Masinagudi in pictures

Saturday Oct 16th

2.30 pm

Here I was, lying on a hammock in the middle of the dense forest on a bright sunny day, enjoying the cool breeze, and fully soaking in the glory of nature as I pen down this post. Yes! ‘Pen down’ – The surroundings were so inspiring that I actually took out a pen and a paper and started to write this down. The calm serene atmosphere was only interrupted by the pleasant chirping of birds and the rustling of leaves in the wind. What a sea change from the daily noise of vehicular traffic in the city.

This was absolute bliss!!
I could just lie like this forever.

Thursday Oct 14th

10.30 pm

It all began when I casually told my friend “Babe, we should make a trip to Masinagudi sometime. I was recommended this place by many people”. And my friend instantly said “Let’s go this weekend”, not having any clue about what/where this place was. Filled with encouragement, I immediately googled for a few minutes and found out the contact number of the first resort name I came across – “Jungle Retreat”. My friend made a quick call and made a booking right away, before we could even finalize our weekend plans. Everything happened so quickly, and we were shortly on our way to Mudumalai on Saturday Morning at 6.30 am.

Saturday Oct 16th

1.30pm

Seven hours later we were at Jungle Hut, welcomed warmly by the cackle of geese and the bleating of sheep.

A quick check-in and a sumptuous lunch later, we decided to relax the rest of the afternoon until 5 pm when we had a “nature trek” planned for us.

5.00pm

The nature trek was a short one, in the forest area. Still, it was such a pleasurable experience to walk amidst the enchanting beauty surrounding us. The lush green trees, the frothy white foam emerging from the fresh water streams that flowed over hard rocks, the diverse flora and fauna, the beauty of everything was truly captivating.

We also got to see a bear den, but didn’t quite manage a glimpse of the bear despite throwing stones/bottles at the den to attract the animal’s attention.

The rest of Saturday went in swimming, foosball, movies, books, campfire dinner, among other thing. We hit the bed early as we had to get going the next day morning for an early morning safari.

Sunday Oct 17th

5.30 am

We were all set for the Wildlife Safari at the Satyamangalam forest. Satyamangalam – This was the abode of the infamous Sandalwood king Veerappan. The area is supposed to be off limits for regular tourists, but our guide Siddhu had special permission to access the area. Incidentally, Siddhu was an official guide for the local police to walk through the forest territory during Veerappan’s regime; and he was so comfortable with the wildlife that he never carried any weapon while going inside. Incredible!

All excited, we took off hoping to see some genuine wildlife such as Leopards, Tigers, Panthers, Sambars, Chitals and of course Elephants, which is what Mudumalai is known for.

We came across lots and lots of Chitals (Spotted Deer) on the way and we started off our wildlife photography. Deer are such lovely creatures. When you look at them, they look back at you with such an innocent childlike curiosity, and an inquisitive sparkle in the eye that instantly turns into a deadly fear the minute they see the camera flash.

The Elephants:

We saw lots and lots of them all around the place. There was this one bunch where there were three adult elephants and one baby, which looked quite adorable. It was picture perfect. But the minute we started clicking photos, they got pretty anxious; as though we were going to harm the little kid. The adults really got enraged, and started charging towards us.

Luckily for us, within 2-3 minutes they realized that we were just a harmless bunch of humans out there to have fun, and they decided to leave us alone!

Alas, we didn't get to see any of the 'most sought after' creatures such as Leopards, or Panthers. But it was really beautiful to see wild animals – in the wild. Truly, there is no place like home; for man or for beast.

And that brought us to the end of our brief tryst with Mother Nature and 24 hours away from the maddening city life.

September Rain

I love rains. I’ve always loved the rainy season.

As a kid, I would eagerly wait for the first monsoon showers in the month of June. Floating paper boats around with friends, getting thoroughly drenched in the torrential downpour for hours together; ah, those good old innocent days!

I still love rains. There is absolutely nothing like sitting in the balcony with a hot cuppa tea, listening to the pitter patter raindrops, watching them lash against window panes, uprooting trees around, thundering with all their might and showing man what an infinitesimally small and helpless creature he is in front of nature’s fury. And of course, rains are supposed to be one of the most romantic things on earth!

But today was different. Completely different. No paper boats, no cuppa tea, no pitter patter, and surely nothing romantic; Instead, for the first time ever in my life I was wishing so badly for the rain to stop.

