Monthly Archives: January 2012

The Professional by Subroto Bagchi

January 30, 2012

A two word review of the book would be – too preachy, too Mindtree. Everything that the author tells you is what you probably know since your school days. Stealing is bad, lying or hiding the truth is bad, etc etc. You also know that you should be disciplined, knowledgeable and credible. There is nothing wrong with re-iterating these well-known adages too. A lot of professionals in the corporate world need this re-iteration regularly. The book comprises of short incidents [...]

Labels: Subroto Bagchi Penguin English Self Help Book Reviews

Offshore by Gaurav Rastogi & Basab Pradhan

January 25, 2012

“How India got back on the Global Business map” is what the authors set out to explore or may be explain. The book tells you about what you probably do not know about the offshore industry if you are not a part of it. If you are a part of the industry, there is not a thing in the book that you would not know. Now that defines the audience of this book very clearly: World – people in offshore [...]

Labels: Basab Pradhan Gaurav Rastogi Penguin English Business Book Reviews

Thoughts on Hyderabad Literary Festival, 2012

January 20, 2012

Couple of years back I had attended the Jaipur Literature Festival and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This year I attended a smaller version of it at Hyderabad, my current hometown. And as it should, the festival left me thinking about what is the purpose of these festivals. If I can use the business language, the major stakeholders in these festivals would be writers, readers, publishers, literary journals and their critics followed by general public. In general everyone wants to be [...]

Labels: Events

Chitralekha by Bhagwati Charan Varma

January 15, 2012

Human nature, it’s changing needs and wants, it’s relationship with God and the various ways to reach the ultimate truth have always been the subject of human exploration. The questions have come to humans in every era and age, they have taken various journeys both in the physical world and in their mental space to get the answers. Sometimes they felt they have got the answer, sometimes they felt more exploration is required. Sometimes their Gurus guide them and sometimes [...]

Labels: Bhagwati Charan Varma Rajkamal Prakashan Hindi Fiction Philosophy Book Reviews

Henna for the Broken-Hearted by Sharell Cook

January 10, 2012

Soothing cover design makes you pick up the book, and you want to know what brought the author to India and more importantly settle down here. You start reading and before you know you have finished reading the book. No, it is not a small book to read. But it has been written pretty engagingly and you breeze through it without realizing the time you have spent on it. It is a personal memoir of a young Australian who came [...]

Labels: Sharell Cook PAN Mcmillan English Memoir Travel Book Reviews

Inside Coca-Cola by Neville Isdell with David Beasley

January 5, 2012

Someone who spends his entire working career in one company, a company that is one of the oldest successful companies in the world, and then writes about it. You obviously expect a lot of passion for the company, the brand and the products. You expect some insider stories that you do not know as a consumer. You want to know how he turned around a company that was on its way down when he took over as a management observer. [...]

Labels: David Beasley Neville Isdell St Martin's Press English Memoir Book Reviews

Non-Stop India by Mark Tully

January 1, 2012

10 essays in the book take you through the issues that India faces, issues that have probably existed all your life, you have heard or read about them sometime somewhere and may be a few of them have impacted you directly, but most belong to someone somewhere in the country. We know about the various angles of these stories, but may be not all. Most of us probably know it at a level where we ridicule it by saying ‘ [...]

Labels: Mark Tully Penguin English India Non-Fiction Book Reviews