Manoj's Review on Books

  Harit Nagpal has been the CEO of Tata Play over the last 13 years and spent four decades of his work experience in B2C segments with companies ranging from Vodafone, Marico, Pepsi and Lakme. He has tried to pick 10 case studies pertaining to B2C segments, created fictional leaders who drove their respective business entities, narrate unique problem statements in each of the case studies and finally an adaptive element that brought in a reliable solution. At the end of each business story there are ten checkpoints that Harit expects every reader to answer with earnestness, mostly in the binary yes or no responses.  Let me touch upon the case studies that were interesting, the first one that captured my attention was the storyline of how a newly recruited CEO of a leading AC manufacturing unit in Malaysia, was initially in shock to know that their entity lagging behind at 4th place after having been pioneers in AC business for over  a decade. The CEO breaks down the probl...

Why is storytelling important? Let me answer the question by picturing a couple of scenes, one is a nobel laureate scientist who calling a long list of statistical data that validates the effectiveness of his solution for problem like Malaria. On the other side, let’s remember Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, of the two the latter captures our imagination, the reason lies in the power of storytelling. The three-pound mass of complex organ that lies within our hard skull relates to stories but plain data falls flat.    Given the importance of stories, Will Storr has tried to provide a broad framework for creating a captivating novel or a film. Beyond plot, character, struggle and victory, what are the factors that captures the attention of a bibliophile or an avid movie fan. One of the factors that Will Storr discussed in depth was to consistently provide only parts of information which would leave the audience guessing, till the very end.   In an experime...

When someone gets hitched to an eccentric herpetologist which essentially means a person who specializes in the study of reptiles and amphibians, it’s hard not be in love with animals and birds. Having devoured a range of articles on wire and other magazines focussed on reptiles, animals and birds for over a decade, it’s natural for Janaki Lenin, a passionate zoophile, to pick their unique traits and present them through a book. Every creature has a story is a collection of 50 articles that elucidates unimaginable traits exhibited by birds, fishes, insects, reptiles, primates and mammals. There isn’t any structure to the book and hence a bibliophile can pick any of the fifty articles in random order and read through them. Each story has it’s own essence and would take anywhere between 10 to 15 minutes to finish a single storyline. I would strongly suggest the readers to check out relevant youtube videos as a follow-up to each respective article which is bound to enhance their underst...

Going through Karan’s career journey, it’s clear that he is someone with an exceptional energy level and always needed a place to expand, a sense of comfort seems to give him restlessness. Given Karan’s insane risk-taking appetite, his story should ideally not trigger a content individual on a pre-defined corporate ladder. With that caveat setup upfront, let me provide an overview of Karan’s freedom manifesto. The book is divided into two parts, the first one deals with a framework on how to position oneself for the entrepreneurship journey. He provides formula for the amount of corpus fund required to sustain a desirable lifestyle, investing rules that provides a broad structure to breakup income towards needs and experience based expense bucket while the rest gets into savings bucket, 1:1:1 daily process of dedicating 3 hours of life to self-improvement focusing on exercise, meditation and reflection and a broad understanding into which business idea provides maximum impact. It’s...

For millennium before the mid 19th century, every great captain lost himself in the middle of sea despite the best of charts and compass, eventually leading to heavy loss of life, commodities and in many cases shipwrecks.  There has been hundreds of shipwrecks causing thousands of men ranging from sailors, civilians and warriors who had lost their life in mid sea not having a clue about their whereabouts. It’s one of the prime reasons why many voyagers landed in completely different geographic landmass, the problem of an unclear longitude. Deep sea or oceans brings with it extreme variances of temperature which caused the lubricating oil within the clocks to thicken or thin down the volume along with expansion or contraction of various components within the clock. It meant that the time shown in clocks became unreliable with differences ranging for a few hours ahead or behind the actual time, mostly not even knowing whether the error in time difference is positive or negative. No...

A curious title indeed and it pays to understand the meaning before getting to know the depth of it. When breath becomes the central focus of one’s existence and the subject is in the act of dying, it’s termed as breath becomes air. When every human takes breath as an undeniably granted component of their life, the same act had become central point of attention for over 22 months ever since Paul was diagnosed of lung cancer, an aspiring neurosurgeon just in his mid-thirties but a career that he has dedicated himself for over decade. Any surgery related to brain tumour is bound to be complex not just due the significance of the organ but more so due the life and death related outcomes. When prognosis becomes a function of probabilities added with uncertain elements in the mix, the exercise is a share of not just medical expertise but moral dilemma as well. Would you rather live with the pain of tumour than accept the radical change in personality post-surgery? Is death a preferrable o...

As I was reading through Morgan’s 'Same as Ever' book, it reminded me of the great tamil philosopher Thiruvalluvar’s 1330 verses that remains true till date having withstood over two millenniums of human civilization and progress. Though Morgan’s score of tiny stories doesn’t cover the depth of human emotions as it does with Thirukural, the fundamental idea remains the same.    There are infinite number of ways that your life could potentially play out while any individual seems to be living just a single version of it. The leading question is what would be true in every imaginable version of your life, the universal truth that transcends beyond luck or chance. Having said that, let’s look at chance event that occurred on 28 th of August 1776, the battle of long island which marks itself as a significant day in the history of America. George Washington’s 10,000 troop army was battered by British through it’s fleet of 400 war ships. All that British army had to do was to s...