The Demons of Lunka (Legend of Ramm #2)

 Get it here: https://amzn.to/3C0TMHd

Book Review: Undercover by Ashish Khetan

Ashish Khetan's book is a non-chronological personal account of his sting operations on Hindutva organizations. It was an account that was often, hard to read, as gory details of pillage, murder, etc. sprung forth from Khetan's pages. Khetan lays bare the 'Gujarat model' of encounters, pliable defense lawyers (and judges), and how careers of those who tried to save rioters got a leg up versus how those who tried to stop riots or bring the perpetrators to book were vilified and hounded. I especially enjoyed the blow by blow account of the Godhra train burning, the Bilkis Bano incident and then the judicial proceedings, and the Modi SIT deposition. I reduced 1 star from a 5 star rating because of the non-chronological nature of the book which confused me - often a case that was to be addressed in the future came up in the past and vice versa.

Outside that minor niggle, Khetan's Undercover is essential reading to understand how the "System" was broken at a national level by proponents of the Gujarat model.

PS: Read it before the System bans it.

Book Review: Prey by Crichton

Crichton is the ONLY author whose every book, that I have read, has been pure class. Prey is Crichton's attempt at mingling Artificial Intelligence with advanced biological techniques to create a predator. Oh man, Crichton is a storyteller par excellence. I know there is criticism of this book for being scientifically inaccurate in places, but the story is one hell of a ride. Buy it!

Foreword: "What your Banker won't tell you"

Almost everyone in the world wants to have more money than they already have. (If you are not one such person, please do not read beyond this page.) However, the science and math of saving money and generating wealth is rather poorly understood. This book attempts to answer questions on wealth generation such as:

•What is financial planning?
•Should I stop buying gold and putting money in Fixed Deposits?
•Are mutual funds and SIPs really good?
•How to identify good mutual funds?
•How to make money in the stock market?
•If everyone made money with real estate in the 20th Century and 2000s, why won’t my property appreciate in value?
•What about ULIPs? Insurance? “Retirement funds”?

However, one of the first rules of investing and becoming wealthy is to spend what you need to, after saving, and not vice versa. If you do not have a saving mindset and would rather have that expensive dress/ watch/ dinner at a high-end restaurant versus owning that incremental share or mutual fund unit or fixed deposit, no amount of information can help you.

The first step to becoming wealthy is to become addicted to saving money. Without that, nothing will work.

Get the book here: https://amzn.to/3kxPqkL

The vicious cycle of poor quality, high cost education and how it deprives our country of enterprise

In many ways, I am a cliché. I am an engineer and an MBA (General Category, if you must know), and I then entered the corporate sector to draw a salary that helps pays bills. I studied very little and somehow managed to crack two entrance exams. In many ways, I was a misfit – I was the exception that managed to make it precisely because I hated rote-learning, precisely because I hid novels in my Resnick Haladay or my FIITJEE DPPs. Precisely because I “wasted time” in debate and quiz club in school, when I could have been mugging up Chemistry.

I have worked for almost a decade in the corporate sector and let me tell you that despite being from among the best B-Schools and among the best Engineering Colleges, not one subject (OK, maybe just the one) prepared me for corporate life. Sample this – I came across this problem when my daughter was scribbling on one of my old FIITJEE copies.

Problem 1 - Hunter and Monkey. A monkey hangs from a branch at a height h above the ground. A hunter stands on the ground at a distance R from the tree, and is pointing his gun at the monkey at an angle (theta) to the horizontal, as shown in figure (1):

If the monkey jumps down from the tree at the same time as the hunter fires the bullet, what should be the value of theta, to hit the monkey?

In some way while I was doing these kind of problems at FIITJEE, I always thought my future career would involve monkeys and hunters, or mechanical contraptions mimicking the monkey and the hunter. For me, in 11th standard, the breaking point was fluid dynamics and organic chemistry. Both stumped me completely – but being the perfectionist that I was then as I am now, I continued to go at them never really understanding either, until the syllabus had moved so far ahead that I had to give up.

I decided to focus on NCERT and board exams early in 12th, giving up on IIT. IIT anyway meant nothing but a high paying job to me, and I figured I could eventually put my mind to anything and eventually make money doing it. Sadly, fates conspired for me to clear DCE’s entrance exam (DCE had a separate entrance exam then) and I ended up becoming an engineer.

