Key To My Life

The fragrance of old and new books- you ask any book lover and this stands apart as one of their indulgences. Cloud Cuckoo land is a story that celebrates the love for books and gives you a whiff of this fragrance, through words.  Set in three timelines and places (15th Century-Constantinople, 2020 - Idaho and in a certain unspecified near future timeframe in an interstellar ship), the book is a clever compilation of narratives from 5 protagonists whose destinies are interlinked to help uplift the destiny of a lost ancient text while the text in many ways becomes their beacon of hope to make progress in life and to march onwards. In a beautiful symbiotic relationship, the book saves them as much as they help resurrect the book. With his clever writing style, Anthony Doerr makes the reader work towards building that narrative  much like a jigsaw puzzle and that's part of the thrill of reading this book. Chapters are small yet very detailed in presentation, which gives the impre...

                      Exhalation is a collection of short stories from Ted Chiang. This is a beautiful collection of deep and thought provoking ideas delivered through the medium of stories. The book is, overall, like a "BlackMirror" series of the literary world, combining futuristic ideas with compelling story telling. As I turned the pages of this book, Ted Chiang effortlessly made his way from being a nobody in my world to my current favorite author of all times. My favourite among the gems in this collection is " Truth of Fact, Truth of feeling " where the author draws parallels between the technology of writing and a futuristic technology of indexed memory video logs.  The parallels drawn are amazing to the extents of highlighting the pros and cons of each of the tools with amazing literary devices. Writing in a way is an augmentation to the mind, almost like how external memory can be used to log our lives . The constrain...

Around the time I finished reading Homo Deus, Life 3.0 seemed like the logical next read based on how my thoughts were forming about humans in the landscape and history of cosmos. ( Read my review here:  http://deepthig.blogspot.com/2020/06/homo-deus-notes.html ). I had seen Life 3.0 in the reading list published by Barrack Obama in Dec 2018. My key take aways : 1) "Matter" Matters. The narration touches upon popular questions around AI like jobs, politics, goals, purpose and consciousness. It throws light on the Moravec's paradox which shows how humans find it easier to detect a face and  hard to do long mathematical computations whereas as we cracked the latter problem for machines to solve before we could solve the former. The simple reason for it is the vast number of physical hardware in our brain that is devoted to the former operation which is required for the achievement of the goals. Moravec's landscape also provides guidance to the type of skills that are l...

          I usually do not have a strong, detailed memory of books I read or movies I watch in terms of their plots and story line. However, the key characters and the feeling that it leaves me with, usually stay with me for a long time.  Recently, I was reminded of "Atlas Shrugged" from a tweet by a Mentor and I remembered the feeling of inspiration and disruption it had had on my thinking when I had read it in my teens. I decided to pick it up for a re-read, also curious about a calibration of my own progress.           Reading it again gave me  a feeling of having plunged into a different age in the history of human progress in terms of engineering , of metals, rail roads and the like as opposed to the digital worlds that I seem to be immersed in these days.  The core message from the revolutionary leader in the book (Refer to the Chapter :"John Galt Speaking") is over 70 pages of monologue and is a stark contrast ...

      Homo Deus is an interesting intersection of economics, politics, history, psychology , evolutionary biology and spirituality. The account starts with a summary of human life before showing a projection of what the future could hold but with a disclaimer relieving the author of any obligations, just in case a different future unfolds!! ;)       The disclaimer is quite interesting in revealing the paradox of historic knowledge (I love paradoxes!!):  " Knowledge that does not change behavior is useless, but knowledge that does change behavior loses relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course and faster our knowledge becomes outdated ". ( I am compelled to contrast this with the  Oogway quote: " O ne often meets his  destiny  on the road he takes to avoid it ")       Yuvah predicts that the human agenda for future would be centred around the below 3 p...

