Meeting Rajdeep Sardesai

Met Rajdeep Sardesai, one of India's most reputed journalists at a "meet the author" session at Crossword, Aundh a few days back. He enthralled the audience with anecdotes from his years as a political commentator and journalist, with the backdrop of his book, 2014 - The Election That Changed India.

I got an autographed copy of his book - and a tiny chit chat, talking about the house he has in Quegdevlim!

What was exciting and heart warming was the huge crowd at Crossword, including all age groups - eagerly lapping up his every word. Thankfully, books have still not gone out of fashion!

Book Review: The Utopian Experiment

Another Covert One novel by Kyle Mills, based on the legacy of Robert Ludlum, the Utopian Experiment interestingly builds upon the same theme as Dan Brown's Inferno - too many people on Earth, and one crazed scientist's desperate and brilliant attempt to make things right, unmindful of the rightfulness of the methods used.

This time, it's the Merge, a technology that allows users to seamless connect the Internet to their own brain, overlaying external video and audio inputs onto their own sensory organs, drawing analytics from LayerCake, a unique search and analyze algorithm that can evaluate a person's good/bad quotient in seconds, drawing upon everything that is known about that person in the ether. While millions of ordnary citizens are getting hooked to the Merge for its multiple entertainment and life-enhancing capabilities, including the ability to induce perfect sleep, the US military is excited about using it in combat, riding on an exclusivity partnership with the creator of Merge, the reclusive and brilliant Christian Dresner.

But when Jon Smith, the man in charge of the military program, and his friend and ex-girlfriend's sister Randi Russel, stumble upon some strange occurences in Afghanistan, their curiosity lands them in a desperate battle to survive, and thwart Dresner's diabolic plans.

And unlike many of the earlier Covert One novels which took very early scientific research and created doomsday scenarios out of them (like the DNA computers), this one hits very close to real!

Book Review: Inferno

This time, our very dear Robert Langdon, after waking up in hospital bed with no memory of what brought him there, has to race against time to thwart the deadly plans of a brilliant, crazed and dead scientist to wipe out a third of the Earth's population, unravelling clues in Dante's Divine Comedy across Florence and Venice, with the help of his new-found friend and accomplice Dr. Sienna Brooks.

A decent read, although compared to the earlier books, the excitement is a level lower.

Dan Brown also seems to have missed a very strong Indian connection here - as reported in the Times of India, one of the two oldest surviving manuscripts of the Divine Comedy is very much in amchi Mumbai in the building of the Asiatic Society Library! Its some 450 richly illustrated pages, dating from the 1350s, are bound and wrapped in red silk. And in the 1930s, Mussolini reportedly offered a million pounds for it!

Book Review: The Oath Of The Vayuputras

In this third and final instalment of the Shiva Trilogy, the focus shifts to the battle between the Good and the Evil, and Shiva's mission to eridicate the Somras, that elixir of life that's served Meluha so wonderfully for centuries, but has now turned evil - the source of poisoning of the country's rivers, the drying up of the Saraswati, and deformities in the Nagas. Shiva, along with the Vasudevs, Nagas and the Brangas, must now fight against the alliance of Meluha, Ayodhya and Magadh, in the ultimate war, which will tear apart Shiva's closest aides, friends and family, as they fight for their country and for their principles.

The book starts off very slow, with dozens of characters, and long winded debates and discussions on Good and Evil, draining the reader. And if you haven't read the first two books, this one will be almost incomprehensible. But, if you are patient, the narration picks up pace with the war, and Amish excels in visualizing the setup and strategies of the battles, presenting some amazing material for the movie to follow soon! From tortoise formations, to the giant fighting elephants, from the nuclear arms to the fantasy-like land of Pariha, Amish manages to weave a fantasy you can recreate for all those long nights when your kid wants you to read him a story!

Amish ends with another long winded piece that you will want to skim through quickly, but ends well with how these battles, the science, the philosophies of these learned men, ended up in our holy books and tales.

A good read, but not something you cannot put down.

Lessons From The Mahabharata

Been reading a fascinating "illustrated retelling" of the Mahabharata, by Devdutt Pattanaik.

