Life, The Universe, and Everything

Thanks to work, and preparations for Deepawali , the second week of my project lasted a couple of days longer than two weeks. But through it all I'm happy that I was able to stick to my rule of devoting only the non-productive time to the book at hand. The book that I'm done with now is " Gandhi An Autobiography - The story of my experiments with truth ", which, as I know now, was written in Gujarati originally. The style of the book is very simple and conversational, which makes it an easy read. The author didn't write it in one go, or take too much time out from his daily schedule to pen this. Instead, he tried to complete a chapter or two each week, which makes it easy for the reader to have breaks between chapters (and suited my reading pattern just fine). The author is one of those people who bring out deeply polarizing opinions in people. I am yet to meet someone who looks at him objectively, he is either the Mahatma or the selfish politician who

Week 3 of The 30 Week Project beckons, and it is this week that will test my resolve for the first time for I am totally inundated with work. Nevertheless, I will try to stick to it, and hopefully will be successful. Week 3 started on October 2nd, the birthday of one of the most well known Indians. So I decided it would be the right time to get to a book that has been on my   list for some time now. The book is " Gandhi An Autobiography - The story of my experiments with truth ". I have read parts of this book in Hindi a few years ago. Since then I've wanted to give it a complete reading but something or the other kept popping up. But now the stars have aligned in the form of my 30 week project , and my wife randomly buying this book, so I shall make full use of it. I went through the first few chapters this morning on the way to office and what stuck out for me from the introduction were the bits where he asks the readers to not take like/hate any idea beca

It wasn't too much of a reading week since I finished the book in a couple of days flat. Turns out that was for the best since I haven't had any time to spare from work since then. As I'd mentioned , I'd taken up Lee Goldberg's "Mr Monk is miserable" last Sunday. It was a fun breezy read and for the most part it kept true to the portrayal that we have seen on TV. It was a good idea on the author's part to stick to Natalie's first person account of the events. She has the best view of Monk and the mystery at hand, and provides the much needed saner voice when Monk is going berserk in his own way. As is common with Monk, investigating is something that comes as second nature to him and it isn't really the centre-piece of the tale so to say. That honour goes to Monk being Monk  when experiencing Paris, trying to find order in chaos, trying to arrange all human skeletons by type in a Catacomb , trying to single-handedly clean up the stre