Reflections

How to Lie with Statistics  is an amazing book. Educational, thought-provoking, humorous -- this book is all of these and more. That the first edition was printed in about 65 years ago makes it even more awe inspiring. All things that the author explains in the 10 chapters about the different devious tricks people use to mislead with statistics are pretty much relevant and applicable to current day. If you do not have time to read the rest of this post and want one takeaway, it would be to just pick this book right away and read it cover-to-cover.  You will definitely not regret it. The introduction sets the tone for the rest of the book. It starts with an example where two polls, one by Gallup and another by a newspaper come up with such huge difference in their estimates on how many people are familiar with the metric system in US. One said 33% and the other 98%. The author ascribes this anomaly to the massive sampling bias in the newspaper poll. There are similar such ex...

The  power of habit  book was a fairly enjoyable read and good start to the new year. The prologue of the book is fairly captivating, it starts with a story on how a 34 year old woman who was struggling with obesity, debt, alcohol and a host of other issues turned it around, became fairly successful at work and indeed managed to run a marathon. The author quotes a Duke university finding -- "40% of the actions performed each day weren't actual decisions, but habits".  It is by forming the good habits and overwriting the old habits that we turn around our lives. The book has three parts. The first deals with how habits emerge in individual lives, the second in organisations and the third the habits of societies. All the three sections are well laden with anecdotes and stories the make up for a interesting reading. The first section starts with the story of Eugene Pauly, a man who was afflicted with a viral infection that affected a tissue in his brain that was ...

Predictably Irrational Even though I had created a tumblr account promptly after Yahoo acquired it in June 2011, I had done nothing much about it since. This is clearly nothing new, I have always basked in the glory of total laziness and procrastination. In fact, one could even argue that I had become completely predictable to be that, however irrational that is. And so, when I just finished this amazing book by Dan Ariely, I thought this was a wonderful option to open the account, as we say in Cricket parlance. Predictably Irrational is an extremely well written book in the same genre of Freakonomics and even some Gladwell books, but what provides authenticity and genuineness to this compilation is that these are based on experiments conducted by the author (and his collaborators) himself, not relying on some possibly dubitable study or observations. The basic premise of this book is that we, as humans, are not as rational as we would love to believe. And to make things more...

Come January, and the resolution to blog regularly tops the list again. And what better start than to write about the experiences on what has become an annual January ritual -- The Mumbai Marathon. The experience started with joining two of my running mates, Satsang and Sampath, on the way to the airport. Satsang had already blocked three seats together for us, so it worked out well and we generally chit-chatted our way to the airport. Since this was Sampath's first ever air journey, it was nice to sense his excitement, however hard he tried to conceal it. Satsang's friends, Abhinav and Suraj, were waiting for us at the Mumbai airport and drove us from the airport to WTC, where we had to collect our running bibs. Abhinav chose a route that touched the Marathon running route, but unfortunately for us, it turned out to be a long ride as traffic was just inching along. We finally managed to reach WTC and pick our bibs about an hour and a half later. Since the Expo was at the M...

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...