Finally – after years of reading Newspaper with a cup of filter coffee in the morning – I am breaking free from the thing called Newspaper.

The disillusionment started with Indian Express becoming more of yet another run of the mill Masala Newspaper. When the world was burning with Wikileaks – IE choose to look the other way.

“Tata Sumo turns turtle on NH-4”
“Mugging on ORR, techie loses mobile,laptop”
“Old Couple Murdered in Jayanagar”

I started feeling that it is a random generator which picks these news. Of course there were these moments of brilliance – when the editorial will go hammer and tongs against the establishment. But it was becoming less and less.

Then Nadia Tapes leak happened. With it Vir Singhvi – whose columns I used to love – was chucked out. Swapan DasGupta left IE long back to write for ToI. Gurumurthy and TJS George’s columns were coming very sporadically..they were getting old. IE could never find anyone to sit at their desks.

Finally I gave up – and switched to ToI for 2 months.

“Should item numbers be done by popular actress” – center page editorial debate.
“Strawberries good for health” – with an accompanying photo revealing all other details.
“Property News” – actually Ads – you can’t guess which is which anyway

And always the opening page – being sold to companies with deep pockets. It is like a coupon book the whole newspaper. There was no sincere intelligent editorial. Swapan Dasgupta’s editorials didn’t have the punch it used to have -felt very much tamed. The leaks, scams, Anna Hazare – all had a passing reference – something that should have been the front page news.

Finally with my disillusionment complete – I gave up.

Now I have filter coffee with a book in hand. It is so much peaceful.

And for the world and scams – I get them on my twitter & facebook feeds – can make my own judgments – I am grown up now.

I picked this book because the cover had Julia Roberts saying – “this is an amazing book and I gifted this to all my girl friends”. Before you start passing a judgement let me just say – I agree. It is not a smart way to pick a book.

But – I did and ended up reading this one. and I recommend it wholeheartedly to both boys and girls.

This lady, Liz 34 years of age, goes through a pretty messy divorce. She is an accomplished writer/journalist living in New York – like one of the New York movies ( wait they did make a movie out of this – with Julia Roberts ). Has an affair that does not go well either.

So she takes off on a vacation for a year – split in 3 parts equally – Italy, India and Indonesia ( Bali actually ).

In Italy she joins a class to learn Italian. And she hunts for great food. I was hungry all the time while I was reading this part of the book – every page will have some dish or the other that she relished to the core. That is all she does – day in and day out and puts a lot of weight.

Then she moves to India – to an ashram near Mumbai. She was to spend 6 weeks and then go around India – but she ends up staying the full 4 months and never leaves this place. There are some hilarious bits here – how she does meditation and how her mind keeps getting in the way. If you are a beginner in meditation you should read this part – you are not alone.

Then something magical happens during her stay. She experiences ecstasy – the divine one. Till date I have only heard of this – but she explains it beautifully. She gets over her messy divorce finally – and is at peace with herself.

Then the story moves to Bali – where she had a deal with a renowned medicine man who had said during one of her earlier visits ( she is a journalist – and keeps travelling to interesting places – and during one of her trips she had met him ) – she can come and live with him to understand things better.

However the medicine man does not remember – but accepts her and she learns interesting things. She finds a place to stay and from here it is like a fiction. She is to find the balance in life in Bali – between the pleasure ( Italy ) and divine stuff ( India ). She gets lot of insights into the medicine man – he has mastered various types of meditation and can visit Heaven and Hell apparently.

It was interesting reading on Bali culture – Bali babies never touch the ground for the first 6 months of their life – as they are still Gods. After 6 months there is a ceremony to convert them to humans. Also they have only 4  names – The firstborn is “Wokalayan” (or Yan, for short), second is “Made,” third is “Nyoman” or Komang (Man or Mang for short), and fourth is “Ketut” (often elided to Tut). [got this from wikipedia] The fifth kid on wards the names are repeated. So if someone tells their name you can easily place them where they are in the family.

The books ends well – she falls in love with a 55 year old divorced Brazilian and ends on a high note. I read that her second part of this book ( which I am not going to read – as 2nd part always suck ) is about this second phase of her relationship.


So that is it – got a nice mix of spiritual and meta physical, 2 interesting cultures ( Italy and Bali ) – all written very fluently and in an entertaining manner – good TP.


and for me – I have moved on to metaphysical stuff – I am conversing with God now for the third time – perhaps will write about it next. 

Yep – thats the one. Took almost 2 months to finish this monster. Recommended reading for geeks, nerds and all the in betweens.

I first read about Neal Stephenson in a Wired article in 2006. Since then have been on the look out for his books. Every year will go to Strands book facility and will ask them about any of his books – they will draw a blank.

Anyway – found this book in JustBooks in February- the wonderful library chain that has been feeding me books for the last 2 years.

This is one big masala book – has some mathematics ( yep – equations, graphs and all that ), computer stuff of late 90s when the book was written ( Finux is the OS one of the main character uses – I do not know why he did not use the word Linux ), has an elaborate VC/lawyer, entrepreneur battle, nerd culture of late 90s – and of course the whole underlying theme – cryptography.

The book starts during World War II and the interesting stories are only here. Alan Turing and his college buddies fight it out ( one of them is a German and goes back to work for Hitler ). Each party will try to break each other’s cryptosystems and once broken they will do lot of stage managed accidents in order to keep the opposite party from knowing that they have broken the code – so they will not change it.

