Manoj's Review on Books

Dream Teams are largely built in the space between inertia and destruction. If a bunch of resources in a team are formed with similar characteristics then there could be a good sync between individuals but the similarities in perspectives won’t help in identifying super optimal solutions. Again if the bunch of resources are sorted together with diverse background and characteristics the gain is the difference in perspectives but team synchronization and trust goes for a toss. It’s the cognitive diversity in teams that creates a lot of potential energy but one needs to strike a balance between a friction which is too low or too high.  This is exactly what this terrific book from Shane Snow on Dream Teams talks about. Shane has tried to showcase both success and failure stories (though not in equal measure) to put forward his perspective of what went right or wrong. Personally, I believe this is how a point of view needs to be put forward. I found a few of the stories ...

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Anuk, Burange, Rashmi, Seema, Arvind and myself, all six twenty something characters, decided to do a night trek, in a place called Rajmachi near Lonavala, in the first weekend of March. The idea behind such a decision was probably to go for a night trek in an unfancied and not much known location. Am not completely aware of the brainstorm before the decision was made but i pretty much jumped into action without a hint of the geographies of the location or the extent of trekking that had to be accomplished, only to shockingly realize that no one had much of a hint of what we were about to do. Incredible!!! And we are yet to begin the journey. Rajmachi is basically an abandoned fort on top of a hill and about 20 kms from the Tungarli Lake, which happened to be our starting point. There is nothing great about the path in the dry forest that leads to the fort or the fort, the incredible stuff rest upon the trek itself, no one seem to question the feasibility of walking 40 kms at a sin...

When i was attending the valuation class taken by Mr. Damodaran, he gave a strange but an interesting analogy to pinpoint the misplaced concreteness in identifying flaw or the loopholes in the financial statements, he asked us, how does one treat the itching sensation on his amputated thumb? Now, this question triggered two more questions within me. 1. How can someone possibly feel the itch on a nonexistent thumb? 2. If that really is the case then how do you go about your treatment on something that’s nonexistent? Phantoms in the brain, written by Ramachandran, tries to enlighten us to those questions and a lot more syndromes that we didn’t even know exists. This is a syndrome which is identified as Anosognosia, the inability of your brain to perceive the absence of some or any part of your body. It was common amongst soldiers who lost their limbs in the civil war but could still feel the presence of their lost limbs. We can call them ‘Phantom limbs’ for easy identification...

I had actually been asking this question for more than year now, “Can one be a good person”, so when I came across this book “the difficulty of being good” and flipped across it’s preface, I came to know that the book’s on Mahabharata and it’s relevance in our day to day life. No wonder that I gave it a try. The epic Mahabharata has an interesting claim, it boasts itself to be so extensive and comprehensive that it quotes itself by a phrase saying “What is here is found elsewhere. What is not here is nowhere.” I certainly would love to test the credibility of that phrase but just as I was thinking that, one of the chapters sprung up with the practice of polyandry in India, which is the practice of having more than one husband. I have heard of the practice of polygamy, which is the practice of marrying more than one wife happening in a lot of places in India but I never knew that polyandry was practiced in the stretches of Himalayas. By the way, if you are asking ...

In an era where being in nuclear family is the in-thing, have u ever wondered what life would be like to live in a joint family. Just imagine a household, with members of 3 different generations sharing space, what would erupt is not just the difference in the value system but the difference in the way of life itself. While a letter from a female colleague stating 'with love' prefix before her name maybe just a caring remark for the current generation Software Professional Sridhar, it happens to be an incorrigible stain on the family for his pious Grandfather Sunderesan. While a causal bend to touch the feet is enough for Sridhar to show his respect, a complete 'horizontal-lying-on-the-floor' type traditional obeisance is the minimum requirement to receive the respect for his tradition driven Grandfather Sunderesan. If Sridhar is quick to retort, his Grandfather is quicker in garnering enough support through his intense emotions. In this kind of a scenario, t...