I read this book with a lot of tech background help from ChatGPT. Should I call it irony or a follow-through where IBM wasn’t as successful as rest of the players in the AI race? That – it’s left behind, once again… Whatever said, it is a good, insightful business book. Hard execution, a customer-backed Read more

“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Michael Eisner was a control freak, manipulative, didn’t care about anyone else other than himself, created his own kind of reality distortion field – he considered himself as the heir to Walt Disney’s legacy. He also was the CEO and Chairman for 20 years of Disney, one of Read more

This was going to be 3 stars for me, but for the end – it is 3.5. Got to see the real Bosch at the very end. It is an okaish book – while the plot kept me hooked, the fire was missing. Because it is Ballard and Bosch – we have two cases being Read more

A mysterious woman in a veil, coyly and grudgingly revealing her secrets – withholding more than she gives out. This is how Frank Herbert writes his Dune books or at least the first two that I read. I was forced to read passages again, tried hard in gleaning the meaning from the text – so Read more

Don’t tell them that I haven’t warned you about spoilers! Ineffectual human protagonist and unlikeable characters galore (though the arachnids were great), this book is the best I have read this year so far. Definitely up there with Asimov’s & Herbert’s books – the ideas presented were so amazing that it actually made me giddy. Read more

‘Prithviraj Chauhan’ is by far, the best work of Anuja Chandramouli. Extensively researched, fast-paced, action-packed and full-bodied page turner which marries history and mythology, this helluva book chugs along at the speed of bullet train. Impersonal mythical retelling, no more! Show, not tell, right? While Anuja’s books have always been engaging and well-written, I always Read more

For one, ‘Kartikeya, the Destroyer’s son’ by Anuja Chandramouli is an incredibly engaging book, it took me under two days to finish it. The mystique of the eponymous character played its part in keeping me hooked as well as the fluid writing style that is so characteristic of Anuja. Sometimes she reminds me of C. Read more

Review: 5 Stars In the end, it is all about conditioning. Right and wrong, it has a reference point. Apart from certain universal moral values, all sets of ideologies differentiate and draw a line.  And because it is so deeply enmeshed within the skeleton of the so-called universal moral values, it feels inherently wrong when Read more

Review: 4 stars Discovering a new book is like discovering a new joint to eat, only better. Because in the worst case, suffering from bad writing is better than an upset stomach. So even though desi Chinese sometimes upsets my stomach, I was eager to try out this collection of short stories in ‘The Paper Read more

Review: 5 stars I encountered my Margo Roth Spiegelman when I was in 9th standard. She was not only an image that I had created in my mind – she was also pretty much fictive. Ladies & gentlemen, I was head-over-heels in love with Hermione Granger, and if you had encountered me then, I would Read more

Review: 4 stars Reading ‘The Hunger Games’ made me realize that there are actually two kinds of heroes in any story: Rebels and Survivors. Often, rebels are perceived to be better because they refuse to accept the status quo, have a greater sense of what’s right and wrong, and they just cannot stand the oppressive Read more

Review: 2 stars The funny thing is, triffids most certainly do not have their day in ‘The day of the triffids’ by John Wyndham. They are most certainly afterthoughts in a novel that was meant to be specifically about them. The literal and nearly-complete blindness of humanity and the ways in which they deal with Read more

Review: 5 star The difference between Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke has always been that of the fantastic and the possible. And I must admit that I am mighty partial towards fantastic, though Asimov would be hurt by my assertion regarding his work. Clarke had always skirted closer to reality, whereas Asimov had pushed the Read more

Review: 4 stars Orson Scott Card can truly be called the father of ‘Modern YA literature’. Let’s not be pedantic about the perils of pulpy paperbacks – that stuff sells. And even though you swear on your stars that you can’t stand that trope, you love reading it. The stuff that screams action on every Read more

Review: 4 stars My mind cannot comprehend war. I have of course seen the movies and the documentaries, read the books by all the right authors – yet, fail to comprehend the immensity, brutality & the utter meaninglessness of war. I let myself be mindlessly pumped-up by jingoist fervor over a primetime debate on television, Read more

Review: 3 stars Salman Rushdie is a notorious name-dropper, or I must be simply unaware about the major chunk of literature that he enjoys and sometimes reveres. If this is the popular culture out there, then I must be the ostrich with my head in the ground. Or I can always say that it is Read more

Review: 4 stars Let me tell you from the very outset, Genghis Khan was not a Muslim who perpetrated various acts of violence against the people of India. Furthermore, he even failed to mount a conquest on India as he found the weather to be too hot. Genghis Khan was a Mongol and a shaman Read more

Review: 4 stars 1984 is terrifying, bleak, intricate, detailed and downright depressing,Fahrenheit 451 is lyrical. Before reading this classic by Ray Bradbury, my approach to dystopian novels was something as follows: gingerly open the first page, read few more, shut the book and pick it up after 6 months or so. I hated Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World , Read more

Review: 3 stars ‘The King’s Speech’ tells me that appearances matter, more so – when it is the question of British Monarchy. An inspirational figurehead, the king is supposed to rally the support of his subjects around important issues of the day – for that a skill of oratory is must. And the job of Read more

Review: 5 stars This book is a gold mine. Labor relations, change management, marketing, Govt. relations, cost reduction, & the recent Trump rhetoric – I get to know all about it in this 370 page paperback, which was written way back in 1984. More than that it teaches you about persistence, about having a greed Read more

Sumit Agarwal is prescient. The recent events in the country – be it the ‘Surgical Strike’ against Pakistan or the ‘Demonetization Drive’ finds its way in the novel ‘The Four Patriots’,  way before they actually happened. Even if you don’t take this book as a blueprint for the development of the nation, it is a Read more

‘The island of Doctor Moreau’ reminds me of the robots in the Isaac Asimov novels, and the three laws of robotics. The first one goes something like this, “A robot may not harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.” There is a similar but a more selfish Read more