However, once I entered engineering college, I realized how advantaged I was precisely because I had not given up my life to focus on IIT. (Some of my batchmates will disagree but) I had a rounded personality, I had leadership traits, and most importantly, I had developed a joy for reading that made me both read and comprehend English at almost lightning speed. When I (inevitably) began preparing for CAT, I realized how far ahead I was, needing almost no preparation for English Reading Comprehension, but quite a lot for DI (I hated DI with a vengeance).

MBA entrance exams like CAT were far easier than engineering entrance for me, and I ended up in FMS. It was then that I ended up meeting a hundred odd people like me – talented misfits, great at one or many things, super smart and fun to work and learn with. The one class we had in FMS which still helps me was IT or Computer skills, in which the Professor taught us Excel and Word tricks that put most of us ahead of the field when we joined the corporate world.

It was when I started working that I realized how useless my entire education had been. Yes, education had given me a scientific temper which helped me understand medium to difficult statistics (needed in most of my roles so far), and it had given me Microsoft skills, but beyond that it was my love of reading, my public speaking experience and my (decidedly moderate) curiosity developed by quizzing that helped me. Work was about communication – both written and oral, influencing people without authority or with authority, nurturing people and getting things done. My formal education did zilch to prepare me for any of these. It was quizzing and non-fiction that gave me a love of learning and not the monkey/ hunter/ parabola, or the formula of some ether molecule in organic chemistry. It was my debating experience that gave me a fearlessness of speaking in public (and speaking my mind!). And it was the novels that I hid in my course books that gave me a command over the English language (and the annoying habit of needing to write books and articles like this, you might say).

Our education system is broken and there are now startups who will charge parents thousands or lakhs of rupees to help get their children ahead in this broken system. But none of these startups teach vital life skills. Our schools and colleges also make essential life skills optional, so that only the few like me who have an interest or were nudged into some of these hobbies by their parents, manage to gain vital life skills. They condition us to not dream but mug up, to filter out the wrong options from four multiple choice questions – not teaching us one bit about how life and work are all about people and managing or influencing them. And thus, they condition us to follow the trodden path – mug up, get into a decent college, do a post-grad and sit for placements. 

Not that I would have been an entrepreneur, but clearly the minority of India born multinational organizations and their lack of scale is a symptom of our education system which dis-incentivizes risk taking and teaches only about exam management. Yes, our poor labor law, land law and tax law system is to blame, but then isn’t the education system to blame for that as well? The average bureaucrat or politician who is a product of the same education system, cannot even comprehend the scale of a US tech behemoth (think Netflix, Google), and thus cannot think big, cannot dream.

It would be awesome if people put life skills ahead of marks for their children, and celebrated accumulating them. All my education got me (for the most part) was a foot in the door, but the right system would help our children create doors of their own, wherever they want.

And not waste their growing years solving problems about monkeys, hunters, bullets and pulleys. Or worrying about where to put the covalent bond in an ether molecule.

Book Review: The Return (Animorphs) by Katherine Applegate

Animorphs is awesome to begin with, mediocre in the middle, trash towards the end and awesome again at the end. The Return is absolutely one of those books that are towards the end of the series.

I understand the Applegates have had a lot of the books in the series ghostwritten, so that might explain the decidedly mediocre plot in 'The Return'. Also the books with Ellimist and Krayak or their stooges can be weird to read because the Almighty beings have no rules to contend with. They defy gravity, time, space and even logic. It makes for irritating reading.

The only book one can read in the series and walk away contended and completely mindblown with is 'The Ellimist Chronicles'. Every other book in the series is as risky to read as the Animorphs invading a Yeerk pool.

Book Review: The Animorphs #39: The Hidden by Katherine Applegate

'The Hidden' is one of those Animorphs books that manages to bring back fast paced, high octane action. The Animorphs must protect the morphing cube from the Yeerks and there a couple of very interesting story points where random animals get the power to morph. However, the book is let down by a sloppy ending, all the action ending with a damp squib at the end.

Disappointing.

Book Review: A Midsummer's Equation by Keigo Higashino

From the author who pulled off literary magic in 'Salvation of a Saint' and 'Devotion of Suspect X', this book went automatically on my reading list. I had thought Higashino's standards had lowered with 'The Name of The Game...' but this book was decidedly worse. Higashino is best at slow burn thrillers where you know who committed the crime but games are afoot to evade the law, but he struggles to put together something even half thrilling in 'A Midsummer's Equation'. The story is linear and placid. And flashes of Higashino's brilliance are rare. 

Readable only as a flight-read.

Book Review: Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex von Tunzelmann

Very rarely, do you come across a history book that commands to be read - every day, every hour, every minute. 

