Manoj's Review on Books

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. ...