Book Review: The Man who Broke into Auschwitz by Denis Avey

A touching tale

From the onset, the memoir looks like a grand adventure which is ironically what the author, once a British soldier set out to do. He had, in his words, “no sense of allegiance to the queen” but had “in a spirit of adventure” enrolled into the army. Much as his father, who had no obligation to do so in his age, drafted himself with an intention to look after his son. His memories of Auschwitz which is what the second half of the book is mostly about, is as vivid as a finely cast glass. His extraordinary foray across the length and breadth of Africa and Europe is sprinkled with generous anecdotes and recounting. At times, his observations, while stark and pedestrian seems apt for the life he is living. And at times, the simplicity in thoughts and idealism brings to fore the innocence of the man living in times as harsh as the holocaust. To hear him describe the camp III, is listening to horrors of the war from a third person narrative as he sees the Jews recklessly led towards death. Macht frei, german for work sets you free is brought out in all of its ironies and the subsequent attempts at finding evidence of the same is again, ironic. He lives through to tell the tale of his experience but what he goes through after having scaled the landscapes of Europe and in the safe precincts of the Great Britain is heart wrenching. Sometimes, more than the atrocities at the concentration camps. It would be interesting to listen to Ernie, now that we have the outsiders perspective. Coming on to the title, atrocious and unbelievable as it sounds, the author puts himself in the concentration camp of his free will in order to understand really what went on inside. His observations of the thousands of the “poor fellars” inside the camps, his brief conversations with the inmates is not sufficient to satisfy the curiosity. He, through his words, makes us believe that adventure was what he had always wanted his life to be, and in doing so he touched upon the basic human aspect of curiosity, empathy. All came together in his multiple attempts to scale the walls of the concentration camp and see for himself the decay and the hardships that went on inside. The times when humanity lost its meaning in entirety. It seems heroic and a striking parallel to Forest Gump can be drawn. Only, it concentrated mostly on the war and the holocaust. Sceptics abound as to the accuracy of his memories, who having lived through 60 years after the ordeal could recount each moment as if it happened only yesterday. Only when it comes to the later part of his life in London that his memory seems to give way. While that may seem to be proof of his fickle memory, and makes one doubt as to the authenticity of his story, one also feels somewhere that its often the sad times that one remembers vividly in his lifetime. The narrative sometimes narrows to the clichés, and the observations often deviate to the grandiose. Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. In effect, the prison could bound him physically but could not bound his mind to wander. Cigarettes, the instrument one often hears about when one listens to the World War II anecdotes, is also brought out as an important protagonist. One that eventually is instrumental in helping the author come out of his PTMD- post-trauma mental disorder. I picked up this book hoping to start being a regular member of the GoodReads club, starting, obviously, with finishing with the clubs April reading. That was how I came to know of the author and the book. Of the holocaust books I have read so far- Every Man Dies Alone- Hans Fallada, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay- Michael Chabon, though its not strictly a holocaust book but delves deeply into the Nazi perpetrated crimes, I found the former book by Fallada as the most moving and touching. The account of the elderly couple is stark and minimalistic in its take on the Nazi-era Germany. In contrast, this book is as much about the war from a soldier’s perspective as it is about the various concentration camps and what went on in there. Knowing that the allied powers were close at hand, Avey recognized the importance of satisfying his curiosity and despite the dangers, risked his life a second time to understand better the camp in its monstrosity. He understood the chances of any survivors in the camp were minimal, and believing in his own indestructibility, as is evident from the streaks of adventurous heroism, he set out to know. Recounting it, I believe took more of an effort than placing himself at the swords end. Read it for a grass-root account of the war and for a humbling knowledge of the goings-on.

The Sense of an Ending- Book Review

Nostalgia is a perception and a misty one at that. You memories are essentially facts about your life you had forgotten. History is not the “lies of the victors”, it is more “the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated”- those who are sort of in a no-man’s land and in a constant tussle to lead life “peaceably”. History also, “is that certainty at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation”.

Confessions have always held a sacred place amongst the tools of an author. Across generations, from Lolita to Moll Flanders, A History of Time to Crime and Punishment this form of narration confronts the reader, nudging him to understand the narrator in ways the author has deliberately held back his pen from describing. In an open-ended book, such as The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, the very same narration strikes gold in the eyes of the receptive reader, leaving him to interpret as he may the fate and the wry thoughts of the delinquent narrator. What makes the narration all the more brute is the reliability of the narrator. If we are, by deft means of course, left in the lurch as to whether to trust the narrator or not, a new story constructs itself parallel to the original. This guides the reader as in a mystery novel, as if a puzzle lies in waiting.