September 24^th 2010

At 6.40 pm, I decided to call it a day and bade goodbye to my colleagues in office. Just when I stepped out on my Honda Aviator (it’s an awesome bike by the way), it started drizzling lightly. I chose to ignore the drizzle, as the day had been pretty hot otherwise and I estimated I would reach home in 30 minutes, ample time before it starts heavily (if at all). Turned out I was wrong. Within 5 minutes, the rain turned bad. I have driven in rains before, so I thought I would get through this as well.

Again, turned out I was wrong. The rain only got bad to worse and I really wanted to get out of it quickly. But unfortunately, I had to stop to fill fuel on the way. At the petrol bunk, there were several motorists who had halted just waiting for the rains to stop. Instead of doing the same, I just filled in fuel and decided to brave through the downpour. A wrong decision.

I went on for a while, but after a point it got so bad that my vision was beginning to get compromised and I desperately was looking out for some shelter. As Murphy’s Law would necessitate, there was none around. No shops, no petrol bunks, no bus stops, just a long stretch of road lay ahead of me. I somehow managed another 10 minutes very slowly, trying hard to see what was in front of me and finally reached a place where I could see a lot of bikes parked. So I too stopped, parked my bike there and decided to wait for the rain to reduce. Another wrong decision. There was no real shelter there; all of us just had to stand under a tree!! All I had was my helmet for protection.

We were standing right outside the police academy on Hosur main road. The entrance to the police academy was sloping slightly upwards and as a result water was gradually getting accumulated where we were standing. All of a sudden the security guards over there opened the two front gates. Immediately, water started gushing out of the gates with so much force, that it was as though the floodgates of a dam were opened up. The force would have been enough to run a turbine and generate electricity, in fact! Within minutes, the water was almost knee deep at that place and a few of the bikes got half submerged. Luckily mine was parked at a higher elevation, so was better off.

At this point, I realized that it was absolutely futile to fight against Mother Nature and decided to wait right there under the tree till it stopped raining. I would have waited for almost an hour there, just getting drenched. It was freaking cold, especially as I did not even have a warm jacket. And this is the point when, for the first time in my life, I was wishing so badly for the rain to stop.

Finally, when the intensity of the downpour reduced a bit, I decide to leave. I had to wade through knee deep water with the bike, for about 20-30 metres to get onto the road itself. And when I did get onto the road, I was faced with yet another obstacle. Heavy Traffic Jam. Sigh, I resigned to my fate.

Somehow I got through the ordeal, fighting my way through the traffic, the water flooding, the potholes and the unruly motorists. By the time I reached home it took me 2 hours for a journey of 30 minutes, I was soaking wet, almost frozen, teeth shivering, hands so numb that I couldn’t even feel my fingers. But yeah, I was there. Safe and Sound.

So much for a rainy day in Bangalore. But yes, I still do love rains!

Here are some pics:

Superfreakonomics

I had been wanting to write about this book for quite sometime now, given that I had read it almost a year ago. I had read Freakonomics, the first book by the authors Dubner and Levitt and loved it so much that I blindly ordered a copy of the sequel without even bothering to read the reviews. Perhaps it wasn’t such a wise decision after all.

The basic premise that the authors worked on in the original Freakonomics is “People respond to incentives”; whether it is a suicide bomber, a real estate agent, a drug dealer, a sumo wrestler or a street prostitute. Superfreakonomics was intended as a sequel with the same premise, based on which, the authors have aggregated a number of unrelated topics which are in reality no more than anecdotes, short stories if you will. Somewhere along the entire book, I never got the impression that “People respond to incentives”. Either the authors have completely digressed from the basic premise that they claim to be a unifying theme between both the books, or I have somehow failed to read between the lines.

The very first chapter that gives a detailed ‘analysis’ of the economics of prostitution, is not only quite crude and obnoxious, in my view, but also really tells us nothing significant or interesting. It looks as though the authors have deliberately thrust the chapter right in the beginning of the book in order to engage the reader enough so that he/she will end up reading the rest of the book; this of course is the popular trend these days and it works!

Then there is this other chapter that talks about how the brouhaha over global warming is uncalled for, with only a 5% probability of an actual catastrophe happening, and this number itself is uncertain as well. The authors further say that the issue of global warming has become a ‘religion’ where the true believers are going all out to reduce carbon emissions while the agnostics claim that human activity contributes just 2% of global CO2 emissions, the rest coming from natural processes like plant decay. Obviously, this kind of an assertion had to incur the wrath of the scientist community. A few other smaller stories are thrown in such as about how ‘global cooling’ and not ‘global warming’ was the major issue in the 1970s, and the impact of Mount Pinatubo’s volcanic eruption on the world climate.