The Mahabharat is a compilation of lots of stories by multiple rishis and sages through the centuries, a sort of Wikipedia around the ever-evolving Vedic way of life, although the first version was narrated by Vyas. The more and more you read it, you get a feeling that most of the Mahabharata is a guide on the follies and mistakes of humans, when Vedic laws are misinterpreted or misused. The most striking of this, of course, is Kunti's order to Arjun to share Draupadi among his brothers, but there are many other examples too - tales of extreme and unjust violence, racist attitudes, and scheming and plotting - and unlike popular belief, not just by the Kauravs, but also by the Pandavas. The Gita, as an embedded sermon by Krishna to Arjuna, is almost the soothing balm, the guide on how to live life. It's almost as if the Mahabharat sets the context, explaining to the reader the ills and evils that rule our lives, and then the Gita, at the point at which it is delivered, ensures the lesson hits hard.

As Devdutt puts it,

The Mahabharat is an ancient Hindu epic where,
a daughter is a prize in an Archery contest
a teacher demands half a kingdom as tuition fee
a mother asks his sons to share a wife
a family is divided over inheritance
a king gambles away his kingdom
a queen is forced to serve as a maid
a war is fought where all rules are broken
the victors loe their children
a forest is destroyed for a new city
... (and lots more)
until wisdom prevails

It's fascinating how almost every story points to good people doing bad things. As the Pandavas live their 13 years of exile, they meet gods and sages who teach them the folly of their actions - and through deeds later on, the Pandavas show how they have learnt from their expereinces and become better men.

Another fasctinating aspect of the Mahabharat are the stories of divine intervention and unbelievable acts, but when you think about it, can actually represent truth told as an exaggerated story, pointing to very advanced knowledge of science and techniques, presented in a manner that would be palatable to the not-so-smart common man.

Stories of a king sending his seed to his faraway queen through a parrot, or invoking the gods to give children to his queen, could very well point to knowledge and practice of artificial insemination. Similarly, stories of Kauravas being "incubated" in pots of ghee using pieces of an iron ball that came from their mother, clearly show that these weren't all natural babies! Is it unimaginable that they were incubated in test tubes?

More later...

Book Review: The Krishna Key

If you liked Angels and Demons, do check out The Krishna Key by Ashwin Sanghi. After Amish, here's another Indian author who's done a great job of blending mythology and contemporary, facts and fiction, with simple yet polished writing that will immediately appeal to Indian as well as Western readers. 

After Saini, a history professor, and his PhD student Priya, are falsely implicated and arrested for the murder of another researcher and Saini's friend, they find themselves in the throes of an adrenalin pumping race to decipher the mystery of the Krishna Key, while staying away from the clutches of the law, and the gleaming steel blades of an assassin.

Ashwin uses a very interesting track - Krishna's life in his own words - running parallel to the main story set in contemporary India, to add richness and a sense of mystique to the narrative. Extensively borrowing from recent history, geography, modern science, astronomy, metallurgy, mathematics, the Vedas, Greek philosophers, the Mahabharat, half-truths and conspiracy theories, Ashwin weaves a fascinating web of intrigue, where the line between truth and fiction is very, very blurred! Read the book with google.com open on a laptop close by; you will find it fascinating to go beyond the lines - and see how sometimes, truth is really stranger than fiction!

One thing these books and authors have awakened in me - a deep sense of intrigue and curiosity about the Vedas, The Upanishad's and the depth of ancient Hindu wisdom. History was never so exciting!

Book Review: Freedom

Daniel Suarez's Freedom picks off where his first book, Daemon, left off.

The Daemon has now taken over much of the world's networks plunging governments, companies and the economy in chaos. Gangs rule the streets while Loki's Razorbacks and AutoM8s unleash terror on the non-darknet world. But authorities are trying to fight back too, coordinating all their power in their fight against the Daemon.

But as the darknet communities find their real heroes, and start building pockets of resilient, self-sufficient communities fighting against the world's powerful corporations, and the authorities' murky connections to the private corporates and militaries become more and more suspect, one wonders which is the better side, after all.