The Man-Booker winner novella tells us a poignant tale of a man’s quest to retrace his life and discover amazingly new and tantalizingly destructive facts- one that is bound to shake the whole system he based his life on. In the words of Webster, the narrator- “My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being.” In some ways, the novel turns back on the notion that life, lead in full, is supposed to welcome wisdom. This novel, in a way negates that, suggesting it may further compound the questions themselves. A life which ends in questions? Is that so hard to believe?

The novel achieves the distinction of being didactic, a page-turner and at the same time, a sharp observation that casts an intensely ferocious look inside the machinations of a complacent life. The narrator provides us a disclaimer as to his inadequacy at having understood life, even his.

“This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed”- to the credit of the author we have been presented with a disclaimer in the very first page itself!

Nevertheless, as we turn the pages, the wry, sometimes splittingly funny, sometimes brutally honest and cutting observations push us to give him a sympathetic ear and cannon-blast attention- till we come to the second part of the book where both our and the narrators’ beliefs are shook to its very foundations.

As Webster looks into his childhood days, he describes the dramatic entry of one Andrew Finn: “There had been three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn’t expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life.”

“In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives—and when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first indiscernible.”

The setting is a classic 60s England where those “book hungry, sex hungry, meritocratic and anarchic” youth indulged in understanding intellectuality, British snobbery and the idea of life and where “morbid disbelief was a natural by-product of adolescence”. Finn, the ideal intellectual with a supremely confident notion of history, life and of British mannerisms- also the leader of the pack of 4 who “each felt himself close to Andrew” and regarded his notions in high esteem.

“I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious. I really hate it.”- Finn in one of his rarest outbursts; is symbolic of the pathos of the British sense of being, one he found condemnable and one in which Tony finds solace post his “humiliating” encounter with his girlfriend Veronica’s family- the root of the novel.

His ideas and principles were a mystery to them and hence he had become de-facto the coolest person in their eyes. So much so, his death, as a suicide, had a profound effect on them- each wishing to decode his parting note and trying to understand life as it happened to them. Of them, Tony, the most observant of the lot, or so we are led to believe had a different take on life- he respected Finn but did not emulate him, unlike the others.

“So for example, What if Tony…”

As a 60 year old, while Tony recounts his largely amiable, complacent and peaceable life he receives a notice from a solicitor informing him of a will bequeathed on him by the late Mrs. Ford, mother of his ex-girlfriend of 40 years ago. A sum of 500 pounds and a mysterious package of unknown whereabouts is what is left for him. When he discovers it’s a diary of his friend Finn, he sets out on the elusive, mysterious and pounding quest to get back the diary, believing the diary would be a revelation as every diary is supposed to be. In the process however, as shreds of new evidence creak through, pushing him to shed his mind-blocks a shattering revelation about his past, one he had blocked himself out of, resurfaces. It is his piquant self, with acid in his tongue that leaves him dumbfounded and in the peril of recalibrating his entire existence.

History now becomes “the self-delusions of the defeated”.

“We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history—even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?”

The book trudges the thin line differentiating the “collective” and the “personal” history. One relying on “documentation” and the other on the imperfect assimilation of a forgetful memory and an imperfect documentation.

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”- And surely, Webster masterfully continues to construct lives in his mind as he compiles newer information.

The book, in a way is also, despite its justifications for suicide and “taking things into ones’s control”, a celebration of life. It focuses on grave existential concerns and tries, albeit in a complicated fashion to bring out the essence of life.

Sample this: “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things, rather than facing them. Time . . . give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical . . .”

Tony, in his unassuming way wanted an average, peaceable life, thinking, erroneously that he was being mature and responsible. As things go, he comes to disregard, even block things out of his way.

For me, the most rewarding aspect of the book is the astounding depths this concise masterpiece goes into trolling the inner workings of human emotions. Through brutal honesty and razor-sharp observations the machinations of the human mind, the frailties of the older age, the irresponsible youthful exuberance and “the attraction of overcoming someone’s contempt” is brought to the fore.

Carpe Diem! Cliched as it may sound the desire to live life to its fullest is given its full treatment in the book. Barnes plays to the ideology that it is better to regret something which you have done than regret something which you haven’t.

But anyways, “that’s kind of philosophically self-evident” isn’t it?