Tunzelmann has mined the history of our nation to give us facts hitherto unknown: the eggheadedness of Mountbatten, his rather unconventional marriage to Edwina and Nehru - Nehru the superhero. My favorite character in the book was Nehru - a man with the backbone to take on international powers, with the very Indian ability to get into streetfights with rioters and hooligans (just imagine a Prime Minister in a fistfight with a street hooligan!) and also to charm politicians when he wanted to. I know most people will pick this book up for details on the Nehru/ Edwina affair, but Tunzelmann manages to dig up more dirt on the Indian partition and its key players than any other historian I have ever read: Guha for example, pales in comparison. Perhaps the fact that she is focusing on an event, on a smaller period of time helps her uncover the amount she does. 

It is somewhat ironical, but also typical that it took a foreigner to tell us the truth about everything. I am a little surprised that this book hasn't been banned yet for one frivolous reason or the other. 

'Indian Summer' is essential reading for those who want to understand how our nation and our petulant neighbor were born.

Deals on all books

The following of my books are on deal on Amazon.

‘The Great War of Hind’ at Rs. 29 https://amzn.to/2QZthcM

‘If God Went to B-School’ at Rs. 29 https://amzn.to/2S0pJLK

‘A Year in Faking News’ available for free https://amzn.to/2RZ31Ul

Book Review: The Ellimist Chronicles by K. A. Applegate

 Between my adolescence and adulthood, I lost track of possibly my most favorite book series ever - the Animorphs. Growing up, Applegate just wasn't releasing the books fast enough for me to read them - and it so happened that somewhere around Book #28, my academic studies overwhelmed my ability to keep up.

I chanced back on to Animorphs a month back, expecting to be completely hate or at least, dislike the books a bit. After all, despite the nostalgia, the books were meant for kids. Or so I thought.

'The Ellimist Chronicles' is a cracker of a science fiction book. Forget the "Young Adult", "For kids", etc. tags: the book is good enough to be read standalone by someone who has no clue about the Animorphs series. I have never read an author trying to take a crack at the creation of life itself, and Applegate does it spectacularly with this book.

The only reason I found it a little disconcerting is because I had no clue who the Ellimist was narrating his story to. I later learnt that this is the penultimate book in the series and hence, quite a lot had transpired in the Yeerk/ Andalite/ Human war. And thus, the confusion was warranted. Without that small issue, 'The Ellimist Chronicles' is a splendid timeless science fiction masterpiece for all ages.

Book Review: The Operators by Michael Hastings

I was directed to 'The Operators' from 'War Machine' - the Brad Pitt starred on Netflix which I had really liked (War Machine is based on this book). Mostly, I wanted to understand US' operations in Afghanistan a decade after the 'War on Terror' had been announced.

The book was disappointing. Hastings goes back and forth between two timelines, and tends to use present tense for things that happened in the past far too often for my comfort. Even so, the source material is interesting enough: feuds between Obama, McChrystal and the bureaucracy, the whole elaborate pretense that the war was worthwhile or even, being won, was fascinating.

In case you are looking to catch up on 'The Operators', I would recommend watching the fantastic Brad Pitt in 'War Machine' instead. The writing style was not for me, even though the story Hastings was attempting to narrate was quite intriguing. 

Book Review: Visser (Animorphs) by K. A. Applegate

I used to love Animorphs as a kid. The series was so much richer than the other "young adult" fiction that was peddled to us - more poignant, more 'science' in the fiction. However, as an adult I struggled to finish one of Applegate's books. The plot was just too thin for my grown-up sensibilities.

The reason I bought this special edition is because Applegate's special editions tended to have thicker, more complex plots (or so I recalled from my adolescence). In terms of plot, 'Visser' provides the complete backstory of Visser One (or Marco's mom) set as a trial where she is pitted against the formidable Visser Three. The parts of the book where the two Vissers butt heads are awesome; however, the battle scenes/ parts left something to be desired. A couple of plot devices seemed to provide too easy an out for the story, as well. Again, grown-up sensibilities.

Recommended for series aficionados, but not much anyone else. 

Book Review: Never Give Up

I would have never read this book, if it wasn't free with Prime Reading. It reads like something hurriedly compiled off Wikipedia/ the internet. Far too many grammatical and spelling errors to be a tolerable book. The only reason I managed to finish it is because I found the source material of some of the stories interesting.

Avoidable.

