Manoj's Review on Books

A tightwad is someone, largely gender neutral, who refrains from spending on essential products or services wherein he or she should have while a spendthrifts opens up their purse on unnecessary items pushing themselves well beyond what was needed. In short, tightwads experience pain in spending while spendthrift are carefree to a point of even going bankrupt. The expenses in consideration includes the entire spectrum ranging from food, clothes, housing, education and entertainment as well. As per research, the combination of tightwad and spendthrift forms 40% of the spending diaspora while the remaining 60% fall in an unconflicted zone of being at a relative balance in their expense factor.  For a start, such an analysis is extremely hard to conduct since a meaningful conclusion can only be unearthed after considering a wide sample covering different geographies and observed over a long longitude dimension cutting across decades. Scott's reasoning is based out of secondary researc...

Atman in Hinduism is the universal, eternal self, the individual soul, that resides within the essential self. The self is the witness, or observer, of an individual's actions and deeds. The Upanishad describes three types of Self (atman): the Bahya-atma or external self (body), the Antar-atma or inner self (individual soul) and the Param-atma or highest self (the Brahman). In essence, Jiva-atman is eternal but is imprisoned in an earthly body at birth.  Every life undergoes a continuous cycle of birth and death while the idea of salvation, which is a release from the cycle of birth happens to be a mirage to many. Hermann Hesse narrates the learnings, path and fall of events when two highly illustrious characters meet at a junction in their lifetimes, one of them is Gowthama Buddha who is regarded as the only soul to have attained moksha while the other one is a fictional character named Siddhartha.   Siddhartha, a handsome and nimble young boy who exhibited high degree i...