Okay, fine. Now while I am still trying to figure out what on earth any of the above stories have to do with economics or have any meaningful data backing them, the authors shift gears. Enter “Intellectual Ventures (IV)” and its founder Mr. Nathan Myhrvold. The rest of the chapter (which is around 60-70%) is all about glorifying the ingenuity of Mr. Myhrvold and how he has found the ‘magical’ solution to the global warming problem at a very low cost – Inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere using a really high hose. The Sulfur dioxide, combined with the water vapor in the atmosphere, has the property of reflecting sunlight back into space. Voila! An alternative solution suggested by IV is to form man-made clouds that would induce a cooling effect in the atmosphere. And how is this done? Use a fleet of boats with underwater turbines to kick up a steady stream of water spray into the air, several yards above the ocean’s surface. Sounds simple enough?

And not just global warming, IV seems to have a solution to every other global problem. For e.g, a simple solution to avert hurricanes in future is to continually keep flushing out the warm surface water of oceans to the bottom, so that the colder water comes to the surface; and this can be done by using huge floating cylinders in the ocean!

The whole chapter was nothing more than a long winding epic story, phew!

Now that was about global warming. There was this other chapter on why suicide bombers should buy life insurance. This topic particularly caught my attention, as the chapter summary hinted at something like “How to catch a terrorist?” which made me quite curious. And instead what do I get? I get to know about some guy called Ian Horsley (“name changed for security reasons”) who mined a lot of data on the terrorists, and created an algorithm that would identify a terrorist with 99% accuracy. And what more, the most potent metric that truly made the algorithm work was “Variable X”, that cannot be disclosed “in the interest of national security”. What a bummer this was!

I do not want to sound overtly critical; the book was definitely engaging to a good extent and does provide good entertainment value. There are also several interesting facts and theories that I learnt from the book. And yeah, the epilogue section on the experiments with monkeys was quite hilarious. But still, on the whole, the book turned out to be far below my expectations and was simply not up to the high standards set by Freakonomics. several claims were either not so believable or were incomplete, and not so much backed by data while some were plain irresponsible. One can read it purely for the entertainment it provides, and not look for applications of economic heories in day-to-day life, unlike Freakonomics which stuck to its theme pretty much.

The Paradox of Choices...

A while ago I was reading an article about the small car market in India and how the Indian consumer is overwhelmed with a myriad of options, to an extent where she is unable to make a rational purchasing decision. I can completely relate to the statement. If I were to purchase a car right now, I would perhaps end up using a random number generator to make my decision.

As consumers, it is not just about small cars, but about every single thing that governs our lives where we make choices. Be it our mobile phones, our day to day FMCG products, white goods, the idiot box with its innumerable channels, our retail products and even the basic food that we eat; there is a plethora of choices everywhere.

Of course, some choices that we make are more important than others, choices that shape one’s destiny; career choices for instance.
While I was growing up, at different points in time I wanted to become a different person. At times I thought I would make a great Bollywood actress, at others I thought it would be super cool to become a CID Detective! There were other times when I imagined myself as a school teacher, and at other instances I was a scientist winning a Nobel Prize. Ultimately, I guess I was destined to be an Equity Research Analyst (Sigh, so much for my dream of fighting crime and solving mysteries).

On the other hand, some choices can be relatively insignificant, and yet can tax the mind to no end. For e.g. the decision I had to make on my derivatives position. The payoffs were like this – a) Exit and make immediate profits of Rs. 600 b) Wait and bear the risk of unlimited losses or another opportunity to make bigger profits.
During my first tryst with derivatives, I opted for (b) and ended up making colossal losses. Fortunately (or no?) this time I went for choice (a) and settled for lower profits, but got rid of the unwanted stress of the huge uncertainty that lay ahead.

Now isn't it supposed to be a good thing to have so many choices? Or is it like the situation of Buridan’s ass? (A hypothetical situation wherein an ass is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. The assumption is that the ass will always go to whichever is closer, but ultimately it will die of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision to choose one over the other.)