My very first book- self published on Amazon under the pseudonym: Leela Menon https://www.amazon.in/Quiet-Whispers-Leela-Menon-ebook/dp/B07M7KCBB5 " The vast potential of who we all could be is within our minds - our own biggest comfort, pride and fear. This composite novellette is an unapologetic journey to understand the limits of sanity of our minds in the form of short and micro stories and verse. The little child asking for the moon is in all of us, craving for the impossible, unattainable. Life is like this dark chocolate, which becomes unpalatable without the right balance, a balance between the conflicting needs of the human mind- The need for the familiar just enough to balance the need for the novel. The need for excitement just enough to counter the need for contentment. The need to be in control just enough to feel the need to let it go and to be vulnerable. The need to be heard just enough to keep the little voices in our heads unheard."

Alias Grace by Margret Atwood. Margret Atwood, with this book has led me back to the world of fiction again. (When did I depart from fiction? Read this : https://deepthig.blogspot.com/2011/04/selfish-gene-richard-dawkins.html )  It's the sort of read that weaves in a story with not the plot but with the author's insights that are refreshingly deep. The novel explores a real life double murder that happened in the 18th century Canada. The thread starts with a fictional character who is a psychiatrist exploring the truth behind the murders for which the protagonist , Grace Marks who was a housemaid at the victim's house, has been declared guilty.The story unfolds gradually in the thoughts of Grace Marks and her discussions with the doctor. Through out the novel, there is an intricate overlap of the innocence and guilt of Grace Marks. The reader is more invested in understanding the mystery of Grace's mind than in getting an answer to the Whodunnit. Really Interes...

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist affiliated with the University of Indiana. At the age of 37, one morning, she woke up with a throbbing headache due to an exploded blood vessel in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she realized that she is having a stroke attack, she found herself thinking "‘But I’m a very busy woman! I don’t have time for a stroke!’"  She took  the opportunity to observe and study the brain circuits during her own stroke while keeping herself busy calling for help. In the 4 hours that followed, she witnessed her different brain faculties shutting down one by one but became aware of certain other changes in her self. She desribes the feeling of knowing what a number looked like in her mind, although when she reached up to the phone for help, she could not identify the numbers on the keypad.  She remembered knowing what to say in her mind when she was  finally able to cont...

The most interesting book I have ever read till date. The book is a beautiful journey of understanding how life might have originated and how life is the way we know it. You get to read and know about a variety of things like social behavior, game theory, psychology and of course biology, with a touch of philosophy if you will. It explains the chemistry and race between prey and predator, male and female, sexual selection, altruistic behavior among individuals and groups, replicators for cultural transmission as in fashion, music and other evolving trends. Considering the entire community of social insects as a single organism with the sterile workers as the support cells and the queen as the reproductive cells- that was a beautiful way of explaining the theory of altruism. The writing style is very elegant, interesting, witty just here and there. I would love him as my teacher because of the way in which he builds up my understanding from nothingness to the level of being able...

. While reading the book and after, I could not quite decide if I liked it. I've always liked the "elephants in the cloud" thought ( that human beings are wired to find a purpose and meaning to everything, to find patterns in the chaos that surrounds us) and the author has explained the idea very well in his field of risk analysis and has been able to extrapolate them it to life in general, in his random thoughts. I learnt a lot of new things from the book and I liked the book for that. However, I believe that it could have been written a little better than this. It was more like a compilation of scattered thoughts and examples which I could not quite classify as a writing style. I really didn't see any reason why the things in a particular chapter were consolidated to be in that chapter. They might as well have been in another section. I am not sure if there was something huge in the book which I totally missed due to which I missed that connection and order. T...

An interesting read. I admire his writing style and choice of words. The book encourages arguments in the reader's mind for and against the idea being debated. It helps you ask more questions to yourself and understand the God in you a little better and be one level stronger, spiritually. Technically, the book is not so much of an attack on the God hypothesis as it is on religion. Calling the book God Delusion may not be acceptable for people who believe in God but take the religious beliefs with a pinch of salt. Labelling God a delusion, for the flaws of religious beliefs is like saying patriotism is a vice because they cause wars.( Interestingly countries are virtual constructs too.) He argues desperately for the non existence of God and speaks against agnostic views and that seemed to me to be fanatic. He has not been successful in convincing the reader that he is not a fanatic in forcing his theory to people who do not believe in it. The argument against the existence o...