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“Blink”

2011-09-21T00:00:00+05:30

“Blink” is a book by Malcom Gladwell on rapid cognition, that is, our ability and tendency to take decisions and form opinions in the blink of an eye, without taking the time needed to fully evaluate the matter at hand using all the available evidence. We are usually not conscious of such behavior and cannot normally explain it, if forced to do so. This “thin-slicing” (as the author calls it) helps us a lot in our lives, but we need to be aware of its disadvantages and work towards turning it into an advantage.

There are quite a few and varied anecdotes that the author manages to stuff into this little book to illustrate his points. The breadth of these anecdotes is amazing - I have no idea how the author manages to find so many of them from different fields in support of his points. However anecdotes, being what they are, are hardly conclusive evidence that can prove the author's points. They usually fail to mention or account for another factor that could provide an alternate explanation. In some of the cases, the anecdote in question doesn't even seem to support the author's point (most notably the story of the military war-games between the Red and the Blue teams, where the Red team's behavior appears more deliberate than the author cares to admit), except if you just take his word for it.

In fact there doesn't seem to be much of a point in the book. The author initially seems to argue that we take quite a few decisions in the blink of an eye without much data to support them, which turn out to be the right thing to do. Then the author seems to argue that many a time these decisions and judgements go awfully wrong and we'd really be better off resisting our irrational urges to go with them. Finally the author seems to show that snap decisions work best for experts in their area of expertise or when it is backed by deliberate and sustained practice.

Why does one need a book to tell them this?

In other words, get this book as a light read that tells some interesting stories, but don't expect to get any big insights. As they say here in India, this is a “time-pass” book.

“Liar’s Poker”

2011-08-26T00:00:00+05:30

Liar’s Poker is a book by Michael Lewis that describes his time during the late 1980s at Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank. It also tells the story of the firm itself, especially its hits (with mortgage bonds) and misses (with junk bonds), as it rose to become a mighty power in the financial markets and subsequently fell into disgrace from that position. The book provides an interesting look into the mad, testosterone-filled world of financial traders as it was during a crucial turning point for Wall Street.

The author weaves two narrative threads into the book: his own experience at Salomon Brothers and the story of the rise and fall of Salomon Brothers, peppering these with commentaries on crucial events that shaped the financial markets during the 1980s. The feel of the book changes as the author switches between the two threads - autobiographical in some places, journalistic in others. I found this a little jarring, though the prose remains highly entertaining throughout.

Some of the characters and events described in this book are incredible. These include John Gutfreund, the firm's CEO, Lewis Ranieri, the head of the mortgage department who started off in the mail-room, John Meriwether, the head of the fixed-income arbitrage group and one of the finest bond traders, etc. If you have always cringed at the astonishing paychecks and bonuses given to many traders at Wall Street or if you despise the way they seem to actively misguide their customers to further their own interests, you will find a wealth of material here to support your theses. If you have ever worked in a large organization, you will have much to empathize with in this book.

The author has a knack for simplifying financial jargon and making it accessible to the lay reader. He explains how bonds work, how mortgage bonds are created, what is meant by Collateralized Mortgage Obligation (CMO), what are junk bonds, how traders exploit opportunities for arbitrage, etc. This is crucial as the creation and usage of some of these financial products is central to some of the parts of the narrative. What make the book truly readable though are the author's sense of humor, sharp observational skills and a consistent focus on key people and their interactions.

Read this book to get a good insight into why Wall Street behaves the way it does and why global financial markets have grown so big so fast in the last few decades.

“Khushwant Singh Selects Best Indian Short Stories (Volume 2)”

2011-08-15T00:00:00+05:30

“Khushwant Singh Selects Best Indian Short Stories (Volume 2)” is the second part of a collection of short stories written by various Indian authors and selected by Khushwant Singh. I was looking forward to reading this volume after having read the first volume. Most of the stories in the first volume were of a good quality and I had hoped the same for this volume - unfortunately for me this volume is quite disappointing and the stories vary wildly in quality.

The first six stories in this book are awful in my opinion, even though they they were written by some big-shots (not necessarily in literature though). It's only from the seventh story onwards (“An Accident” by R. K. Laxman) that things start looking up for this book, though they again start to scrape the bottom by the end of the book. I'm a little befuddled by the vast difference in overall quality between the two books, since the stories have ostensibly been selected by the same person for the same collection of which these two books are the constituent parts. Perhaps the publisher should have just published a single volume of great stories, saving readers some money as well as saving a lot of trees.

