Reviews and recommendations

This is my second book by Ruskin Bond. This book is basically a collection of stories from daily happenings of Ruskin Bond. A detailed description of when he wakes up, what he does after he wakes up, his afternoon routine, his evening walks, in short about his daily routine in general. He shares his experience by transitioning from the Dehra of his childhood versus Dehra now. He talks about what he loved while growing up. There are so many characters that made an impact on his life. His little experiences which he remembers precisely even after so many years are kind of funny to read. Ruskins story of his pet and his adventures rather misadventures with uncle ken are presented as short stories in the book and are light hearted to read. There is nothing much you can find in the book. No story or biography or anything just little life experiences. Its just nothing about nothing! 2.5 stars out of 5!

This is my 3 rd Sophie Kinsella book after   Confession of a Shopaholic and Remember me. Remember me I remember was pretty good ;) (pun intented) So My not so perfect life is a story of a 26 year old having a mind of 16 year old until she is fired! Katie is obsessed with London and the obsession is unhealthy to an extent where she has to change her name to fit in, changes her accent and hides from people about her back ground all because of the fear of being judged! She tires to make cool (rich) friends and then when she goes out with those friends to expensive places she doesn’t even   have money to buy her own food. I mean what is the point of pretending so much where you get into a situation where people mistake you as a begger? Instead of performing well in the office all she wants is to be cool and fit in so she withholds her opinions and then complains when she gets fired! After being fired her life changes and she helps her parents build a business from s

Pralay is squeal of Hrappa, the curse of blood river. The thrill of the first book continues in the second and the story is as gripping as ever, infact it gets better. 1700 BCE The Surya Devta after being tortured and skinned alive is sent to dungeons to die, returns for vengeance and the rage in him to destroy the whole of Harappa is chilling. The Gods are angrier than ever with the sins of the people of Harappa and the end is near. Manu meets a mysterious ocean man at the Black Temple, who seems to be   the most divine person on earth. This mysterious man is supposed to help Manu through “THE PRALAY”. 2017 Vidhyut betrayed and almost killed by his most trusted best friend is recovering while Vidhyuts   great grand father revels the secret of the curse of the blood line. Now the most powerful aghori of Banaras is trying to kill Vidyut because of a new world order. So what is this new world order and who is giving them? This book deals with so many Human emotions. How

Harappa, curse of the blood river is a story which moves simultaneously between 1700 BC and 2017 AD. Its 2017 AD Vidhyut shashtri   running a successful tech start up gets a call in the middle of the night to reach Banaras for his great grandfather is not in good health. Vidhyut has always known the he was special but a whole new secret was waiting to unfold in Banaras that vidhyut had no idea about. In Banaras Vidhyuts great grandfather the matthadesh tries to explain Vidhyut what makes him and his blood line so special. Vidhyut   is having trouble understanding and absorbing all these information about his blood line and curse on the blood line while   some people are desperately   trying to kill Vidhyut. 1700 BCE Vivasvan Purohit is going to be named as a chief priest of Harappa but gets accused of a murder and put in dungeons. On one hand Harappa is in great danger of enormous flood and on other someone very cunning is planning to take on Harappa by destroying the most pow

Okay so this book is about a women named Katie in her 40s getting sacked from a show on which she has been working on for more than 10 years. From there things pretty much goes down in Katies life! Suddenly everything in her life seems to go wrong and that is when the book also starts to go wrong. This book literally goes nowhere till 100th page. Just Katie and her sad little life, who instead dealing with her issues choses to get over drunk everytime and ruin things more. Seriously this got so irritating after a point that i started skipping pages. There are so many characters and they seem to keep coming up out of no where. Most of them were unnecessary. And there is no built up of story either. Its just Katie being drunk and ruining things and for other characters it just feels like they are all writing their personal diary at the end of the day! I really enjoy reading a lot but with this book i just wanted this to end as soon as possible. If you really a

