Muthu's Weblog

Faster than Lightning: My Autobiography by Usain Bolt My rating: 4 of 5 stars There is a certain audacity in the way Bolt asserts himself in this biography. I have met some people in my life that are at/near the absolute top of their fields and in a way, they are too humble. When we start to embark on a journey to attain that skill level, we sometimes miss out on the humility. Then there is this rushing towards an excess of it, as our extraordinary lump of tissue sitting atop our neck decides that some failures along the way are due to our lack of humility. While humility or the lack of it can substantially alter our progress in the learning, all other things being equal, humility as is practiced in the post modern world might be disposable. Or that's what Bolt will convince you of. There is a certainty with which he asserts his dominance. He is unapologetic about the fact that he has special talent. He is not overtly humble. He just sails throug...

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was an exhilarating read. The plot is extraordinary and makes you feel invested in a way that very things can do. You want to travel along, you want to read just one more page and see what Teddy is up to. Every time there is a twist in the novel, you'll think, "Ha! I know this trick!". And you'll be woefully wrong. Dennis Lehane carves a wonderful thriller and my only regret was that I didn't read it in a single stretch. Rekindled my interest in thrillers. :D View all my reviews

Windows 10 users, download this registry entry, double click and add, and restart your system. Don't shutdown, restart. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-QbWCkLjW6qTkg2ZWdFU2ZJdDg/view?usp=sharing Ubuntu users, download this file, and from the directory where you have downloaded the file, execute the following commands one by one in a terminal. You will have to connect temporarily to a mobile hotspot to install missing dependencies. So, connect to hotspot, run these commands. sudo dpkg -i wpasupplicant_2.3-2.3_amd64.deb sudo apt-get -f install

Demystifying Kashmir by Navnita Chadha Behera My rating: 4 of 5 stars Despite being an Indian, I knew very little about Kashmir, when I started this book. I was primed to think of it only in ideological terms, and always viewed it as a problem where if India showed enough rectitude and military might, we will win decisively. And this book has proved me wrong, in so many elegant pages. The first chapter seeks to bust the myth that Kashmir is a bone of contention on ideological, or religious terms. There are enough evidences to point that at times, Kashmir didn't even figure on the plans of Jinnah, not as a constituent state of Pakistan.Jinnah at many occasions, wanted states to be independent or accede to Pakistan, not because they wanted to or Jinnah himself wanted them, but because he thought that would weaken Indian Union. The level of detail in this book can be overwhelming, but it can also leave you clueless at times, through references to ma...

Incarnations: India in 50 Lives by Sunil Khilnani My rating: 5 of 5 stars 'India isn’t really a country, It is a sub-continent composed of nationalities, Hindus and Muslims being the two major nations.' This was Jinnah. He was the man who would be complicit in the partition of India, along with his Indian counterparts, in what would turn out to be one of the bloodiest events in the history of the world. But when reading anything that is related to India, we are taught of eras and empires and kingdoms. Rarely is an individual talked about much in the larger context, as a means of history. One of the reasons might be that it is so vast that even an individual can cover only a fairly small time scale. Perhaps Nehru, if the centerpiece, can tell us a bit about Modern India. But he will be spending much of that time in the northern part of the subcontinent and outside India itself, and very little in the southern parts of it. The geography plays a...

Stoner by John Edward Williams My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.” Rarely does a book, seemingly unrelated captures your feeling in words that you wish were your own. Sometimes, when I am reading a book, or staring at the to-read pile at my desk, I feel a thought very similar to the one articulated above. Now that we have gotten it out of the way, let's come to the book. An american classic, almost two years since the last one. I have since grown averse of the genre. They have a way of doing things to your heart. Today, the sole reason I started this book was to get it off my to-read list. It's been there for months. And I am glad I took it on. "He listened to his words fall as...

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Watson was a misogynist and racist. Halley was the one who actually haggled Newton into publishing Principia Mathematica. Robert Hooke was a shameless plagiarist. Wolfgang Pauli's wife ran of with a chemist. Avogadro, of the Avogadro no. fame, was brought to a school by his mother who hitchhiked 4000 miles, to make sure he got an education and died shortly after they got to the school. Henry Cavendish was quite possibly the worst introvert in history. Almost half of Science's discoveries are misattributed, either because the discoverer's were very secretive, or because the ones who got the attribution were more influential in there fields. And the barrage of facts goes on and on like this. A Short History of Nearly Everything (henceforth known as ASHONE) is one of those books you have to careful to keep at an arm's length, or you'll have to go through an e...