Book Review: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders- Daniyal Mueenuddin

Stories are like windows in a train compartment. Offering a momentary glimpse of a stretched-out world outside. This short form of literature peeks into the complexities of your everyday lives and brings out feelings that stretch your thinking. It is, in the end, a means to look at things we look at everyday in our lives, only this time, through a quick and dirty telescope- zooming in and out as the author nudges and pokes, soaking in or puking forth as we come across the characters.

In Comédie humaine, the epic chronicle of french society by Balzac, an ingenious technique of using recurrent characters was used to bring out a sense of compassion towards those whose lives we earlier barely glanced upon. As we move from one story to the next, the ensemble resurrects the lives and times of people glimpsed earlier in passing or known through referrals in a different story of a different time. Likewise, Daniyal Mueenuddin, in his enthralling debut pitches us the story of an old-timer landlord in Pakistan and the cavalcade of people around him. Each linked to the other, albeit marginally and appearing as a shadow-ghost frequently.

Through the eyes of a critical observer we are pushed into the lives of the maid, the chef, the driver, the butler of K.K Harouni, the erstwhile landlord- now old and unable to rise above his ‘reality distortion field’ that heritage colonial riches and exploits pushed him to. Through de-linking each stories, other than the recurrent characters, the essence of the short-story is preserved while at the same time as we come across known characters, even if in passing, in each of those stories, the instigation of familiarity and acquaintance run common. This, to me is fascinating in that it mimics the reality of subjective perceptions ala Rashomon and is in a way strangely similar to A Visit from the goon squad by Jennifer Egan. Although, while the Kurosawa classic and Egan’s masterpiece is in-your-face and direct, Mueenuddin leaves it to the readers to interpret and even define the perceptions.

The book is set in the late-20th century Pakistan, where, as a judge puts it, “all things can be arranged,” and concerns both those young, wealthy, secular and globalized people who lead a trashy life-style like youngsters from any other country and those downtrodden and enslaved labor class whose definition of the world runs as an antithesis to that of those wayward profligates. Thus providing a spectrum of colorful and self-conscious characters through the prism of which Pakistani culture and principles disperse.

The book starts with a bucolic Punjabi saying that goes- “Three things for which we kill– Land, women and gold”. Indeed, as we move into the book, get encapsulated by the vivid yet simple imagery and marvel at the picaresque settings the one common theme of corruption shadow each of them. We see corruption, degradation to a eurotrash lifestyle and the corresponding regret with which the character reflect upon his/her decisions/choices. They barter one for the other of the three coveted belongings, becoming, at times violent and corrupt, and at times hauntingly sad and depressing.

In each of the stories, we learn about a character’s past, then zero in on the central crisis of his or her life and, even while we are expecting more development, suddenly find everything wounded up in a paragraph or two- the climax or the closing scene can therefore be interpreted either as too abrupt or simply making a home-run towards the soul that the author wishes to reflect upon. It is not merely the story of the main character but the particular phase he is going through which forms the bulk of his imagination.

A Visit From the Goon Squad- Review

This ambitious novel by Jennifer Egan sets out on an experimental overdrive employing age old techniques of shifting ludicrously from first person to second person, from one generation to the next- travelling a whole lifetime sometimes in barely 100 odd words. It includes a 72-pager story that is set out in a powerpoint format tells you what exactly I mean when I say Egan has left no stones unturned in seeing to it that the novel capture both, the age-old infatuation of writers with the decay that time does to people in general and to appeal to a generation that is hung-up on the latest fads in technology. So, through the prism of the music industry, the papparazzi and nomadic instincts this Pulitzer Prize winning novel encapsulates what it sets out to achieve. Sometimes, it does go overboard and digresses but that remains only some of the weakness in the novel which is otherwise stimulating and thought-provoking.

Having come onto this book just after reading The Fall- Albert Camus, the narration- one of the primary traits that appeals to me as a reader is being projected tacitly into a trajectory that while aint all encompassing  but is nevertheless inspiring. It is an intelligent novel I would proclaim in not what it sets out to reflect and incite but the way it does that. While the semantics of terming it as a series of intertwined stories or a novel can be best left to literary anthologists and history keepers, the best way I can describe this book is that of an unending tree which branches out from every nook and cranny.