There have been several occasions where I have faced a similar situation (not that I am comparing myself to Buridan’s ass, but the analogy holds nevertheless) wherein I was unable to make a choice and ultimately ended up leaving the decision incomplete. For e.g. my plan to purchase a house – of course for such a big ticket purchase a random number generator will not be apt. Nevertheless, I could not decide upon the budget, the locality, and worse still not even the city; and therefore cancelled the idea of a purchase altogether.

I think we as humans are so spoilt for choices that we fail to appreciate the finer things in life. I also think that too many choices in life lead to excessive hubris, greed, envy, and a lack of focus and confidence.
And there is always this constant stress of 'what if I had made the other choice, would things have been better?'

But quite often I have wondered “What if?” What if we could actually live an entire life for each of the choices we make in our lives? That would be like living a million lives within a single lifetime. Each of the million lives can be lived in a fast forward motion within the original lifetime. Finally, we can take a combination of the best choices that results in the best kind of life, and ultimately live that life alone in our original allotted timeframe of life.
This will surely make a good movie script, a la Chris Nolan types right? But oh well, that’s another story altogether.

The Stars of FIFA 2010

Question: What are the top two takeaways from this year's world cup?
Answer:
1: Paul - the psychic Octopus
2: Vuvuzela - the celebrated trumpet of Africa

Now what else is common between the two other than being the Stars of FIFA?

I would have to say "Both of them are as annoying as they could get".

The Vuvuzelas -
I don't really need to explain why they are annoying. The deafening ultra-high decibel noise coming out of the blaring trumpets (actually sounds more like a huge swarm (maybe zillions) of bees) is enough to make the healthiest of people tone deaf. The first time I heard this noise in the background during a match, I thought something was faulty with my cable connection and actually had a long argument with the poor cable guy on the bad quality of audio! I felt quite embarrassed when the truth came to light.

The Psychic Octopus and the Psycho followers -
Everyone, everywhere is talking of Paul, the psychic Octopus these days, and about how accurately 'he' predicted the outcomes of all eight matches - the ones that Germany played and the Finals in FIFA 2010, correctly. Paul is in fact front page news on most leading newspapers, if you notice. Spanish businessmen have offered 30 grand Euros for the Octopus, whereas Italians have claimed that the Octopus is in fact an Italian catch, named Paolo! So much fuss over a silly sea creature. And the Germans, who presently are the legal owners of Paul, had put absolute faith in his predictions during the World Cup (and they say that we Indians are superstitious).
But it is surely strange, that the creature turned out right 13 out of 14 times that it has been used for such purposes, although observations do reveal certain patterns:
1: The Octopus usually tends to go for the country whose flag has more designs or is brighter. Think of it - Spain and Serbia, both have flags with three rectangles, with a prominent design in-between. On the other hand England, Argentina, Uruguay and Ghana have flags that are quite dull when compared to the German one. The outlier here is Australia whose flag is far more attractive than Germany's, and yet Paul picked Deutschland. Note: Wikipedia's article on 'Octopus' supports this theory. Apparently, Octopuses have a keen eyesight and can distinguish between different colors.
2: The second theory is that, Paul usually picks up the box kept on the right side. Again, this has been true for all the FIFA predictions, with the exception of England, whose box was on the right side, while Paul picked Germany again.
Whatever be the truth, Paul's predictions work. And that's what has made him a celebrity, and that's what has even brought him several death threats (I fully support this). Talk about two sides of a coin! Now, I personally found Paul much more annoying than the Vuvuzelas purely because the damn mollusk bet against my fav Die Mannschaft.

So that's the end of the story of the Octopus and the Vuvuzela.

Oh yeah, there is one more Star that I almost forgot to mention here. Ms. Larissa Riquelme - the kind lady who volunteered to run naked through the streets if her home country Paraguay won the world cup. Unfortunately, they got eliminated in the quarters itself. But wait, there is more to this story. The lovely damsel was extremely disappointed at the defeat, even more than the Paraguayan team themselves. It is a different matter that it wasn't exactly because her home country lost, but because she lost an opportunity to run naked!! In a bid to make up for the colossal loss, she still declared that she would keep up her promise as 'a present to all the players, and for all the people in Paraguay to enjoy". Whoa! Dramas galore in FIFA 2010. But I am sure glad Argentina lost; after all who in their right mind would want to watch Diego Maradona do what Ms. Larissa proposed to do (Oh well, that's a different story).