As with the first book, the stories in this book are short enough to be completed in a single sitting and do not, mercifully, represent obtuse high literature. This makes the book ideal to be picked up during a short break or for a little unwinding, for example. The stories represent a fair cross-section of authors from across the country, including Manohar Malgonkar, Saadat Hasan Manto, Mohan Rakesh, Khushwant Singh, Bhisham Sahni, etc. As is to be expected, some of the flavor of the original language for a story is lost in the translation to English (at least for the stories in Hindi or Urdu), but thankfully much of the original character is retained.

If you have read the first volume, keep your expectations low for this one and you won't be disappointed. If you haven't read the first volume, go ahead and read it - it is well worth the little time and effort you will put into it; this one, I'm afraid not so much.

“Beautiful Thing”

2011-06-30T00:00:00+05:30

“Beautiful Thing” is a poignant book by Sonia Faleiro on the lives of bar-dancers in Mumbai, based on research done by the author over a period of five years. The book tells the story of Leela, a beautiful nineteen year old girl who works as a dancer in a dance-bar in Mumbai called “Night Lovers”. It traces her life as a much-exploited young teenager from Meerut who manages to escape from her home only to become a bar-dancer in Mumbai. There she earns good money, achieves independence and is fussed over by a steady stream of men.

The book is brutally frank and surprisingly intimate, a result of the author being close to her subject and winning her confidence, having followed her subject almost everywhere and having directly interacted with her friends, customers and what passed for her family. Only a woman could have done justice to this subject and it shows in the empathetic tone of the narrative. At the same time, it was remarkably courageous of a woman to spend time in dance-bars, in brothels, in seedy lodges, in the company of petty criminals and not-so-petty ones, with lecherous customers of the girls, etc.

Even though the book is a work of non-fiction, it has a narrative and a cast of characters that rival those in good fiction - it even has a cliff-hanger of an ending, where we are left wondering what becomes of Leela who has taken a big leap of faith. There is beautiful and young Leela who is at the peak of her profession as a bar-dancer at the beginning of the book and has a steady relationship with the (married) owner of the dance-bar. There is the extremely beautiful and somewhat-narcissistic Priya who is Leela's best friend and a bar-dancer as well. There is Leela's submissive mother Apsara who decides to move in with her, much to her irritation. There is Leela's abusive and drunk father Manohar, who regularly beats his wife and in an instance of spite gets the police to repeatedly rape his barely-teenaged daughter. There is Leela's adopted mother Masti who presents the rare case of a eunuch accepted by her family. And so on. The epigraph for the book, quoting Leela, aptly reads:

“My story is the best you will ever hear. The best, understand? Now come close. Closer! Okay, ready?”

There are some minor irritants in book that are a bit distracting. For example, reading “non-wedge” and “kushtomer” looks authentic and amusing once or twice, but not so repeatedly throughout the book. The author has a certain fascination for naming brands that seems superfluous in the text at best and irritating at worst - we are told again and again about the Gold Flake cigarettes that Leela smokes and the LG refrigerator she keeps her rotting vegetables in.

That aside, this is one of those books that make you feel sad or angry at one time and laugh out at another. It makes you contrast your ensconced life and good luck, your relatively petty problems notwithstanding, with that of those far less fortunate, caught in the grip of circumstances beyond their control and living with a constant hope for a better tomorrow. It is in other words a thought-provoking and insightful book that is a must-read. It is arguably one of the best non-fiction books to have come out of India in recent times.

“Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”

2011-06-04T00:00:00+05:30

“Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” is a book by John Perkins describing his work as a purported economist for a large engineering firm (MAIN) that allegedly colluded with politicians and other such firms to spread America's hegemony as an economic super-power. This was done in part by convincing corrupt political leaders in poor countries to take on onerous loans from the World Bank and other such institutions in the name of development and extracting concessions for the business of American companies in such countries when their loans became difficult to service for them.

The author defines the term “Economic Hit Man” as follows:

Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly-paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.

According to the author, the goal of such economic hit men is to further the global empire of corporations, banks and governments (collectively called “corporatocray” by the author, an unwieldy term that he insists on using throughout the book). If a political leader they target turns out to be incorruptible or not pliable, the “jackals” (CIA operatives) are sent in to assassinate them and replace them with a puppet leader, who very often turns out to be a despot. These operations were carried out in all countries that could help further American business interests - from countries in Central and Latin America, to the Middle East and to the Far East.

If a country did not need foreign aid, for example an oil-rich country like Saudi Arabia, America would still convince its leaders to give business to its firms in the name of modernization of the country. Thus money spent on a country, and much more, would eventually come back to America as business profits, whether the money was originally spent on loans to the country or as payments for oil. In recent times with countries like China that export a lot to America, the money still finds its way back to America as China purchases large amounts of American Treasury securities. It helps tremendously that the American dollar is the international reserve currency, since it does not get hit by a country defaulting on a loan or its own obligations on its loans - it can simply print more money to take care of these situations.