Freedom is an interesting book, but fails to create the magic of the Daemon - and after some time, it does become repetitive and overbearing.

Book Review: Daemon

Daemon is an amazing techno-crime thriller by Daniel Suarez, himself an IT consultant, that packs cutting edge gaming and networking with superb real world action to leave the reader breathless and hungry for more.

After legendary games developer Matthew A. Sobol dies of cancer, his brainchild, the Daemon, unleashes a war-by-proxy on the world, harnessing the collective power of millions of gamers playing his massively multi-user online game, to recruit his foot soldiers, and infiltrate thousands of corporate networks.

Detective Peter Sebeck is called in to investigate the death of two programmers working for the game developer CyberStorm Entertainment. When initial investigations into the murders-by-Internet point to Sobol, the FBI sends in a team to search his mansion. But Sobol's daemon unleashes a wave of terror on the team, killing all but one, using a deadly unmanned Hummer, and cutting edge weaponry the FBI has no idea how to control.

As government and security agencies flounder, the daemon takes over thousands of companies and provides financial and computing resources for creating AutoM8s (computer controlled driverless cars), Razorbacks (sword-wielding robotic riderless motorcycles, specifically designed as weapons) and other devices, terrorizing the world.

How do you catch and bring to justice a criminal who is already dead?

The Hummer scene is so beautifully written, you can visualize it in such vivid detail! The way the daemon executes its recruitment process, the description of the game play, both in the MMOG and in real life, is spot on, and leaves you hungry for more.

Daemon is a must read for fans of crime thrillers, and will be enjoyed and truly appreciated by IT-savvy readers, for it's clarity and authenticity when dealing with bits and bytes. An excellent subject for a movie, with potential of some truly amazing acion sequences that will thrill for years to come.

Book Review: The Secret Of The Nagas

The Secret of the Nagas is the second book of the Shiva trilogy by Amish. Taking off right from where the first book ended, Shiva embarks on a journey through India in search of evil, in search of the Nagas. Secrets keep tumbling out, as Shiva and Sati learn that her first child is still alive, the Naga he has been hunting all this while, as well as her twin sister, the Queen of the Nagas! His search for truth ultimately leads him to the Naga capital of Panchavati, where he comes face to face with the Secret of the Nagas.

TSOTN loses the novelty of the first book, has too many characters, and to some degree, the repetitiveness gets to you. The romance and marriage of Shiva and Sati now well understood and accepted, the focus shifting to the amorous designs of Anandmayi on the Meluhan General Parvateshwar, resigned to a life of celibacy. Shiva's travels and adventures make for a fast paced read in most parts, but with the novelty gone, and the almost-pedestrian language lending a feel of amateurity, you might be tempted to put down the book once in a while. Amish does get you smiling about some of the imaginations and explanations - most strikingly the tall temple spires "transmitting" the voices of the Vasudevas :)

TSOTN brings Shiva closer to the riddle of good and evil, the balance between the opposing forces, and the understanding that different is not necessarily evil. It also exposes his weaknesses, his loss of control, his battle to retain his "siddhi" in the face of personal tragedy and emotions.

The first was better, but the second is a worthy sequel!

Book Review: The Janus Reprisal

When Col Jon Smith of the USAMRIID is rudely awakened in his hotel room at The Hague by the blazing guns of terrorists while at a WHO conference on infectious diseases, he realizes there is a lot more at stake than just his life. Teaming up with his friend and ex MI6 agent Peter Howell, and CIA agent Randi Russel, sister of his dead fiance Sophie, Smith races against time to defeat a devilish plan by just-escaped-from-jail Pakistani terrorist Oman Dattar to attack NYC with a mutated H1N5 virus on the back of electrically-transmitted bacteria through the subway system. And while he is at it, he also needs to protect and save the new love of his life, a determined investment banker Rebecca Nolan, who has had the audacity of stealing Dattar's millions while he rotted in jail, and is now after her.

In the true tradition of Robert Ludlum and Covert-One, Jamie Freveletti takes cutting edge scientific progress and adds a liberal dose of fiction to it, concocting a crime thriller that is worthy of a read. However, unlike the master himself, Jamie's lack of field experience shows, and the amateurish descriptions of software and Internet banking, hacking, and tracking lend a shallowness to the book.

