Sunday, October 09, 2011

Jaya

Jaya is a book on Mahabharata written by Devdutt Pattanaik. The book covers the main story of Mahabharata along with few anecdotes that are prevalent in certain states / tribes in India. The USP of the book is that it has creative illustrations that will make your read interesting.

I would recommend this book to people who are new to story of Mahabharata. For people who are versed with the mythology might find only 10% - 20% of the material that is exciting and something that they haven't heard before. You can still pick the book up for illustrations though.

Overall I am glad I read it as I learnt something new about Mahabharata (even after having read / watched few versions of the story since childhood).

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Stay Hungry Stay Foolish

The book, written by Rashmi Bansal, lists 25 alumni from IIM-A that are successful entrepreneurs. The book explains the struggle of these people in starting something from scratch. Rashmi interviewed these 25 people and got them to advice the budding entrepreneurs about the paths they should take and the pitfalls they should avoid.
The book is a pretty average read. I would have preferred if Rashmi had interviewed only 3 out of these 25 stalwarts and wrote their startup-survival stories in long and detail. Instead she chose to write 25 stories which after certain point sound similar. Well to be fair I cannot expect her to write a fictional story with a nerve-breaking twist at the end, but then the book fails in inspiring its readers as none of the stories are well-researched. Most of the material has been provided by the entrepreneurs themselves during their one-on-one interview with her. It seems that all she did was to use her own IIM-A alumni card to get access to these people and interview them in the limited time that they could provide her.
On the better part, these numerous stories tell you that a successful entrepreneur can come from any academic / family / economic background. The common factor of all these people is their strong will - willingness to stick around longer with their creation especially during the bad times.