FIFA -
Actually, this is the first time ever I have watched any Football match from the beginning to end. I never understood why FIFA was such a rage among the denizens of the Earth. I still remember the time in 2006, when me and my roommates decided to try and watch a soccer match, just to understand what the big fuss is all about Football. If I remember right, it was Germany playing Italy. All of us were rooting for the German team all through the match, and cheered with much enthusiasm whenever there was a shot on the goal...It was only in the end when the commentator announced that Germany lost the match, that we realized that we were supporting the wrong team all along!!! Of course, unlike Cricket, the players' jerseys do not tell you the name of team they are playing for, so we hadn't a clue as to which colored shirt represented which country. So much for our knowledge of Soccer.

Anyway, a lot has changed since then, coming into the 2010 World Cup and much to my own surprise, I actually enjoyed the football matches to the core. It was quite a refreshing change from the useless, controversial, fixed matches of Cricket that we Indian audiences are mostly subject to.


So to conclude - Heil FIFA! Heil Deutschland! Und Koche die Krake fur mittagessen. Waka Waka.

1411.....or the era of the Cockroach?

1411- By now every one of us would be aware of this number; in case you didn't know, that is the exact number of tigers left in India. The 'Save our Tigers' initiative, launched by Aircel and NDTV, has roped in stars such as Suriya, MS Dhoni, Baichung Bhutia to campaign for saving the tigers, which is incidentally the national animal of India (I had almost forgotten till I was reminded of this fact by these ads). The audience is asked to spread awareness through e-mails, social websites, blogs (this post is not one such), word-of-mouth and anything else that comes to mind.
Now the question I would ask is - Why ?
Is it because:
1: The tiger is our national animal.
2: It is cruel to kill animals for human pleasure.
3: As a policy, no species on earth should ever get extinct.

Let us begin with Point 2:
There is already a whole lot of jazz around us on the issue of cruelty towards animals, it is in fact a worldwide phenomenon. We have the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) with two million supporters worldwide (Source: Wikipedia) or 3% of the world human population; and back home we have our very own Maneka Gandhi with her "People for Animals" and active involvement in various other animal rights related initiatives. I am assuming these organizations would certainly focus on 'Saving the tiger' as well along with various other animals, that may include mosquitoes, flies, and bees as well. So I really don't think we need more people to spread the awareness, we especially don't want Mr. Dhoni joining Maneka Gandhi's camp, lest it affects his Cricketing performance adversely!

Point 3 - This completely contradicts the basic theory of evolution by Charles Darwin.
Darwin says that the mechanism of evolution of life essentially follows 'natural selection' and 'survival of the fittest'. It just means that any living organism 'naturally' selects the most desirable traits required to adapt itself to its surroundings, and over a period of time the species that are the 'fittest' survive, whereas the others get extinct. Simple enough?
History has it that over 97% of species that ever lived are now extinct; and someone else says that 25% of all species known to mankind will become extinct in our lifetime. There have been a total of five "mass-extinction" periods in the history of the earth's existence, the most notable of them being the extinction of Dinosaurs, that paved the path for the arrival of mammals and birds into the world (For details please refer - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_extinction), and finally us Homo Sapiens. Had there been any resistance to the natural process of evolution, humans would not have been humans, we would have still remained apes. Or worse still, we would all have been single cellular amoebic organisms, or maybe even not that.

All I am trying to say is, this is exactly why one day even the tigers will get extinct; Rather, they need to get extinct, in order make way for something better, and fitter. Just like one day even the human race will become extinct and give way for a far superior species, right? Now this is what will be the "Sixth mass extinction" in the history of evolution. If this is how nature has intended life to be, then why tinker with it, right?

Finally, coming to Point No. 1 - Do we need to save the tiger just because it is our national animal? Now, how did the Tiger come to become our national animal in the first place? And why was the Tiger alone chosen as the national animal? Why not something else that had far lesser chances of becoming extinct within the era of the Homo Sapiens?
Just to give a different perspective - take the case of sport; Hockey was made our national sport at some point in history and it still remains so. But instead, it is cricket that the entire nation worships ah so religiously! This would perhaps be followed by Tennis, or F1 where India is nowhere in the world map; and yet Hockey is almost dying a natural death, just like the tigers of India.

