Manoj's Review on Books

The Importance of being Earnest is a farcical comedy play staged during the fag end of 19 th century, it’s set up against the cultural backdrop of London. Apparently, Oscar Wilde has produced three other successful plays which led to another resounding play centered around the fictitious character Earnest. Six key characters drive the entire storyline – Jack Worthing and Algernon who are men in the age of finding a spouse for themselves, Augusta who is probably in her fifties bound with the culture of her era, an attractive women Gwendolen, pretty teenager Cecily and mistress Prism. There are few more characters involved but they play minor role across the scenes. Jack and Algernon misrepresent themselves as Ernest to woe their respective sweethearts. To their delight both the ladies fall in love with their prospective partner assuming them to have been christened Earnest. The situation takes a deadly turn as both the ladies unexpectedly meet each other exposing the fictitious cha...

Concentration camp (1939-45) in Auschwitz which is in the southern part of Poland highlights the devilish nature of mankind. A quick look at the numbers will elucidate the trauma each of the captured civilians, prisoners of war or jews had to undergo. A total of 1.3 million who belonged to the non-German creed were captured, out of which 1.1 million were murdered in the concentration camp. This would give an inmate roughly 1/10 th of a chance to survive the brutal treatment met out to them. Under the influence of concentration camp, which disregarded the value of human life and made each inmate an object of extermination. The only reason a Schutzstaffel guard left a prisoner alive was to extract every ounce of physical resource in each of them. With the given background, every prisoner lost his sense of being an individual and identified himself as a part of the pack, regressing to an animal form of life which can be herded around. In short, the man has retreated himself to a primit...

Cognitive error is a failure to think clearly under various conditions which is widespread amongst learned, intellectual or regular section of people. Rolf Dobelli has elucidated 99 of such scenarios wherein irrational side of human behaviour is exhibited. There isn’t a specific flow to the narrative but the idea is around picking different scenarios wherein we are easily lead to an irrational decision. I have highlighted a bunch of interesting bias Survivorship Bias – People overestimate the chance of success and negate super significant failure rate. Setting out to become movie stars, starting a new firm or path towards national team selection has a significant error in misjudgment on their chance of succeeding. The failure rate of start up is 90% and 10% of them don't even survive a single year in business. External Illusion – Models are signed up for cosmetics ads because they score highly on beauty aspect and didn’t attain the same through cosmetics. However, the viewers...

One of the most engaging books I have read till date, goes to show how much the attention of the audience can be grabbed when there is a clear sense of why. Simon Sinek’s premise of the entire book is to have a consistent long-term purpose towards business initiatives, which is what he has repeatedly been calling out as start with why. The fulcrum of the narrative is to start an engagement with a strong sense of why while the how and what aspect should emerge as a tangible proof of what the organization believes in, which is coined as the golden circle. Samuel Langley, a  professor of Smithsonian  institution, inventor of bolometer, a renowned individual who tasted success for his proof of concept on objects that could fly short distance way back in 1900’s. The US government realized the potential and funded him 50,000 USD which could easily measure up to 50 million USD in current valuation, Langley hired the best talent in the country and got the attention of press as well. P...

The bus picked me up at 11:20 pm at Banashankari bus stop and stopped in a few more places to pick the remaining trekkers. In about an hour, I was surprised that a 50 seater bus was full with youngsters, the broad age range would well be within 18 to 24 years and the enthusiasm was evident. Once the last section of trekkers were picked, the back row group started playing music using their Bluetooth devices and voiced over the songs which were predominantly in Hindi. The songs were sung in loud fashion until the bus stopped for refreshments 2.5 hours latter and the group was truly living up to the back benchers tag. Am 39 years of age as I write this blog, may well be the oldest in the group and it has been a long time since I experienced such high energy amongst a group of people. The trek started at 4 am from Skandagiri base point and I was leading with the guide for a significant portion of the trek. About 20 minutes into the trek, I could sense it was tough and scale of difficulty w...

Oscar Trimboli is the host of Apple podcast Deep listening which covers over 100 episodes with a wide selection of personas focussed on listening attribute. He has created an ambassador community on deep listening and is the author of a couple more books, Deep Listening – Impact beyond words and Breakthroughs: How to Confront Assumptions. The introduction for Oscar makes it clear that he wants to make extensive use of his ears than mouth. We as humans are also biologically structured with a couple of ears but a single mouth giving us indications towards the proportion on how much we should be inclined to listen versus speak. Oscar has interviewed over 2000 participants to break down the components of what gets communicated by the speaker and how does one extract true meaning from it.   He throws in an interesting number towards this process, an average human can think 900 words per minute, hear 400 words per minutes and speak 125 words per minute. It essentially means...

Is a long youthful life possible? Can ageing be arrested or even reversed? Can we truly desire for an immortal life? A few deep questions that can have significant impact on the human population at large if it’s proved to be possible. David Sinclair believes to have found the secret sauce to counter aging and live a long life of vitality. A quick look on David’s qualification will bring in semblance of credibility on the outcome attained through decades of research, he has a Phd in molecular genetics, postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T. and held the position of co-director in Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School. He starts of his book with an extremely bold statement, 'aging is a disease'. It took some time to realize the gravity of the statement since for millenniums of human existence, we are taught to believe aging as a natural progression of life. However, the fundamental belief is set to change if David’s research outputs are proved ...