Borrowing lines off this interesting review on NYT:

The book starts with Sasha, a kleptomaniac, who works for Bennie, a record executive, who is a protégé of Lou who seduced Jocelyn who was loved by Scotty who played guitar for the Flaming Dildos, a San Francisco punk band for which Bennie once played bass guitar (none too well), before marrying Stephanie who is charged with trying to resurrect the career of the bloated rock legend Bosco who grants the sole rights for covering his farewell “suicide tour” to Stephanie’s brother, Jules Jones, a celebrity journalist who attempted to rape the starlet Kitty Jackson, who one day will be forced to take a job from Stephanie’s publicity mentor, La Doll, who is trying to soften the image of a genocidal tyrant because her career collapsed in spectacular fashion around the same time that Sasha in the years before going to work for Bennie was perhaps working as a prostitute in Naples where she was discovered by her Uncle Ted who was on holiday from a bad marriage, and while not much more will be heard from him, Sasha will come to New York and attend N.Y.U. and work for Bennie before disappearing into the desert to sculpture and raise a family with her college boyfriend, Drew, while Bennie, assisted by Alex, a former date of Sasha’s from whom she lifted a wallet, soldiers on in New York, producing musicians (including the rediscovered guitarist Scotty) as the artistic world changes around him with the vertiginous speed of Moore’s Law.

In one of the Newyorker broadcasts on Fiction Writer’s Beginnings, Egan strikes me as one of the self-conscious writers who is modest while at the same time articulate in what she sets out to convey. She would be placed in one of those in-classifiable writers who develop their own peculiar and often unsettling manner of narration. The book sets out to explore the vagaries of time on various people connected through a thread and travels across time, culture, generation, eyes and grammar.

Scotty’s “Time’s a goon, right?” is what the whole book revolves after and one which the reader can imbibe from each of the inter-connected stories save one. We have a “cokehead music producer” whose sole intention it is to restrict the passage of time, the punk-rocker whose fall is so steep that when he does come back he does so with a panache so monumental that the irony becomes banal. We have Lulu the new-age child who is so alienated and indifferent to the world that the images of gun-toting henchmen and that of her fellow classmates trying to unsettle her evokes the same characteristically inert response. Then there are the protagonists, or atleast they can be called one just for the heck of it – Sasha and Bennie who are both cardboard cut-outs of cocaine snorting, aimlessly travelling, disenchantment’ed’, desultorily meandering generation who has to come to grips with the erosion that time pushes on them.

The book, as described here,  works as an album in that you can enjoy each song as it comes independently. But then, when you try and relate each of those connected dots, the stark realism of the text strikes you smack on the face. What I love most about this book is the seemingly intelligent and digressing way in which it sets out to bring the one common theme that runs throughout the book. While the meta-fictional element that forms the core has been explored wide and out, especially in those vintage classics that ran pages with little or no plot, this new-age novel does so through a complex intermingling of characters, situations, time and narration.

Now reading:

1. American Pastoral – Philip Roth
2. How to be Alone – Jonathan Franzen
3. The Big Short – Micheal Lewis

The Dead

All art is quite useless- Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Words are deceiving; the astute weaver plots the angles, measures the distance, ropes in the music and sprinkles the noises while keeping the soul within kissing distance of the parchment. The thing about the parchment is, since it is now immortalized it begins a never-ending journey. As it passes through the hands and fingers of the mortals it waxes itself up, boots up the visibility and gains a whole new personality. Sometimes, it even forgets its own identity and becomes but the image of the beholder. Somewhat like a mirror.

Not all are fortunate enough to evolve though. What then makes it great? What keeps the mirror shining brand new for every latest entrant to the scene, shows him his true colors, brings him to his own conclusions, keeps his mind whirring about random lines, random words and random characters? Does the plot matter or is it just the fashion in which it is told?

When observations become a technique and the technique becomes an observation the beholder grapples with anxiety and bewilderment. Every time you hold the mirror aloft, it shows you a different image. The contours do not change, the expressions do. It is in moments like these that you sometimes wonder- was it the nature of the mirror to change or was it you who perceived it that way? Was it the magical charm of the craftsman or your naivete that was responsible for the purportedly flawed display earlier?

The magical thing about a mirror is, it does not show you what you want to see, which is a perfect face; it shows you the face you have been allotted and with which you cannot run away from. It shows you your true colors open to interpretations. Is it then fair to paste another’s face above the handle just so its pleasing to look at?

“the cracked looking glass of a servant“

I am deviating here but will ever so continue to do. I love doing it.

When you look into another man’s mirror do you see him or do you see yourself? Is it not the mirror’s motive to owe allegiance to none and lean wherever it is tilted to? Yet, everyone loves a little nudge. A push and a shove in the right direction works wonders for people. It brings in renewed appreciation, acknowledging eyebrows, heaved sighs of despair and valiant movements of the head. One who calls a spade a hammer is corrupt. One who likens it to a scimitar is a cultivator gone astray. One who calls it a spade cannot be anyone other than the forger himself. A connoisseur refrains from nouns and accentuates himself with vague adjectives, relying on verbs alone to display his craft. He might as well polish the spade such, that it becomes an elf set free from his master.

