Manoj's Review on Books

Ravikant’s journey has been remarkable to say the least, from a humble background of having spent his childhood in a lower middle class family run by a single parent, he has transcended himself to a phenomenal venture capitalist. The fact that he has invested in over 200 early stage companies including the likes of Uber, Twitter, Postmates to name a few and amongst them, 10 have grown out to be unicorn companies, this highlights the quality of his foresight combined with enormous risk taking appetite. The Almanack of Ravikant focusses on his tenets that laid the foundation for his phenomenal success, I have highlighted the ones that resonated with me. *Love for reading books – This must be driven to a point wherein it becomes an obsession. Many super successful entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have known to spend 2 to 3 hours everyday on reading books. The number of books read within a year or month shouldn’t be a vanity metric but how much we derive value out of th...

It’s always interesting to learn about the city in which we grew up and hence there is no surprise in picking up a book that traces Chennai’s history especially when the same is authored by historian V. Sriram. Let’s first focus on tracing the roots of how Chennai got it’s name. Apparently, Chennai short form of Chennaipattinam points to Damarla Chennappa Naicker who ruled over Kalahasti and adjoining areas in the late 16 th century (a sketch of him is given below). Ayyappa Naicker who was the son of Chennappa Naicker gave permission to Francis Day for an English settlement back in August 1639, the rest as they say is history. But why did the British start calling it as Madras isn’t very clear. One legend points to a chief of fishermen community named Madarasa who was instrumental in parting areas of his community for George Fort and another points to a rich Portuguese women named Madeira who lived near San thome. However, there is no clear evidence for both these stories. The f...

Vaclav asks an interesting question, can humanity realize all it’s aspirations within the safe boundaries of our biosphere? He attempts to determine the answer covering a range of human actions, right from farming practices, mode of travel, economic strata of different regions and also touching upon discoveries along the way. The broad intent of the book is to give indications on how the world is progressing towards net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Though Vaclav states quite a few times that he doesn’t prefer being optimist or pessimist, his indications were clearly pointed towards a global arena not even getting close to the 2050 target. There are definitely abundant reasons to justify his indications and the following pointers throw some light. *Even till the fag end of 19 th century, 90% of all mechanical energy was extracted through animate power, in simple terms it refers to physical effort of animals and humans aligned towards the output required for existential needs. Ina...

The first thing that strikes when someone picks up this book is the question, what’s the connect with a technocrat billionaire and climate change? Isn’t this supposed to be the topic of some nerd scientist who would potentially display abstract mathematical models to elucidate the impact of climate change? Well, this point of view drastically changes when we realize the catastrophe of what just 1 degree Celsius (33.8F) increase in temperatures can do at a global scale. Let me throw some light on an impending apocalypse like scenario, northern ice caps could melt down submerging coastal cities, hurricane, heat waves, floods, droughts and a range of other unforeseen disasters that can regress human life by centuries. This can result in unprecedented economic depressions, massive levels of immigration, dearth of energy along with food supply and the worst of all a potential world war. Before I go any further, let’s understand that climate change is a critical aspect every human should b...

Having picked up this book after knowing that Sheryl Sandberg was a COO of Facebook, I was expecting a lot of references from her career experience of having worked in a leadership role. However, the entire book is focused on post trauma growth and the factors that lead to a positive change despite a major setback. The narrative begins with Sheryl finding her husband Dave lying dead over a treadmill back in 2015, she is shell shocked on the hard event and goes about describing the impact of her deepest trench in life. She refers to 3P’s - Personalization, Pervasiveness and Permanence as a core emotional pattern exhibited by individuals post a trauma. Let me throw some light on each of them, Personalization – it’s feeling of guilt that the individual is fully responsible for the trauma, Pervasiveness – the individual feels that the negativity will spread across or impact all areas of life and Permanence – it’s a belief that the trauma will have a life long negative impact. A high pe...