Retire young retire rich is a 5 th book in the series of Rich Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Robert in this book shares his journey of retiring very rich at an age of just 47! He speaks about his real life experiences and struggles and how he came through without losing his motivation. My main motive to pick up this book was to learn something new from this book. Not exactly retiring thing but getting rich thing. After reading this whole book I realized that I knew most of the points put forward in this book. Being a graduate in finance degree and currently working with futures and options I knew everything what Richard was trying to say. So the main crux of the book is to motivate the readers to follow their dream of becoming rich by starting   their own business. Job security, according to the author is not security but the biggest risk. I summarized few points   from the book to narrow it down to give the idea as a whole.      Always remember the risks of starting a n

The history of Indian literature has been very rich, with so many different languages and scholars in India . Vedas, Upanishads, the epic sagas of Ramayan and Mahabhart are the part of Indian literary heritage . The Golden Book of Holy Vedas primarily explains Rig veda. There are manily 4 Vedas, Rig Veda being the oldest. Rig veda is basically a collection of Hymns in Sanskrit. Hymns were passed down orally earlier from generation to generation, it was written much later with the development of the languages. Rig Veda worships the strong forces of Nature. Sun, Earth, Wind, Fire etc   are considered gods in Rig veda. Every source of energy that helped human lives to survive is depicted as god in Rig veda. The author   Macdonells has written a systematically organized book.The book starts with a detailed history of when the Vedas originated, How it developed and what significance it holds. Every god is given a brief introduction in the book along with their powers. A pictur

This book revolves around a very hot topic “Feminism”. It is a story of a single woman in her 40s. Akhila has always been a good daughter, good sister, a good woman all her life. After the death of her father she becomes the man of the house. She starts earning at a small age of 19!  When her siblings come of age one by one they all get married totally forgetting about Akhila. They still try to control Akhilas life by saying she needs to take the permission of the man of the house even though she is an independent woman who has held her family together. She starts thinking is she really lonely and unhappy? Does a woman really need a man to make her life complete? Fed up of all the interferences in her life and to find all her answers she sets out on an adventure trip alone with a one way ticket to Kanyakumari. She meets 5 more women in her ladies coupe. One by one she listens to every persons story while thinking back on her own life. Life stories one coming from

  Recently government has announced to privatise loss making Air India. Arun Jaitely in this years budget mentioned the target of getting 80,000 crore from divestment this year. Air india is the priority right now. The main plan is to divest 76% and keep the remaining 24% under their control. History Air India was created by JRD Tata before independence. It was origanlly named as Tata Airlines but after getting the approval of international routes the name changed to Air India. After Independence the government took over Air India. And in 1953 Divided it into 2 separate air lines 1 Air India-International. 2 Indian Air Lines- Domestic Both the companies were profit making companies till 2000. During the NDA government in 2000 initiatives to divest air india was taken but was not materialized due to several reason as well as due to strong disapproval by opposition. During 2007 UPA government took a huge step and merged Air India and Indian air lines. Afte

More than 400 pages on everything thing about INDIA It Covers the modern emerging India as a whole From the very beginning their is a Precise comparison between pre economic reforms of india and post economic reforms of india Nehru and Gandhi got all the mentions leaving the other freedom fighters!  But Sardar vallabh bhai patel got no mention in the book in building of new india after independence. Stating the facts about why india failed as a nation post independence. Accurate description of the rural india and urban poor india! Rural development starts with giving the farmers right The slow moving legal system (bdw did you guys know the Back log of cases would take approximately 300 years to complete) Caste issues poor treatment of the backward class and changing of their caste to christianity from lower caste Hilarious thougts of a wellknown politician on Yadav and mahars and brahmins and his theory of the gods they came from. this book contains the chilling incident