“the rage of the caliban at not seeing his own face in the glass”

“the rage of the caliban at seeing his own face in the glass”

“the rage of the caliban at seeing someone else’s face in the glass?”

Mirror mirror on the wall

Mirror mirror on the wall
show me something unknown to all

Mirror mirror on the wall
would you answer my clarion call?
Mirror mirror on the wall
give me my cafe latte’ tall
Mirror mirror on the wall
is it so unbecoming to fall?
Mirror mirror on the wall
I have climbed out to crawl
Mirror mirror on the wall
would it suffice to toll
as i scrape through the wall
would you be my savior at all?

 

I would strive to come back with more on the Gabriel saga; perhaps Lily would be literally run off her feet again. Who knows eh?

 

 

Fooled By Randomness

I recently finished reading this extraordinary book by the well known quantitative trader cum Wall street dissident Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book provides an interesting take on the common human fallacies of mistaking random noises as patterns and striving to find a reason and logical connection to everything that happens around him. The book is actually a prequel to the more famous The Black Swan in which the author goes ahead with his theory and suggests the existence of a rare and often misunderstood event which he coins as the black swan event.

Coming back to FbR, the book transcends the philosophical tone and invariably directs our attention to the various anomalies that govern the information rich world that we live in. Taleb uses heuristic procedures to describe what is commonly called the survivorship bias. The bias essentially states that we tend to glamorize the winners in a bet and refuse to acknowledge the whole gamut of losers who fall behind the curtains to conceal the sad face of a rapidly devolving world. The Ludic Fallacy as coined by Taleb states in simple terms the platonic ideals of the ignorant man wherein the presence of a tangible and detectable object is taken to be the evidence of absence of a more messier and jargogled truth. The capacity of man to rhetoric is ridiculed and the inherent tendency to rationalize the available data at hand condemned. The author patronizes the financial news reporters and says that though he keeps his TV set on to view the happenings, much to the chagrin of his colleagues he mutes it to filter out the irrelevant noise!! Strangely the absence of evidence of an event is commonly mistaken to be the evidence of absence of the event!!

Taleb quotes Gladwell to drive home the point of skewness in everyday affairs. In quite categorical terms he states that its a common human error to mistake a wager to be 50:50 balanced when it is not. While in a 99:1 the chances of winning is greater the 1 % chance of losing on a big note compensates for the non-linearity.

Skepticism abounds in the book and the author seems to revel in it. An ardent admirer of Popper and the likes of Soros of modern times, Taleb questions the set principles of the financial world. His fervent appeal to listen to statistics than merely judging through explanations is amply buffeted with examples and references. In ‘If we’re so rich why aren’t we smart?’ he questions the notion that successful people become so by dint of their superior mental prowess and analytical capability. He opines that this may not always be so. There may have been in the career of the concerned person a series of such minute but important events that eventually led to the turn in the fortune of the man. It might have been a coincidence that he landed up the right job when the interviewee was in a boisterous mood, it could have been just pure luck that he bumped onto the famous lawyer in a bar that eventually led him to fight the battle of his life and emerge victorious in the process. In short, a series of small events that led to a consequence so mammoth that it dwarfed the rest of the details. This too finds a name that comes by the term-’The Butterfly Effect’. A butterfly fluttering its wings somewhere in India can cause a destructive hurricane to wreak havoc in a non-descript part of North-America. Impossible you say? Scientists can actually prove the logical connectivity of such an event!!

“True traders I believe dress sloppily are often ugly and exhibit the intellectual curiosity of someone who would be more interested in the information revealing aspect of a garbage can than the Cezanne painting on the wall”- Taleb in Fooled By Randomness.

“Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost”- Taleb again.

An MBA degree holder himself Taleb does not restrict himself on condemning just the television reporters or the financial gurus but goes so far as to ridicule the management education as a whole. The book is an instant classic in that it knows no limits and is a brilliant, chaotic yet structured criticism of everything and anything, which strangely, strikes a familiar chord. His opinions are supplemented with incisive references and mathematical proofs so much so that you can’t help but relate to the meanderings.

The book is a must read for those aspiring for a financial career. The key element of the book is that it provides an expansive and wondrous insight into the workings of the financial industry with no holds barred criticism of anything remotely connected to it. The book reads like a monologue on atheism by a practicing Hindu saint!!