So if the sole reason for 'Saving our tigers' is that it is our 'national animal', then it is surely not worth the efforts. I say - lets not bother about the Tiger being our national animal. Let us all just embrace Darwin's theory, let the tigers reach a natural extinction, and let us create a new national animal. Something that is found in abundance. How about the Cockroach? Or the housefly perhaps; some of the most ubiquitous creatures you would find around. I am sure these animals would not get extinct for generations to come. Some scientists say that even in the event of a nuclear holocaust or aliens capturing the earth, the one species among all living beings that will truly survive is the Cockroach. So let us all join hands and spread awareness through e-mails, blogs, social websites, word-of-mouth and anything else - to make the Cockroach our National Animal!

Books and Me...

My newest resolution is to develop the habit of reading. Regular reading that is. 6 books a year, one in two months - quite a reasonable target to begin with, I think. Especially, given that I took one FULL year- last year, to finish a single book that went by the name - "When Genius Failed". Of course, it was more like a textbook on exotic derivative products and stuff, rather than a readable story; so not entirely my fault for being so slow. This made me ponder over how my reading habits have gone through a sea-change over the years.

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The first time I would have started reading something other than my school textbooks would have been at the age of 6-7. Tinkle, Amar Chitra Katha, Champak etc were some of my favorite reads back then. I still remember how used to eagerly wait for my subscriber's copy of Tinkle every two weeks, go straight on to the Puzzles page, solve them and send them across to the magazine's office. But all I ever got in return for my 'correct entries' were some 'Coupons', which if I collect in certain numbers would entitle me to a 'bigger gift'! Which I never ultimately claimed anyway.

Over a period of time, I started cultivating the habit of reading novels. This was when i was in standard 7th or 8th, those were the days of Enid Blyton, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys; of course Tinkle never did lose its charm even then! Ah! The Teenage years - A time when a lot of my friends used to go absolutely ga ga over the 'romantic' Mills & Boons books. Somehow I never really had the courage to pick up one of those books and peruse the contents. The sheer number of those books lying around in my neighborhood library and the ridiculously mushy content thoroughly repelled me. Anyway, romantic novels never really were my cup of tea. Thrillers, Action, Murder Mysteries were more of my type. Surprisingly, my choice is the exact opposite when it comes to movies. While I quite enjoy watching romantic movies with the occasional mush, I do not really fancy action movies.
After some years, the Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys were replaced by the likes of Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, James Hadlee Chase. Tinkle was almost out and in came Archie Comics. Those were the days when I used to easily finish off one novel a day.

I used to particularly love the Hercule Poirot mysteries of Agatha Christie. Poirot was absolutely unique in the way he solves crimes, purely by talking his way through the various characters, playing with their psychologies and getting them to reveal more information than they desired to.

In a complete contrast to Poirot was Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason whose first step after a crime has taken place invariable is to collect 'physical' evidence - fingerprints, footprints, cigarette butts, ash trays, anything and everything that one can lay hands upon at the crime site. Of course, the character Perry Mason was a lawyer by profession, rather than a detective, as was the author himself, and therefore more than 50% of his novels involve courtroom dramas. I simply loved those courtroom dramas of Perry Mason, and the way he defends his client in a seemingly impossible case.

I have come across very few people who have read a James Hadley Chase, and rarely anyone who actually liked his books! What I really enjoyed about his books was that they are always full of action, extremely fast paced, and would always keep one guessing what's going to happen next. Although crime is always central to his novels, they are not exactly murder mysteries; each novel will have a unique adventure to tell.

Coming away from thrillers and murder mysteries, an author who remains my all-time favorite is PG Wodehouse - a legend in his own right. The classic Jeeves - ah! Who wouldn't have heard of him? The quintessential butler, who always has an answer to every conceivable problem in the life of his employer Bertie Wooster, who has a knack for landing up in all kinds of awkward social situations.

Well, that was almost the end of my reading habits, as I entered college. I may have perhaps read 8-10 books in all four years of my engineering,which was when I got introduced to Sidney Sheldon for the first time. "Tell me your dreams" of his is one of my favorites. I must make a mention here that I have somehow not read a John Grisham or a Jeffrey Archer till date, which I presume is a must read for any avid reader. Nor have I read any 'Classic' novel. After college, I've read books intermittently, of various genres, with no specific preferences. "The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night Time", "The picture of Dorian Gray", "Freakonomics", "Fooled by Randomness", "The Monk who sold his Ferrari" - are some of the ones I liked.

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So coming back to the present - So far my count for 2010 is three - 'The Interpretation of Murder', 'Superfreakonomics' and '2 States'. More on the individuals in another blogpost.