Everbody wants to contribute to the society in need as much as they can and donating Money is not the only way to do that. The easiest way we find to contribute is by giving away our old and used clothes and things to the people in need. But do we ever give a second thought about the clothes provided by us   are even   useful to the people or not? We just mindlessly give away all the old clothes we find at our place but are those clothes even useable? Here is where GOONJ comes in picture. Anshu Gupta founded this organisation in 1998 after leaving a well paying   corporate. He made this huge selfless move because he believed in his cause. And the cause was that rich or poor everybody deserves the right of proper clothing! The concept of GOONJ is optimum utilization of resources. No matter how good our intentions are to help people, donated clothes always end being misutilized. He observed that people in need were not getting the required clothes and people were so thoughtl

Kahlid Hosseini’s stories are based on war torn Afghanistan, not exactly war stories but how the war had ripple effect on the lives of the people of Afghanistan at that time. His story makes you curious and makes you feel and think. This is one of the peculiarity of Khalid hosseini’s story that some parts of the story stay, it stays with you. Same is with this story. And the mountains echoed is not specifically about the destruction due to war but due to loath and greed and selfishness in humans heart. This stories goes through 3 generation and unfolds each layer slowly and beautifully. Its about people leaving Afghanistan due to war or other reasons and then visiting and re visiting their pasts. There are some bold topics taken up in this book like homosexuality and rebellious woman in Afghanistan! There were few characters’ story I felt were left incomplete ( how did Roshi coming to America and write a book, Idris after returning from Afghanista, Gholum after his father di

So what you have failed! So what you took the risk which everybody was telling you not to take! So what you didn’t take a good advice from your well wisher and now you are screwed! So what your life is not going anywhere you have planned! You have reached the rock bottom, now you do what? You Accept it! You accept that you made a mistake. Feel it. Don’t try to suppress the feeling, because even if you try to it will still be there somewhere in the back of your head always bugging you. Its okay! Its life. It happens. Things don’t always go as per your plan no matter how good your intentions are. So Relax! You are a human being you are allowed to make your share of mistakes! We are intelligent species, we obviously will learn from our mistakes. We don’t need to hear “learn from your mistakes” we are in some way sort of programmed to learn from our mistakes. So now the actual problem is How to overcome the GUILT of failing or losing?           Calm your nerve

This is a book I randomly picked up while strolling through my towns public library. The title caught my attention how can you make money without using money in real estate? The answer is simple and everyone knows it. The main idea of the book was to help explain the financial management to the normal crowd eager to invest but are afraid to take risk. Sorry to say but the book turned out to be disappointing but there are few points worth discussing. It  does start with explaining  the real estate business but strays off to explaining the unreleated topics how to start and manage a business. And in real estate also it just explains or discusses about the things we already know. Pichai gives so much emphasis on Survey and investigation of property before buying and rightly so. Another point is “ patience is the key”. And the last and most important point discussed is never be afraid to fail or lose. Instead learn from the bad situation, adopt that lesson learned to improve and

I picked “I have a dream” for whole and sole reason to motivate myself. Lets talk about the writing style. The first few stories where the writer used hindi lines from the original interview was cringe worthy. I was not able to understand in the beginning if it was the author or the interviewee speaking. The book could have been presented better rather formed better. Now the content part. The stories in this book were very inspiring. This book gets you in thinking gears. Infact some stories in this book had pushed me to do more research in certain field in which i am interested, if only it was well presented. And being a Bollywood freak I would say movies should be made on 2 stories one on Sulabh sauchalay and second Parivartan of Arvind kejriwal. There were so many heart touching stories where people gave up on a flourishing thriving career after IIT, IIM or in foreign country and chose to serve our Motherland by improving the lives of strangers who are helpless or unp

I completed this book in a food court over a strawberry smoothie in 3 hours. A simple and amusing journey of Rusty. This book was kind of special because i was able to connect with the helplessness of Rusty. The sense of not belonging to anywhere but everywhere. Rusty’s journey of running away from a toxic home to discovering a whole new world is as simple as it is fascinating. It touches all the right chords of the sense of independence, the sense of friendship who are your family, the first love and the loss of it and the struggles you go through when you have to start the life from the scratch again after losing everything. The book teaches us to look for one single reason to not give up and find peace and meaning in life even if you have lost everything. This book is a light read which you can complete in few hours of a bored holiday after noon or few hours of train journey.

