Manoj's Review on Books

  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...