SUVISO

Brain Rules - John Medina A decently refreshing book about the workings of a brain. It will definitely attract and fascinate the not so very well informed people about the topic of brain. Its a fun book for binge reading about the limits and extreme capacities of a normal human brain. The book gives ample information about various aspects of brain very interestingly, giving real life examples and with engaging personal anecdotes. Often times we overestimate our power to control and manipulate our own brain capacities according to our needs. We take it for granted. And ofteb ignoring the basic brain rules by which our mind functions most effectively. Such as sleeping well, exercising, drinking enough water, meditation, proper diet and chemical wiring. And oftentimes we underestimate the capacities of our most important gift, by under utilising it. Brain rules isn't a dense thick academic book about the subject. It is a lighter and less mainstream one and can be referred ...

Synecdoche New York - 2008 Directed by: Charlie Kaufman   Synecdoche, New York is sweepingly vast in its scope and ambition. There will be no second Synecdoche, New York, in future, and if attempts are made to make a such movie again, then they are bound to fail miserably. Charlie Kaufman , the screenwriter, who has written many weirdly imaginative complex stories before, directs his first film, which has the same strange, surrealistic and existential tone to it. The film requires multiple viewings not just to understand whats going on in the film but you will really want to watch it again. The movie has so many complex layers that it is exhausting to it fully absorb the actual motive of it and what it wants to say. The exhaustion is sadisticly satisfyingly though. The film is about life than anything else. It is about mortality, and illness, and relationship struggles, and loneliness, and neurosis, and obssesion, and fleeting time and its about very question of life a...

Rosemary's Baby: 1968 Directed By: Roman Polanski Rosemary's baby is an eery, haunting, bleak and darkly comic horror-noir movie which is apparently a perfect psychological horror in every sense. Directed by Roman Polanski in 1968, the film offers an awfully fatal ambience to it, which we sense from the very first moments of the film.  The story is about a couple who is just moved into a new apartment in order to get their life started and settle there. It seems obvious that they are newly married couple, cheery and conscious of each others preferences and struggles. They were warned by one of their friend that the place have a sinister past and moving there might not be the best idea, but they disregard the idea saying that these things are just made up by people, so they moved in anyways. This couple is Rosemary and her husband, a struggling wannabe actor, played adroitly by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes respectively. But just when they move into that apartment things sta...

The whole story is revolved around a coupon which is forged by a kid, Mitya, who was persuaded by one his friend to repay the money which Mitya had borrowed from a some other friend. But he did not know that it will lead many people to commit the gravest of crime including murder. This book as I found later, presents many of Tolstoy's own beliefs on good and evil, his moral preoccupations, and his view on Christianity. This was written in his last years of life, which makes it more insightful about what he thought in his dying years. Its quite disturbing to understand from the book that how little desperate actions which seem harmless when committed, but later lead to crime of such heinous degrees. In the book we exposed to many characters which are morally sound at first but slowly and gradually they turn into raging monsters and descent into the abyss of depravity just because their circumstances. Good and evil is not that black and white situation where, good people ...

     After certain level these kind of books dont help at all. Although I have to agree with whatever the author has to say but it doesnt make a huge impact on me in the long term. I even forgot that I had read it a few months ago. This is not about this book in general but all others in the self-help genre. It might make difference to the people who actually act after reading such stuff, and who have certain degree of control on their impulses and actions.       This review seems to be more about my reading priority than the work of the author. The author have of course fair ideas about how you can make change and be productive and successful and the best and the most important and........ But at the end it depends on the reader himself to how extent he is ready to act and change himself accordingly.      There are huge number of books being published in these genre everyday. All of them presenting same ideas but putting dif...

Oliver Twist       Although this book was quite tough to get through but I loved it. Loved the process of reading this book throughout. I knew not much about the book when I started reading this. Good for me. Its the best to read a book blind slated and not to be primed with the plot, the characters, their motives and their eventual fate.      The writing style was unfamiliar to me, and really had problems understanding what Dickens wanted to say. But once I got used to it, I actually loved the book even more, because of the way it was written (it was only one of the many reasons I liked it). He used sentences that ran over literally whole paragraphs, and shown importance of commas, appropriately using them and without any restrictions. Of course there was elegance in the words, since it was written in Victorian Period. The words were stuffy, but not used deliberately, they had meaningful purpose and served to enhance the overall sense of t...

Permission Marketing It is quite informative book about marketing. Even though it was written in 1999, it is still relevant today. There are lot of things that we dont understand about marketing. How a product comes to us, in what form, in what credibility. We all are being manipulated by the marketing guys to buy a particular product, without too much trouble from ourselves to first check overall advantages over other available products in the market. We just act on their cues and fall in prey of their game. Although it not always a bad thing. Many products that come to us came because they were better than others. But this book is for marketers not customers. Or also for customers, or people who want to know about marketing. Godin breaks down various strategies used in marketing, in quite easily comprehensive blocks, such as Permission Marketing and Interruption Marketing. To give some idea, Interruption marketing is a desperate effort to gain customers by constantly bomb...

The Asocial Networking  I picked up this book randomly from a book sale without intentionally knowing anything about it. I just read the cover description and subject matter and it seem to me a compelling one. I gave every benefit of doubt to the author and was non judgemental towards whatever the author was really trying to convey. And I had pretty much the same experiences and opinions about social media as his, before I read the whole thing. But it didnt really made me think highly of this text. The author presented some 150 articles on his experiences on social media, particularly Facebook. I find many of them relevant but most of them might be personal to him, but totally irrelevant to me. I dont know that whether we should spend so much time musing and introspecting on something so trivial and artificial as Facebook, but considering that we spend nearly all of our time on such trivial platform, so why not!! But the essays here do not provide any valuable insight b...