Book Review: The Immortals Of Meluha

It is 1900 BC. In the land starting with heavenly Kashmir, a land we modern people "mistakenly" call the Indus Valley, a land called Meluha. It is a perfect empire created more than a thousand years earlier by the great emperor Lord Ram. But all is not well. Meluha and its proud Suryavanshi rulers are fighting on various fronts - the drying up of its primary river Saraswati, terrorist attacks from the Chandravanshis and the Nagas. But when a tribal leader from the shores of Lake Manasarovar, Shiva, appears, with a throat that's turned blue, the Suryavanshis see hope in an ancient legend - the legend of Neelkanth. Is this Shiva really that saviour, and will he be able to save them from disaster?

The book is a fast paced read, written in an easy-going flowing manner. The ancient and the revered mixes nicely and effortlessly with modern concepts, and makes you smile. Shiva's portrayal as a strong and mighty fighter at times conflicts with his easy banter and almost juvenile interactions with his friend, but in some sense, that's partly where the fun is. Descriptions of government, registration desk, soap, toilets, and yes, the "maika", lend an interesting angle to the modern-meets-ancient thread throughout the book.

Shiva's love affair with Sati, also known as Parvati, their furtive flirting against the law of the land, is also very interestingly presented!

Overall, a good start to the trilogy, one of the few English novels written by Indian authors that I have enjoyed reading!

Book Review: The Janson Command

After a disappointing last Bourne installment, The Janson Command came as a welcome helping of action and excitement in true Ludlum style. Written by Paul Garrison, TJC follows a style very true to the master himself, with a lot of globe trotting, high stakes espionage, dictators, assassins, the works.Janson and his new partner, the sharpshooter Jessica Kincaid, accept the job of rescuing a doctor from an African rebel group, kidnapped from an American oil exploration ship. What starts off as a relatively simple get in get out mission, soon takes them into the heart of an African revolt, and the take over of the country from the dictator by the rebel group. A Sea Harrier on the scene is shocking enough, but when they are almost obliterated by a Reaper UAV, equipment that is known to be operated only by the US government, they realize the stakes are much higher.

Book Review: The Bourne Imperative

The tenth novel in the Bourne series, and the seventh to be written by Eric Van Lustbader, The Bourne Imperative will be a disappointment for fans of Robert Ludlum and Jason Bourne. While Lustbader did a pretty good job carrying on the Bourne franchise for a long time, much longer than Ludlum himself did, this is a bummer.

Too many characters and sub-plots, with Bourne relegated to being just one of the many characters floundering around in the maze, unnecessary erotica, and a story that just seems to go nowhere, the book simply refuses to grab your attention. Unlike the high ocatane action Jason is known for, across exotic countries and locations, The Imperative evokes none of that imagery.

For someone who cannot stop devouring a Ludlum novel, the Imperative has taken almost a month of painstaking reading, a couple dozen pages at a time, to get through...

Disappointing.

Book Review: Think India

Think India by Vinay Rai is a must read for three categories of people: young Indians who are proud of our country and wanna know more about the amazing journery of the last decade and the wonderful future ahead, old or stubborn Indians who still live in the 70s and 80s and fail to realise how we have changed, and everyone else who doesn't care about this country, but should!

A very breezy read, Think India is a wonderful summary of the history, culture, people and the economic miracle called India. With more than a billion people, a free press and judiciary, a strong and focussed army, and very deeply-rooted democratic values and respect for diversity, India is poised to dominate the world stage. This book takes you behind the known and the obvious, with facts and figures that will astound and amaze you.

Check it out.

Book Review: Super Freakonomics

If you liked the earlier Freakonomics, you will love this one. The authors come back with a bang, with a book sequel that's even more exciting, and so much more relevant in today's world.

Crammed with interesting examples, very insightful analyses and some thought-provoking questions, the book will keep you engrossed as it tackles issues like prostitution and global warming, and why we need to look at simple answers to some tough questions facing us today.