Book Review: One Indian Girl by Chetan Bhagat

A large number of Chetan Bhagat's books are free with Amazon Prime Reading. It is for this reason and this reason alone that I read "One Indian Girl". Also because "All the money in the world" was proving to be a little long winded after starting briskly. (I kept losing track of the Getty offspring in "All the money...").

With One Indian Girl, Chetan writes from a girl's point of view for the first time. I was happy to note Chetan's grammar, ability to spell, punctuate is so much better vs 2 states, which I read for free again. (Please note the trend here - clearly, I believe subliminally that the intrinsic value of a CB book is Rs. 0.) The plot as with every CB book is wafer thin - the story of a random girl's relationships. But CB is trying to deliver a message here, I think. CB wants to be seen as a feminist. CB wants to be a politician eventually, or maybe just taken seriously.

Even so, though CB is CB, his plots are thinner than hair, and his plots are mostly purloined from his working life/ vacations, he does manage to keep you engrossed in the girl's tale: like a bad TV serial you started watching years ago and can't give up, just because you must know what happens in the end. For that and for CB learning better grammar and punctuation, I am willing to give this book 2 out of 5. 

The Great War of Hind - free Audiobook

Free Audiobook

The Great War of Hind (Legend of Ramm #1) is now part of Audible trial. Simply sign up for a free 1 month Audible trial and you can listen to the audiobook version for absolutely free!

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The Great War of Hind - now free with Amazon Prime

The Great War of Hind (Legend of Ramm #1) is now part of Prime Reading. If you are an Amazon Prime member, you can read the ebook for absolutely free!

Click here to read for free now: https://amzn.to/2zrc2LG 

Book Review: Molly's Game by Molly Bloom

I caught Molly's Game on a 14 hour long flight in which I also watched a lot of other good movies I had been saving up for the flight. Of American Made, Get Out, Game Night, Shubh Mangal Savdhan (borderline good) and The Titan (absolute dud Netflix original), Molly's Game stood out as probably the best movie I saw on the flight.

I usually do not buy books I have seen movies of (reverse is almost always true - I will almost always watch the movie rendition of books I have read). I believe mostly in the fact that an author with mere words and ink can not possibly compare with the magic a skilled movie-maker can conjure (Notable exceptions: Munich - based on Vengeance, Anna Karenina). I bought this book largely because it names Tobey Maguire and Ben Affleck, and because I wanted something to read (on the return leg of the long flight).

The book standalone is good enough; however, the movie is rather splendid. Characters like Houston Curtis, bad Brad and the Doug who speaks in riddles are just so much more fleshed out and colorful on screen than they were in the book. A notable exception is Tobey - who the book does more justice to than the movie did.

A decent read just for the incremental scoop on Tobey - but by and large, if you have seen the movie and the splendid Jessica Chastain as Molly on screen, no need to buy the book.

Book Review: Serious Men by Manu Joseph

I picked up 'Serious Men' almost 4 years after 'The Illicit Happiness of Other People'. 'Illicit' was perhaps the book of the year for me in 2013 and 'Serious Men' was purchased in a post 'Illicit' fugue. Reading Joseph is as sublime as watching Tendulkar bat or any of the 2 Ronaldo's play soccer. There isn't a man who was more ordained to be an author than Joseph and 'Serious Men' - his first book - is the reading equivalent of watching Tendulkar bat at 16 or a young Cristiano amaze Old Trafford on a goalless debut; a time when the joy of doing the job overtook the job itself.

Surely, 'Illicit' is a much surer book, funnier and a more tangy plot but 'Serious Men' is a serious masterpiece, darkly comic in parts, poignant in others. The characters are so real, that you could almost touch them in Joseph's pages.

There are a handful of authors whose every book I shall read and pick up (Zaidi, Higashino, Levy/ Scott Clarke, Rutherford) and Joseph is one of them - so poetic that his writing might as well be music.

Unmissable.

Book Review: Redeployment by Phil Klay

Redeployment by Phil Klay is a collection of short stories about US armymen fighting or recovering from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I picked this book up on an Afghan war buying binge and Klay entertained me enough not to regret the purchase. The stories are heartfelt and breezy reads; however, most of them do not really give you a twist/ pang at the end like classic short stories do. Neither is Klay at the level of say a Jhumpa Lahiri to get away with a meandering story that ends without really ending.

Even so, this is an important book for depicting the lives of men caught in a war they did not start. I particularly liked the story about the water treatment plant in Iraq and of a US bureaucrat trying to fix it battling Iraqi culture and Sunni-Shia rivarlries.

Not a must-read, but a can-be-read.