Reflections

Don't sprint the marathon is not the 'run-of-the-mill' self-help book targeted for all and sundry, but is aimed at overzealous and ambitious parents who relentlessly push their children towards 'success'. The author, V Raghunathan, painstakingly explains that, for most part, all the small things in life do not matter in the long run and it is the attitude and the innate passion that made people like N.R. Narayanamurthy and GM Rao  stand out from the rest. As the blurb on the back cover says, the title of the book does sound very obvious and intuitive,  but then as one of my colleagues, Patrick Marion, mentioned to me once - Knowing does not mean doing.  To that end, I do believe that this book is worth a read for all parents of school doing children. While I did enjoy the small anecdotes and examples of the numerous 'achievers', I do have my complaints. It clearly appears to me that a lot of the messages intended for the audience get repeated over and ...

When I came across this book in my library , and noticed that the blob contains keywords "running" and "memoir",  I had no choice but to pick it up.  Having been running myself and jotting down memoirs of the same, I could not have resonated more. And the book did not let me down. There were several instances/episodes in the book which I felt could have been typed by myself instead. I will try to list a few of them. Before that, I would like to mention one point -- this review is unlike others in this blog,  I have added a lot of my personal take on the different episodes, unlike others where I have just tried to be more objective. The first is the author's observation towards the end of Chapter 3, where he says that even after 20 odd marathons, his feelings during the 26.2 mile race have been more or less the same - good feeling for the first 19 miles,  then the period of pain and frustration,  and finally (once the race is completed) forget the entire...

I just completed this book   and I should admit that I was pretty disappointed. The book titles Valkyrie, the plot to kill Hitler, but makes just a passing reference to this plot. No details have been provided on the plot and the book clearly fails to meet the expectations in that front. The book is in fact the memoirs of Philipp V.Boeselager and in itself a good read to understand the conditions from a German WW2 soldier. The bravery of the soldiers waging a losing war in inhuman conditions, fighting against a Red army who had no scruples sacrificing their civilians to exhaust opposition's ammunition, the bravery of captured soldiers not spilling the beans and revealing co-conspirators even in the face of severe Gestapo torture -- the book is replete with such touching episodes. On the plot to kill Hitler and the role played by the author and his friends, I tend to fully agree with the assessment  this article . In particular, I agree that one gets a felling that a lot o...