Online Book Shopping!!

Welcome to the era of online shopping! I am quite excited about the arrival of e-commerce in India. I am already hooked onto it for buying books. There are a lot of benefits when it comes to online purchase of books:

1. There is a clear display of best-sellers, new arrivals, classification of books by various genre. This enables you to quickly narrow down the search to what you are specifically looking for.
2. The book review can be read in parallel from review sites and you get the idea of whether the book is of interest to you or not
3. The book is typically available at a 25% discount to the cover price, which is a significant saving of cash in your wallet. You can now get a lot more books for the same budget.
4. There is no need to stand and wait in long queue's at the billing and checkout counter (also add the time wasted in traveling to a bookstore, waiting in traffic, walking through a maze of crowded shelves unable to get what you are looking for)
5. The book is delivered to your doorstep (typically, free of shipping charges) in a neatly wrapped cover. So far I have not faced any issues on this front

With all these advantages, I am now a complete believer in online shopping when it comes to buying books. I would suggest you to try buying books online. There are a couple of good sites which I have found to be reliable. I usually compare prices and delivery options across:

www.flipkart.com and
www.landmarkonthenet.com

The Immortals of Meluha

Just finished reading this book called - The Immortals of Meluha. I liked the simple and yet engrossing style of writing of the book. The author doesn't hesitate to use contemporary ideas, culture and language while describing the characters set in 1900 BC India. This makes the plot interesting and understandable to a person unaware of ancient Indian history. The main theme of the novel seems to be a search for meaning. Meaning as conveyed by concepts such as good and evil. The author suggests that varying from the norm is often considered or portrayed as evil. He brings this idea to the fore by delving into the root cause for war between the two sparring tribes, each of whom are counting on the same legend to redeem their way of life.

Another undertone in the novel is about the makings of the present day Indian society. The author explores the two ways of life which have interwoven themselves into the Indian society - the stratified society bound by systematic laws and a democratic society founded on individual freedom. The idea is to provide an explanation to the emergence of the present society from two distinct social orders, each with their own advantages. The book is the first in a three part sequel and so the story doesn't end with this part. The author leaves the audience guessing in the end. The protagonist Shiva and his consort Sati are under attack by the Nagas. Have to wait and read to know how the plot unfolds :)

Dehumanization and Web 2.0

The advent of online social networks, text messages and instant messages has lead to dehumanizing emotions. I have decided to go all out against this kind of attitude because it risks breaking all essential human bonds by making bonding a big joke.

Today, the youth are particularly inclined to live efficiently rather than effectively. By efficiently, i mean going through the daily motions of life as optimally as possible. This is ok as long as it's for paying bills online or getting work done. But it has become a fad to stretch this to unbelievable proportions.

I hate it when I see my name as part of a group wishing list, be it in mail or on text messages. Group and bulk SMS's irritate me and when i am lumped with everyone else I take it to mean that I am just a part of a group of people who need to know something as a formality. WTF! I would rather wish a few people personally than make it a show of sending 100 sms' and receiving so many, knowing fully well that it means nothing to the sender or receiver.

Moving on to instant messages. When the instant messaging service was first conceived, it was probably meant to be for quick hello's for those living on two different continents. Today it has become an escape route for making life 'efficient'.

What is more, most of them need to be prompted to say about what is happening in life. It is as though everyone is living a secret life, closed and hidden. I believe that when people behave this way, they think too much of themselves. And everyone does this following one another, resulting in the - 'Hi, how are u?' syndrome.

Hi, how are u? I am fine

How are u? I am fine

When I see this, it reads to me as:

Hi, I am alive, are u?
I am alive too, how alive are u?

Why should I say anything more about my life, when you cannot say something about yours. Something which is different from the list of status messages you have already put elsewhere.

What can you really make out from text? Can u understand what is 'I am fine' or 'i am ok' when you don't even hear a person's voice? It is just a formality for the sake it. As if this was not enough, the inability to know one's emotions on messaging has made it almost mandatory to include an emoticon. Imagine saying 'get lost' with a :D smiley and without it? It can reflect two entirely different emotions. More often than not, lots of misconceptions arise because of emoticons alone.

I strongly believe that if you value someone, you should make it a personal gesture to remember or uniquely identify them. There should some meaning in communication. Not in a manner of a sham where everyone is treated the same. You will be treated in the same way as you treat everyone else. And this results in what can be termed an 'attention deficit syndrome'.

Those who matter and would have cared for you, have been cast away because of impersonal behavior. Those who don't care will only send bulk messages. What happens when you desperately want someone to pay attention to you? There is no one left and you start putting up status messages online. It is a sign of desperation. The individual wanting the recognition of identity over collectivism. The same individual who dissolved the identity by making everyone equal wants to be attended to. The notifications and status messages hoping to catch the eye of one in a hundred who will ask you 'what's wrong?' and go beyond the 'hi, how are u?'

Nothing extraordinary needs to be done to recognize people as individuals. Just be normal. Don't try to optimize and make human relations an efficient process. In the end what will happen is that when you feel human, everyone will treat you like a robot, sending notifications and nothing more that that. No point ruing over loss of human touch then!

A place called home

There is a place called home. It is the only home we have ever known. It is our planet Earth. Earth - Home to all forms of life. We, the humans, constitute a tiny tiny part of the diversity. Yet, it is we who are causing the biggest impact on the planet.

Through our actions, inactions, mistakes and ignorance, we are destroying it. It is not a slow death by any means. Nature is dying. With it's death, the environment we have so long been used to will change, accelerating the extinction of life forms which thrive in these conditions. When nature goes, so will man.

At the twilight of our existence, I want to quote Carl Sagan's profound message about the Pale Blue Dot our dear Home (see that tiny blue dot caught in the picture of the sun beam taken by Voyager from 6 Billion kilometers)

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand."