you set out to search for “Chetan Bhagat” in Google, “Chetan Bhagat wife” comes as the 4th suggestion. You think this book is the reason?
This should be one of the least known books of Paulo Coelho I think. Got it for free for my imint points so picked it up. Usual fare of Paulo - Mix personal development theories/ philosophy into an exciting story of adventure. Unfortunately, most of the times only the story remains in the memory, not the philosophy. Same is the case with this too. The underlying theme in this book is about how to sub-consciously try to lose that which you love. Along the way, there are guardian angels, angels of death and a lot more such stuff. Me not too impressed, thank you so much.
Freakonomics(The first one - Not the sequel - Superfreakonomics)
This is one of those books that gets written because an article got popular - like Long Tail, Free, Tipping Point etc. The same one significant insight derived from the article gets repeated over and over again, across chapters till the author himself is bored with the insight. Dont get me wrong, all these books offer significant insights but not more than what the original article offered. The article was just enough - if needed, add a few more examples, why write a complete book on it? But I should say that such books make compelling read and you feel you are learning from significant lessons for life - except that you will remember none of those after you finish the book. You will be left scratching your head on what was it more than that one insight you learnt from the Preface or the back cover. Nevertheless, you need to read such books to feel at home in a pseudo-intellectual social gathering. Good book for reading in a flight - exactly what I did.
I have not read any of the Ayn Rand books. To make myself included in pseudo-intellectual groups, I thought I need to read her books. This one was a bit thinner than others so picked this up. Luckily, this was not fiction and was a collection of articles by Ayn Rand and one more person, whose name I forget. This book, along with 2 more, apparently make the foundations for the “objectivist” philosophy of Ayn Rand. Frankly, I did not read all the articles - they were too heavy for my mood when I was reading. But I liked those that I read. I felt the authors were trying to unnecessarily make things complex. To arrive at a simple conclusion, I felt they were making roundabout arguments but then the articles were all written in the 50s and 60s so the generational cohorts come into play for sure. If you read philosophy (or was this epistemology?) books for philosophy, you may like this. If you read them for the stories & to be considered part of the PI group, this is not fiction so you will not understand the head or tail of it.
An excellent book. I was wary of reading it since it won a booker. My previous experience of reading a booker winner (Midnight’s Children) with so much enthusiasm proved to be damp squib. I thought it was only for those literary enthusiasts who like to read about how the sun rise happened, explained in 3 pages with you having to run to WordWeb twice in a page. But this one proved to be different. Just when you think the story has begun, with the White Tiger moving to Bangalore, it just kind of ends abruptly. The story and several of its characters are sure to remain at your thoughts for long - every time you see a cab driver in Bangalore or go to one of those malls in Gurgaon and see ladies with shaven armpits. The frequent usage of cuss words and the reference to “dipping the beak” may not be liked by the sophisticated readers but as the White Tiger himself would say - What a fucking joke.
All these were read in March & April. After a long long time, I completed reading these books. The last few years have been one of incomplete books - from Midnight’s Children to Power of Now to Lateral Thinking to Black Swan to … see the list itself is incomplete.