Eragon->Eldest

The fact that Christopher Paoloni is just 22 years old split my mind. Had this urge to read his much touted work which was supposed to catch the magic of the legendary Lord of the Rings crafted by the master J.R.R Tolkien. While the novel in no way even touched the brilliance of the master it very well left me waiting for the last book of the series “The book three of Inheritance”. The flow of the story was smooth and entertaining managing to project a commercial hit work, though not an epic.

Also, having read magical stories of the likes of Harry Potter and LOTR and fed with a constant dose of superhero cinematic blips I couldnt help but find a common thread that connected each of these fantastic stories. The protagonist in each of these stories always invariably turn out to be a loser who happens to posess that factor of sheer luck that propels him from the shadows of failure to suddenly the centre of the universe. That the connection is common on almost all the magical and superhuman stories paints a very frightening picture of the world if my assumptions are correct.

Driven by sympathy of the orphan child or the geek who couldnt propose his beau or the omnipresent beggar who had nothing these stories bring out emotions from the readers who share the same innocence towards all things weak and low. The enemy is always the same all powerful tall, bulk-built muscle-man with a stronghold of 3rd generation ugly and evil orcs/urgals/death-eaters with numbers that shame the stars.

While Eragon is a man/boy of dreams who does nothing other than hunt, while Harry the scar-clad teenager has almost zero academic skills, he specializes in courage,friendship and will-power, while Frodo is the last person one would entrust with the safekeeping of a penny, its them who eventually turn out to be the heroes who save the day in the midst of people with prowess. Paints a pretty picture doesnt it?

Coming back to the books, I would rate them 7 on a scale of 10 when it comes to entertainment. The author in some places even manages to sneak in words of wisdom least expected from a 22 year old guy. The connection between Saphira and Eragon is well crafted and elaborately elucidated. Its their conversation that keeps the strings intact in times when the novel gets a bit slow and boring. The author though has tried his best to trudge the LOTR way with an exhaustive description of the races and the tribes in the “MIddle Kingdom”.

Some characters seem to taken directly from the epic with the characters depicted and described in a more than comfortable similarity. Some of them include:

Orcs- Urgals???

Dwarfs-Orik-Gimli???

Elves-Arya-Legolas??

Some uncanny similarities aside the book captures your interest. The whole part of learning and learning and learning and learning has been depicted fairly.

All in all the book is a one time read. Go out and buy the books for your children..they are gonna love the magic all over again..not that the grownups are not meant to be the readers..

VJ

Google (My take)..

 

Just completed reading this inspiring tale of the rise of Google from a 2 man enterprise to a multi-million dollar churning industry. The story throws light on the known fact that it is innovation that drives the industry today and a constant thrust on fresh ideas and breakthroughs are what the propelling factors are.

 

Sergey Brin and Larry Page are today synonymous with the new age gurus whose ‘Don’t be evil ” policy seems to shake the very foundation of the myth to a successful conglomerate.

Through the years they have shown that it is the problems they focus on initially and then do they implement it for moolah much in contrast with what many of their peers follow.

 

The constant thrust to innovation coupled with a sound mind to apply knowledge has been the factors that has made google what it is today..It is said that employees at Google get about 20% free time to devote their attention to whatever interests them and is of some importance.

The Google masterminds’ penchant for pushing boundaries—without asking permission—might as well be called chutzpah. However you label it, it’s an attitude that runs deeply through Google and may help explain why the company is embroiled in lawsuits over many of its new projects: the aggressive scanning of library books it doesn’t own; display of copyrighted material; and copyright issues connected to its acquisition of YouTube, the online video site whose popularity rests in part on the availability of pirated television and movie clips.

 

The point to consider is its not money that drives these legends, its their thirst for solving problems and making the user experience the net in a way that fosters growth and growth!

What else can then explain the strict advertising policy that the company follows? It has been a matter of constant debate as to how google actually earns money when its home page is still free from “sponsored links”. Companies like Yahoo and Ebay garbage their homepages with advertisements so much so that its often difficult to get to work!

 

The urge to constantly upgrade is quite visible in the email service that Google provides. Even after 3 years of testing the beta version of Gmail is still ruling the roost..ie the guys want to improve upon the already well-built service. It has now been opened to all after 3 years of invitees only and it reamins to be seen if the upgraded infrastructure at Google can handle traffics that are sure to surge. 2.8 gb inbox memory is not something you can deliver easily.