  The intent of the title ‘Elephant Paradigm’ is to convey the idea that India possesses immense strength but can only move in a slow pace, comparing with the attributes of a Chinese Tiger, our nation is unlikely to run at fast pace to reach economic superiority. Being the only nation wherein democracy preceded capitalism, we lost over 4 decades being immersed in socialistic policies. GD points out that its clear that communism or socialism is now an established failure model and capitalism with all it’s flaws is the only one that improves the quality of life while pulling millions out of poverty. Some of the events are interesting to note, like in 1993, the seventy third amendment led to local elections being held for the first time across all Indian villages and municipalities. This resulted in three million legislators being elected out of which close to 1 million were women. Such a massive local democratic exercise is a record on a global front and it was believed that a lot ...

The premise of the entire narrative by Gurcharan Das is explicit in the title of his book – ‘India grows at night’. He is referring to India’s growth story despite the lack of a strong state. The private institutions have found a way to explosive growth ever since India’s liberalization in 1991, a policy change which can be attributed to lack of options rather than a conscious or deliberate choice. Broadly, GD covers India’s story from Independence till about two decades post liberalization. This means touching upon Nehru’s socialist policies, Indira Gandhi’s insistence on building a command based economy to the two decades of post liberal India which is marked by crony capitalism and corruption. I was wondering what would have been GD’s stand had he chosen to narrate India’s story in 2022 which also marks 8 years of Modi’s central governance.   The economic success in India has taken it’s own share of time but the most amazing aspect that goes unrecognized is India’s democrati...

Almost everyone of us choose to be ignorant of the biggest truth of our lives – death. It is a fact that we act in ways that suggest as though death is a far fetched reality until we are drawn upon the day which brings us to it within touching distance. Morrie is a professor who has taken a special liking towards one of his students named ‘Mitch’. Apparently, Morrie has also left a deep impression in Mitch’s mind to such an extent that when he happens to catch a glimpse of Morrie in one of the TV show two decades later, Mitch makes up his mind to meet Morrie. Little did he know that for the next 14 weeks he would be travelling from Detroit to Massachusetts every Tuesday to meet his professor Morrie who is one his final voyage. At the age of 78, Morrie had been diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) which is a rare form of neurodegenerative disease, which in simple terms mean that the body will degenerate to a point of being a vegetative state leading to death. The time ...

My funda of life is not meant to be a gyaan rather an expression of how I learnt to deal with life. I would suggest to quickly read all the points once and then dwell over each point, am sure you will find depth in each of them.  Listing out: 1. Never complain. You don't have that privilege. Look at ways to overcome the hurdles.  2. If you are high on energy then you are living. Life is meant to be lived with full enthusiasm.  3. Keep expanding your circle of friends or acquaintance. Never choose to be confined in a small circle.  4. Consciously choose the hard path. It can be as low key as taking stairs instead of lift. It brings a shift in mindset.  5. Never settle in a comfort zone. Life is meant to live out of it.  6. Choose a healthy lifestyle and aim for supreme fitness.  7. It's alright to fail or be humiliated or be bad in something. Don't live by societies standard of success or failure. Choose to live on your own terms.  8. You are bound...

  Bachelors in electrical engineering, a decent job in HP and life in a vibrant metropolitan city like Pune, these are sufficient enticing factors for any young adult to pick the well-defined regular path of     However, at the age of 23 Gaur Gopal Das had a different inner calling and choose to become a monk. Since then he has practiced celibacy and over the last 2.5 decades travelled across the globe sharing his wisdom to professionals in Google, Salesforce, EY, CII and UK Parliament to name a few. The sheer length and breadth of his travel is enough to provide a solid testimony on the value of his discourse.   Coming to the book, the narrative is woven around a married couple who are having an extraordinary life of wealth and progress which indicates happiness on the surface but deep within are struggling to stay together. How did a pure love affair that gravitated towards marriage and wealth have so much of shallowness deep within? Can fulfillment be acquired...

  Once I had finished reading this book, one aspect was clear which points to a misleading title of the book. It’s a biography of Hans Rosling and his experience in identifying causes of epidemic in a few African countries, I believe that a better title could have been given. Hans Rosling is a medical practitioner who chose to serve on his own will during the early 80's in Mozambique, a downtrodden poverty stuck African country. The challenges are daunting ranging from uneducated nurses, dearth of qualified doctors, lack of hospitals, minimum or no allocation of funds and on top of all an epidemic that threatened his presence in the African nation. Given the size of challenge and a never-ending queue of patients, Hans understood that the best approach has to be minimal treatment for all rather than the best possible one for a few, considering the time and resource constraints, we have to agree that he was right. He underwent immense moral dilemmas when treating his patients and...