The present and past keep alternating – and the whole story centers around a ton of Gold buried under a man made lake by a Japanese Naval Captain who would have escaped from an air attack – escape from sharks, land on a cannibal island, escape from them, get captured by a rogue Japanese Army who are the ones secretly stashing tons of Gold. The Captain while designing the elaborate tunnel system will also plan his escape route through that without his bosses knowledge.

The location of the Gold is hidden in an encrypted message which will finally be cracked by our hero ( who uses Finux ) and the story will end with them bombing the gold out.

After reading this book I do not feel awkward to encrypt all my stuff with TrueCrypt and Keepassx – someday will blog on my paranoid setup !

I salute thee Neal Stephenson – you are the next Michael Crichton.

Imagine someone holding the above whistle and constantly whistling into one of your ears – day in and day out, month after month. That is Tinnitus for you.

Have been enjoying this since my child hood days – will get loud whenever I have cold or some fluid gets into my inner ear. Couple of days before new year some fluid entered the inner sanctum sanctorum in the middle of the night and all hell broke loose – accompanied by severe pain. I made my first visit to the doctor in 2010 – on Dec 30th – bummer.

You might be wondering – so how does this story end? Well – there is no end. Medical technology is only now figuring out slowly why this whistling happens – it seems there are 20,000 miniscule hair inside our inner ear. They respond to the tiniest of sounds and transmit it to the brain.

For some ( around 30 million Americans – no such statistics for India yet ) – some rogue hair “imagine” that they heard something and keep transmitting to the brain the sound – this is the shrill whistle noise I hear – Tinnitus. There is a famous personality who has this condition – Guy Kawasaki – he had mentioned it in Art of Start.

From my unscientific research – anti depressants are prescribed for Tinnitus – which is depressing to hear ( double pun !! ) . Best solution is to just get used to Tinnitus and enjoy the constant raaga.

If you know anyone in your network having Tinnitus – do connect me to them – would like to know how they cope with this.

1 & 2. Dune and Children of Dune by Frank Hebert

The first part – like all movies – is the best. Truly unputdownable – best science fiction I have ever read. Second part is little tiresome.

3. Flow – Psychology of Optimal Experience. How to find joy in everything you do. This book helped me in my running and car washing! Amazing book – will give a new perspective to how you view little chores to big tasks.

4. Outliers – By Malcolm Gladwell. Reasearch is boring – but reading the interpretation of such research is fun. The figure – 10,000 hours got drilled into my head.

5 & 6. Goal 1 & Goal 2 – By Dr.Eliyahu M.Goldratt. This book is a must read for everyone in any profession. It has got nothing to do with Agile or Lean – it will shake you up and make you think. I have heard multiple times about out-of-the-box thinking – this book has enough examples to trigger the out of box thinking process. Also it gives a whole different view point to dealing with constraints and inefficiencies – it is an opportunity waiting to be exploited.

7. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. I picked this book because cover said Nobel Prize winning author. And what a ride it was – Traditionalist vs Modernism. I think I missed most of the deeper philosophies ingrained in it – but what I grasped it was intriguing. Highly recommend this one.

8. Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg. We live in a an interesting social networking era. This book will be defunct in another year or two ( Ning is already on a downward spiral – and this book glorifies Ning ). With MySpace going down the drain – Facebook is not far off. This book covers the journey of all these startups.

These are the 8 books I read in 2010. Just finished reading a mind blowing book this year already – but hey – to know about it you have to wait for my 2011 Books Roundup !

This post is to brag on a mini milestone achievement – I can now complete the upcoming Whitefield Mid Night Marathon ( only the baby 4.2 Kms )!

Of the last 3 runs I have been consistently covering 4.2 kms plus.

Here are a few steps (woohoo managed to squeeze in a pun ) I took :

1. Shunned the iPod. The ear hurts after a while, the buds keep falling off, the wire keeps coming in the way – and the podcast / songs might get boring and I lose interest in running. So ditched the iPod and I can now run just with my thoughts.

2. Psyche myself on Diabetes. Genetically South Indians are programmed with this disease and shipped into the world. I sit and work 12 plus hours – almost 7 days a week. Office is just on the 1st floor. ( ahemm home is on 3rd floor but I am lazy ). Only way to beat diabetes is to exercise – no other way out.

3. Psyche myself on Personal Victory. This one is from Stephen Covey’s 7 habit book. You should first win personal victories before you can win public victories. This one statement makes me spring up from the bed and keeps me going till I reach the goal I had set – 4.2 Kms.

4. Enjoying the zone / the rhythm. It took a long time before I could find the rhythm. Now when I get over the initial few minutes of heart pounding – I start to glide – it is a beautiful feeling – and I do not notice the minutes that go by.

5. Ignore the knees will give away scare. It will be another ( hopefully ) 2 decades when my knee problem surfaces. I am betting on knee technology to improve – and there will be a magic pill very much like the Taj Mahal pill – which will rebuild the knee !

My next goal is the half marathon ( 21 Kms ) and then a full marathon ( 42 Kms ).

PS : A special thanks to @diduPublish Postknow, @nilakanta who I follow on twitter – their tweets used to make me feel guilty and now their tweets inspire me.

PSS : See Twitter is much more healthier than facebook. All I do in facebooks is view and share youtube links and talk politics. My eyes and head are getting corrupted 🙂