The problem with this book is that there is nothing startlingly-new that hasn't long been suspected by people upset by the American hegemony of recent times. For those that aren't, there isn't any concrete evidence in the book to convince them otherwise. You are thus most likely to hold the same viewpoint about American business interests as you held before reading this book. The author claims to have written a draft of this book in the early 1980s, but held back from publishing it because of threats and bribes. Now that it has finally been published, it does not contain any revelations that people haven't already been exposed to elsewhere, even in main-stream media outlets like The New York Times. It just seems like a lame attempt on part of the author to redeem the wrongs of the early part of his career by portraying his supposed constant struggle with his conscience during this period and his renunciation of this career-path thereafter.

This doesn't mean that there's no food for thought in this book. The generally-accepted business wisdom of pursuing growth for its own sake without more than a superficial regard for the depletion of natural resources and the impoverishment of millions of people, all for the sake of continually increasing business profits, must be challenged. The abuse of the power vested in a country by virtue of being the sole issuer of the only international reserve currency is something that needs to be checked.

“Following Fish”

2011-05-09T00:00:00+05:30

“Following Fish” by Samanth Subramanian is one of those rare English books published from India that are not banal attempts at aping the success of the last block-buster book or lame attempts at becoming a “published author”. It is a travelogue and a food-guide that is very well-written and has also been very well-received, hopefully encouraging others to write good non-fiction books of their own.

The book is a collection of nine essays that describe the author's travels through the coast of India in pursuit of the ways in which fish are caught and prepared, as well as the lives of the people who catch the fish. He travels to West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat in his quest, each of which features in an essay (except for Goa, which features in two). The author puts life into these essays by displaying a keen eye for details, a great sense of humor and a flair for the English language. He seems to have charmingly few hang-ups that allow him to get close to his subjects without alienating them.

The essays are wide-ranging in the topics they cover, but are all related in one way or the other to fish. These include the preparation of the famed hilsa (or ilish) in Kolkata, the purported cure for asthma that is delivered by shoving a live medicine-carrying fish down patients' throats in Hyderabad, the toddy shops of Kerala, the pursuit of the sailfish, one of the fastest fish in the oceans, somewhere near Goa and boat-building in Gujarat. Each essay is largely self-contained and with a distinctive feel of its own, making it easy to savor this book in easily-digestible pieces.

It is not very clear just why the author sets out on these journeys, especially since he seems to have taken a dislike to eating fish as a young boy coming from a vegetarian family, but he does show a remarkable passion for his mission and an amazing perseverance. He has a curious penchant for noting brand names (a Mirinda bottle holding oil for a church's lamps, empty Servo bottles used as flotation devices, etc.). I was mildly disappointed that the author does not mention having tasted matthi (sardine) in Kerala, especially since most of the people who have tasted it seem to fall in love with it as far as I have seen, despite its abundance of slender bones that are hard to separate from its flesh. Finally it would be nice to have a list of fish mentioned in the book along with their local names and a sketch or a photograph, for people who are not well-versed in the different types of fish commonly eaten in our country.

Even if you have never tasted fish, these essays make for very interesting reads since they are as much about people and places as about fish. If you love fish, then you owe it to yourself to read this fantastic little book that has just under 170 pages in all.

“Peter Colaco’s Bangalore”

2011-04-25T00:00:00+05:30

“Peter Colaco’s Bangalore” is little book containing several light essays and entertaining anecdotes about Bangalore by Peter Colaco. The book is richly illustrated with water-color sketches by Paul Fernandes (who has created great posters like “Bang, Bang, Bangalore” and the “Shine Boards” series). The book contains “a century of tales from City and Cantonment”, told many a time using the stories of members of the P. G. D’Souza clan, of which the author represents the third generation.

The book dwells a little on the history of Bangalore before presenting little anecdotes and commentary on the evolution of the city. In particular, it talks about the genesis of the very-apparent cultural split of the city into the conservative and somewhat-homogenous “City” areas (Malleswaram, Basavangudi, Jayanagar, etc.) and the liberal and fairly-cosmopolitan “Cantonment” areas (M. G. Road, Lavelle Road, Richmond Town, etc.). Being a man from the Cantonment areas himself, the author talks a lot more about the the Cantonment areas than the City areas. This still leaves the book with lots of entertaining material though and some great insights into why the city has turned out the way it has.

Almost everything that you would expect from a book of this nature is there. For example, the book talks about how large areas of Bangalore came to be occupied by the army, why so many old houses in the Cantonment areas have distinctive “monkey-tops”, why there is such a pronounced influence of English culture compared to other cities in India, how the city came to have so many tanks (and lost so many of them in recent times), etc.