Crucial Conversations  This is an extremely helpful and resourceful book, if one is very inclined to improve his ability to communicate. It is so disastrous having not been able to say what you actually want to say and end up misunderstood yourself. There is always a huge gap between what is actually you think and what you end up saying. Everyone does not have a gift of conveying his ideas through exact words. And the stakes are, seriously, high while talking, not just professionally but also personally within your own circle of influence. It was an insightful book, to understand the art of communication. But applying them is not easy as it sounds. It needs self control, refraining from acting on destructive impulses of making your point without understanding the nature of the conversation. We are not really wired to talk about things that matters, but in moments of introspection, we realise how massive was the impact of those things we talked so casually about. And how...

Eat That Frog Pretty common sensical book on procrastination. It is one of the first book I read outside the academic school and college text books. And took me, I guess a month or so to complete. Well the book is for beginners and novice readers, for general population, who aren't exposed to, you know, thick and dense books. But Tracy puts his ideas quite clearly with intelligible and straight forward words. He uses the  Frog metaphor  to explain the process of procrastination and how to avoid it. According to Tracy, the best way to begin a day is to eat a frog, which is your most important and hardest task, and then move onto to other less significant and secondary tasks and so on. Generally this one single or few frog/s(or task), determine the overall productivity of your work. The undertaking of that task right away is not very different than actually eating a frog. It is last thing you would like to do, it is painful unbearable and, you just wouldn't do it. So...

The Great Movies - Roger Ebert I have been reading reviews of Roger Ebert's since a quite time now. I literally read hundreds of his reviews in recent time. When I cant interpret a movie myself I turn to Roger Ebert. He has watched and reviewed more than 25 thousand movies in his career spanning over many decades. So surely we can trust his judgement about movies. He did not review based only on some dry technical bore, although that is also important, and he did incorporate them as well, but he reviewed movies to understand the purpose of the movie, what really the filmmaker want to convey throught it. He tried to dig the very essence and heart of the movie. The technicalities and methods used by filmmakers are only mediums to make movies, not their sole purpose. The very purpose of movies is to manifest the complex human psychological experiences through meaningful stories. And thats important. If a movie is able to constructively convey what it wants to, it serves it...

Thinking Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman In one of interviews Kahneman was asked whether having an insight on the exact workings and flaws of human mind, make anyone more better person and more rational being. Kahneman introspectively said having such an insight definitely make you more knowledgeable but not more rational or better person. There might be no better person to trace out our most biases and flaws than him. But still he cant overcome them himself after decades of intensive research on the subject.  This book is about human biases and flaws. After reading the book I feel like I had many of them. Most of them. I now know them and can trace down the irregularities in my own thoughts with some introspection. But it is so hard to avoid them in daily life. System 1 takes over . It is great academic book but not feasible to be acted upon(or maybe I lack self control). But as a book to understand the world and its most basic and at the same time most complex element, t...

   An Argumentative Indian      An Argumentative Indian is a highly dense and researched book. There are atleast 3 or more references on almost every page. And each of them seems to be reliable. There could have been no better effort to understand the origin of India and more importantly the 'Idea Of India' in such short length.      The whole book is about contradiction. India is land of contradiction. So many people, so many beliefs, huge conflict! Many of us have very distorted version of what India is, what it stands for, based on their born prejudices, which is quite hard to get rid of. And this book becomes so important considering the current extreme situation of the country.      Sen writes about two extreme conditions, people, beliefs, opinions and states to make sense of the whole situation. Many of times the one side have clear superiority to other but sometimes things are not exactly as they look. For example...

 The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams A relatively short book. Funny, humorous and quite easy to read. Which I first thought to be otherwise. I was so immersed in the book from the start that I completed it in one go. It took me around a half dozen hours, a relatively slow speed i suppose. Anyway, it was interesting from the very first pages. There was some wicked dark humor. In very first couple of pages the Earth is destroyed by Vogons in order to a create a spatial bypass. These Vogons are also responsible and famous for reading out their puking and unbearable poetry to whomever who would listen and torturing them to death.  On every other page we are on a completely different part of the universe, with the most quirkiest and memorable characters possibly imagined. Let it be our main protagonist Arthur Dent , his joyously nihilist and dark humoured friend Ford Perfect , the two headed narcissistic Zaphod or be it 'the paranoid' robot Marvin , w...

 Deception Point - Dan Brown Enjoyed this book a lot. It is kind of book you can read even while you are half asleep. Thats not necessarily a bad thing for a book like this. Particularly this one. An engaging thriller novel. And also a fine page turner. Well it is indeed a formulaic book. It have pre-defined structure to it. The characters act the way the author wants them to, according to the requirements of plot for a particular instances. There is of course lack in psychological depth and congruence in characters. They act like set pieces tied together to make a political thriller story, and a scientific as well. The language used is deliberately simple and intentionally avoids using big confusing words and phrases. There is some stupid, and childish humor, and sometimes good ones too.  But it has a decent plot and have seriously unexpected turns and twists one after another. It is an intelligent book. Cant deny that. Author knows what he wrote and why. If you l...