The Blowback

Thu 11 December 2014 by Thejaswi Puthraya

Impressed by Mukul Deva's earlier books (Salim Must Die and Lashkar), I picked this book. After the death of Salim, Iqbal is on the way back to India but injured in a skirmish. After a long recovery, he slips through to India to be assigned onto a new operation. The …

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The Argumentative Indian

Tue 09 December 2014 by Thejaswi Puthraya

The Argumentative Indian is a collection of essays by Nobel Laureate and economist Amartya Sen. The essays discuss Indian history, democracy, culture and secularism.

Probably, there is a time and place to read this book and that time (atleast for me) was not now. India is currently seeing a kindling …

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Night of January 16th

Tue 11 November 2014 by Thejaswi Puthraya

This is a play written by Ayn Rand that documents the trial of Karen Andre for the murder of her employer and lover, Bjorn Faulkner on the "Night of January 16th".

The play is fully set in the court and no actual depiction of the murder is shown. The whole …

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Nginx Basic Auth without htpasswd-tools

Mon 10 November 2014 by Thejaswi Puthraya

Sometimes you may want to hide your staging server or project under development from search engines and prying eyes but you don't want to take a lot of pain. HTTP Basic Auth is one solution (can be used as a proper authentication mechanism for web-apps as well) to allow only …

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Lee Iacocca: An autobiography

Fri 31 October 2014 by Thejaswi Puthraya

Lee Iacocca was the poster child at Ford, having started from the bottom and worked his way through (being credited with the Ford Mustang) to become the President of the company. Things seemed to be going well until he was fired after sweating it out for more than thirty years …

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The Rozabal Line

Tue 30 September 2014 by Thejaswi Puthraya

It all starts at the shrine of a mysterious figure in Kashmir. A Hindu astrologer notices a weird star formation and predicts the end of the world and a woman finds a severed head in a library shelf in London. What on earth is happening?

Ashwin Sanghi, the author, builds …

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HBR on Leadership

Wed 24 September 2014 by Thejaswi Puthraya

This book is touted to be one of "HBR's 10 MUST reads" and also boasts of an article by Peter Drucker, the father of "modern management".

The book is compiled from their repository of articles and most of them use case-studies to drive the point. Each chapter discusses one facet …

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Stay Hungry Stay Foolish

Thu 18 September 2014 by Thejaswi Puthraya

"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish" was the legendary parting quote from Steve Jobs during a Stanford commencement. Rashmi Bansal picks up on that quote to narrate the entrepreneurial travails of 25 alumnii from IIM Ahmedabad.

I am not sure if it was intended to be a marketing message for a management …

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The Racketeer

Tue 16 September 2014 by Thejaswi Puthraya

An upcoming black lawyer finds himself behind bars for money-laundering. He hardly gets an opportunity to defend himself during the farcical proceedings. After the sentencing, he is treated on par with criminals convicted of heinous crimes and he seethes with anger at this and wants to get back at the …

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The Hungry Tide

Fri 29 August 2014 by Thejaswi Puthraya

No one, and I repeat "no one" can describe the beauty of the Gangetic delta as well as Amitav Ghosh. The inhabitants of the tiny islands in the delta have made peace with the tide but they fear it when it is accompanied by the storm.

In this book, he …

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