  Am reminded of my master’s degree in finance that I had pursed back in 2009-10, one of the key problems that we had always tried to solve was the quantifiable impact of a bunch of variables on the price of a stock. Irrespective of the number of variables that were infused into an equation, there was always an element ‘X’ which was basically an unknown variable that also contributes to the price movement. Judea Pearl uses the term confounder instead of ‘X’ but the fundamental point remains the same. In a cause-effect equation, we have not come to a position wherein the exact cause of effect can be fully explained or pointed to a definite cause. However, with a large sample in place we can state with a certain degree of confidence that can pinpoint the reasons of occurrences. I was surprised to note that even smoking – cancer kind of cause-effect equations has taken three to four decades of debate before arriving at a concrete conclusion. The reason drives down to the fact that...

For over 10 years ever since finishing graduation back in 2006, I did not have a stable job nor a decent opportunity to prove myself. A lot of aspiring talent won’t be able to handle one bad manager. However, I had to go through three of them and importantly sustain the phase beyond their cusp. For a lot of people getting the right opportunity was a challenge. In my case getting an opportunity itself was a challenge, the initial few years after graduation fizzled out without any noteworthy job roles. Since my career was not even getting a kickstart, I had opted to do my masters in finance in not so recognized institution in Mumbai. Phase 1 Post completion of my masters, I was already in my mid 20’s, I was offered the role of Business Analyst and worked under a boss who was from IIM Bangalore. Clearly, he was not impressed with me but I was more than willing to put in the required level of hard work and scale up. In just about 7 or 8 months in the job, he had ripped me apart in em...

When I ask how many companies over a period of 10 years hit a consistent revenue growth of 10% and ROCE of 15% amongst 5000 listed Indian companies. What will be your answer? I was awestruck to know the right answer to be only 7, here is the list: *Asian Paints *Berger Paints *Marico Industries *Page Industries *Axis Bank *HDFC Bank *Astral Poly Clearly, simple attributes are not easy to sustain over a really long period of time and this is a striking example. Saurabh tries to identify the pillars behind the success of all these 7 companies with wide spread parameters like consistency of management / board, importance of high quality talent, reliance on IT as an enabler for faster growth along with efficiency, capital allocation, discipline to stick with their core business line, advertisements, relationship with dealers / suppliers, deepening competitive moats and innovation.   Of all the case studies, Asian Paints was highly impressive. It’s a firm that bega...

  In the course of our evolution from being microbes, to amoebae, chimpanzee and finally Homo Sapiens, is it really our last station?  Yuval tries to trace the evolution of mankind and projects what’s the likely course of direction that humans would eventually take. He also tries to distinguish humans from animals from a varied standpoints to figure out what really made the difference. In terms of pure individual ability most of the dangerous animals or snakes would beat us down to death in no time. However, in terms of our collective ability, the animals just don’t stand a chance. Let’s first assess the similarities of human and animals from a couple of perspectives which is the objective and subjective reality that are inherent in both. Let me throw some light on the above-mentioned factors, objective reality is the same for all species like gravity, wind, fire, water and similar entities. But animals also experience subjective realities like anger, pain, lust and love. ...

My journey of converting wet waste to manure started way back in April 2018 and since then I have simply converted all the wet waste generated out of my kitchen into manure. I stay in an apartment in Bangalore and I have had absolutely no problem. Moreover, it’s important that all of us shift to an ecofriendly way of life. From my side I can do a lot more but this is a small step in that direction. The method to convert kitchen waste to manure is given below step by step.  Step 1: Take a bucket like the one shown below and drill maximum number of holes. The ones in the bottom of the compost bucket is crucial since that’s what drains the black liquid that comes out as a breakdown process Step 2: Place the compost bucket in an elevated position like how its shown in the picture. It makes draining a lot easier in comparison to placing it directly on the ground. Step 3: Get a dry leaves and cover the inside bottom of the bucket. A small layer of dry leaves will be suffi...