And, of course, it's all economics... as simple as common sense. Written as it is in simple every day language, it's hard not to get the point!

Book Review: What's Next?

What's Next is a collection of essays by some of the world's best young scientists and thinkers today, addressing issues ranging from global warming, to viruses to the way our brains learn and think. When I bought the book though, I expected a lot more focus on technology and science - nanotechnology, for example. Disappointingly for me, most of the focus is on the mind, the brain, morals, ideas, thinking and imagination. Not exactly exciting...

Book Review: Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Book 2 of the Hitchhiker series, and the fun continues. After dinner at the Restaurant, a few minutes before the Universe ends in a grand spectacle, our friends steal a "black hole" limousine ship, manage to escape just in time before the ship crashes into the surface of a sun, and get teleported back in time to another ship destined for a soft crash landing on a planet, along with its "cargo" of a few million dumb Golgafrinchans... and guess what that planet turns out to be? You guessed it right, our very own planet Earth, two million years before it got demolished by the Vogans! :)

Now you know where your ancestors came from: not the monkeys, but the Golgafrinchans!

Book Review: Hitckhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams was recommended to me by someone who knew I had liked Haddon's Curious Case of the Dog. Both excel in making absolute sense of nonsense, and if you keep an open mind, can be absolutely thrilling reading.

The Earth is destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a super inter-galactic expressway, but two humans and two mice escape destruction, by hitching a ride on the Infinite Possibility Hypership Heart of Gold. Their inter galactic travels finally brings them to the custom planet-producing Magrathea, where they discover the Earth's secret - it's a super computer custom built by Magrathea, sponsored by the mice, to find the answer to the Ultimate Question. And having been destroyed by the Vogons just 5 mins away from producing the answer after ten million years of calculations, the exercise needs to be redone all over again - right from producing Earth Mark 2.

And as the Heart of Gold moves on to enable it's occupants grab a bite at the Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe, you can't help but look out for the sequel.

Book Review: The Satyam Saga

The Satyam Saga is a compilation of articles by various writers from Business Standard, providing an in-depth analysis and low down on the biggest scandal to hit the global industry since Enron and Madoff.

Written as a very simple, easy-to-understand narrative, the book provides fascinating insights into the persona of Ramalinga Raju, his public image as a philantropist (he was responsible for EMRI, the medical emergency response service that has saved thousands of lives in half a dozen states in India - for free) and a visionary leader at Satyam, a company he created and nurtured as one of India's top 5 IT giants, in stark contrast to the crook he eventually turned out to be.

It also gives a good understanding of how our regulatory bodies and executive boards work, what can be done better, and how the Govt of India played a stellar role in ensuring Satyam did not go down, protecting its customers, employees and share holders from meeting a similar fate as Enron, Worldcom and Parmalat.

Another interesting article is on EMRI, Raju's pet project which he personally funded and helped grow into one of India's showpiece public-private enterprises through his persuasive powers and contacts. A few months later, Satyam and Cisco announced a joint venture to take emergency medical response software to the world. Was EMRI just a pilot aimed at creating and capturing new markets? Hard to tell, but with Raju, everything's possible! (After the Satyam fiasco, GVK has taken over EMRI)

For those who liked this book, I would also highly recommend "The Smartest Guys in the Room", by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, based on the Enron saga. While Satyam was largely about fudging accounts and showing non-existent bank deposits, the scale, the variety and the reach of the Enron scandal was simply mind-boggling. That's a book you will not be able to put down.

Book Review: Shopportunity

Shoppourtunity by Kate Newlin promises to teach you how to be a retail revolutionary, how to get the lowdowns on markdown, and reginite the "thrill of the hunt" when you shop.

I love these kind of books because of the profusion of real life examples that give a peek into how the world works. Another exciting book of the genre is The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford.

Unfortunately, where Shoppurtunity fails to excite is in its drab treatment of the subject. Yes, there are examples, but the book takes a preaching style to help you "learn how to love and look forward to your shopping" through steps and rules of Anticipation, Pursuit and Prominence, making each shopping experience like that of buying your wedding dress.

This book was supposedly on the Reading List of HBR 2006, but I would give it a pass.