It is a male dominated world ladies and there is no denying to that. But you can definetly watch these movies where our protagonists’ didnt bow down infront of the rules of the societies and were just badass! 1)       LAJJA. Vaidehi who just found out that she is pregnant runs from her husband who is abusive to her and has malicious intentions of killing her after vaidehi gives birth to the baby. Along the way she meets 3 beautiful strong women Maitheli, Janki and Ramdulari. Maitheli who is getting married but   her in laws are demanding dowry the   way Maitheli   takes stand for herself infront of hundreds of people, wish more girls had this courage to take stand like this. Then Vaidehi meets Janki an theater actress that to very successful in her state. Janki leaves her to be husband in a heartbeat because he listens to the rumors and starts doubting her loyalty. And then there is Ramdulaari who works as mid wife in small village and does work for women empowerment with li

There are so many bollywood children stories that I liked but below I am sharing the movies in which the little humans won my heart. v The blue Umbrella. Based on a Ruskin Bond book this story revolves around little Biniya and shop owner of the village Nand kishore. One day little biniya finds a beautiful blue Japanese umbrella. She kind of becomes a star in the village and Nandu develops an envy towards her. The film is shot in valleys of Himachal Pradesh and it is a treat to the eyes. And suddenly Biniya looses her beloved blue Umbrella. Devastated and heart broken she tires to cope with it but within few days Nand kishore get the exact same umbrella. Biniya being smart solves the mystery of the lost umbrella. Par jitni choti Biniya use zada bada uska dil. The compassion show by her at the end would definetly win everyones heart. This movie is SLOW but very cute and worth watching. v Halo This movie released in 1996. I saw this movie when I was little and I

The story starts with the story of Sai who just lost her parents and has come to stay with her grandfather in kalimpong. The story jumps back and forth in time, from character to character( so many characters simultaneously). The transition is very swift and it does bother in the beginning but you get used to it. This book revolves around 2 main issues. Indians migrating for better life opportunities to Europe and USA and the movement of Gorkhaland in Kalimpong. The main crux of the story is when you feel out the place what you do? When you are wronged by the world, humiliated, left out, looked down by the world. Then you do what? You work hard and you rise. You rise and exert your new found power on weak, the first person you find and think that you own them. You put out all your disgust and frustration on that person because the world was unfair to you. The description of the illegal immigrants living like rats, all stuffed in one small filthy room away from home away from famil

This book is a collection of stories of Surats highly successful entrepreneurs. It contains 16 stories of local business firms who made it to the top and are pioneer in their fields. There are many inspiring stories to motivate and inspire young entrepreneurs. The book discusses struggles, achievement, mistakes and learning of the initial years of these millionaires with the special message by these millionaires themselves. So I will just give you a brief plot summary of the stories I found unique and inspiring. Shree Ramkrishna Pvt Ltd. Owner Govind Dholakiya comes from a very small village named Dudhala and now owns a business having turnover more than 6000 crores and with strong hold in international diamond market. His strong belief is in adopting new technology and adopting to the changing environment as soon as possible. Treat your employees well and reward them and give them all the facilities possible. He takes his business decision based on opportunity cost and Retur

Story told by little scout about her life with her brother Jem and father Atticus. They live in a small town Maycomb with a really tight neighbourhood where ever person knows the other person by their voice. They have known each other since generations. Atticus is the most kind hearted man in the county and the most brightest of lawyer there. He is handed a rape case, a coloured man being accused of rape. This story is about the time when black people were looked down upon and they had no respectable jobs or position in America. The people of Maycomb turn against the most respectable lawyer of town because he agreed to defend a black man! A story about how Atticus bravely defends the rape accused and tries to put his side of the story with all the logical arguments and evidence is commendable! The injustice served towards the colored folks back in time will make you flinch at the end. Jem is overwhelmed with the sentence and rightly so. This book will leave you wondering about t