Manoj's Review on Books

To start with, am quiet puzzled by the title of the book “Imagining India” since the book is more about India’s history from 1800’s to early 2000’s than about India’s future and such being the case, I cant figure out what Mr. Nilekani had actually imagined. Imagining India is basically a history book that explains the impact of British rule on Indians and the policies made by the Indian politicians post-independence. The book rear views the reader with a lot of interesting events and facts that tracks us back from the past and provides a gist of why we are here today. Nilekani tries to reason out why India took more than 4 decades post-independence to flourish as a booming economy and a lot of details provided are in fact a must know for every Indian citizen. But having said that the book fails to picturize or imagines (as claimed by the title) India in the near or the far future and there has been hardly any interesting ideas for the new century that was discussed i...

I don’t smoke but my friend Vikas is quiet a bit of an addict to smoking. Well, that’s what I thought about his smoking habit. So I asked him if he could by any chance control his intentions to smoke and thought that an obvious or an honest reply would be a ‘not really’ or just a plain ‘no’ but instead he said a ‘yes’. Surprised by his matter-of-fact like gesticulation in his ‘yes’, I simply asked him how he controls himself and his reply was quiet a stunner to me. By the way, Vikas on any given day smokes 5 to 6 cigarettes a day but on the day he wants to control himself he smokes only half of them by sharing the cigarette with his colleague. Looks like a simple way to half your cigarette consumption but please don’t jump into any conclusion so fast, our Vikas actually claims that he zeros his smoking intake that way. Now this is how he goes about his trick, on the day he wants to control his smoking habit, he calls one of his colleagues for a puff in the morning before starting their...

Countless number of times I ve wondered how a quack religious saints puts an act publicly and still ppl believe him to be the incarnation of God himself, how a politician wears a mask so very openly and still ppl believe him as a true leader towards their destiny and how even after scores and scores of ignominious scandals being exposed about their own leader, do these subordinate and subservient partisans still render their relentless support to him. Little do we know that it’s the Maculinea spirit on act, the force against truth and the most unfathomable segment in the design of nature. A butterfly of European aborigine christened as Maculinea Rebeli, in its initial phase of life called the pupa stage, which is an inactive stage of development, intermediate between larva and adulthood, produces the exact scent and mimics a similar sound that is produced by a Queen Ant to cheat an entry into the ant’s nest and the ants society at large. The worker ants treat this pupa stage caterpil...