The text doesn't feel dry at all due to the wit and humor of the author. While the author reminisces wistfully about the charm and accessibility of old Bangalore, he is not too bitter about how Bangalore has turned out (except of course for the chronic traffic-congestion and the lack of infrastructure that make it difficult to get from one place in the city to another, which are the pet peeves of everyone here any way). His enthusiasm for the current generation is a welcome relief from the usual grumbling and despair of the people of his generation.

This book doesn't seem to have an ISBN and is very difficult to buy on-line. Even in regular brick-and-mortar shops, it's a little difficult to come by this book. Maybe it's because only people from Bangalore or living here might find this book interesting or maybe it's because this book is probably self-published with a limited number of printed copies.

Unfortunately the lack of editorial oversight shows through - there are quite a few spelling-mistakes, repeated words, spacing-issues and other typographical errors. Many paragraphs are too short and somewhat disconnected from those nearby, leading to an incoherent narrative in places. There are some annoying repetitions - for example, I encountered the sentence “I was born in Bangalore in 1945, the sixth of a family of seven” in at least four different places. I also found the reluctance of the author to spell out relatively-harmless words (“d-mn”, “b-st-rd”) rather amusing.

One notable omission was any commentary on the emergence of newer, more-amorphous areas of Bangalore like Indiranagar, Koramangala, B. T. M. Layout, etc. These are even more cosmopolitan than the Cantonment areas and have changed the character of the city, being home to a large proportion of the “floating population” in the city.

If you have lived in Bangalore for a while, you will very likely find this book quite interesting and fairly insightful. That is, of course, provided you're able to lay your hands on it.

“The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”

2011-04-17T00:00:00+05:30

“The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” is Edward Tufte's classic book on the principles behind creating effective data graphics. This is the area where graphic design and statistics meet to present a lot of information in a manner that readily provides viewers valuable insights, without them having to wade through and analyze a swarm of numbers. Charts, graphs and other visualizations of data fall into this category. With the vast amount of data created these days, effective analyses of these data using statistics and digestible presentation of these analyses using graphics become very important.

The book is divided into two parts: the first part gives an overview of the current and historical practice of creating data graphics, while the second provides principles for creating good data graphics. The sample provided in the first part include examples of good data graphics from real publications, including the works of William Playfair and the remarkable flow-map of Charles Joseph Minard showing the disastrous march of Napoleon's army across Russia in 1812, as well as examples of bad data graphics. There is also some analysis of the possible reasons why several reputable publications produce bad data graphics. These reasons include considering statistics as boring for the lay reader, using people with (only) creative arts backgrounds to create data graphics, trying to make graphics look pretty rather than accurate, etc.

The second part of the book presents a theory of data graphics. This includes the definition of terms like “data-ink” (ink directly used to represent data), “chartjunk” (decorative elements of data graphics that do not directly present data) and “data-density” (the amount of data presented per square inch) and principles for creating effective data graphics. These principles include maximization of data-ink, minimization of chartjunk, increasing of data-density, etc. Once again there are several examples from real publications presented to illustrate these principles.

The central idea of the book is to show how to achieve graphical excellence:

“Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.”

This leads to a minimal, straightforward and data-intense style that might not go down well with some people (just like the prose of Ernst Hemingway). It nevertheless forces you to think about a subject that is usually considered as just putting a pretty picture instead of lots of numbers in order to not intimidate viewers.

The great thing about this book is that it practises what it preaches - the chapters of the book are short and to the point and the text is lucid. The book itself is relatively slim at about 200 pages of richly-illustrated and nicely-typeset text printed on non-glossy paper. (The author co-designed and self-published the book because he was dissatisfied with the approach of traditional publishers.)

There is a brochure that comes with the book promoting all the works of Edward Tufte, including other books, posters, classes, sculptures, etc. One quibble I have with this brochure is that it was not at all clear to me how his books are different from each other going just by the blurb presented here for each one. This was a little ironical accompanying a book that promotes clear and concise communication.

Almost all of us, at some point or the other, need to present data to others using graphics. This is not the book for you if you are looking for instructions on which type of graphic to use for presenting a given type of data. Once you have picked the graphic though, the principles presented in this book can help you maximize the effect of such graphics in clearly communicating your ideas to your target viewers.

“Benaami”

2011-04-05T00:00:00+05:30

I picked up “Benaami”, a debut novel by Anish Sarkar, despite having read a brutal review by Rrishi Raote in Business Standard because the author happens to be a friend of a good friend. There are many positive reviews of the book for sure (e.g. this one or this one), but I'm afraid I'll have to side with Rrishi on this one.

The plot revolves around Arjun Chatterjee, who has recurring flashes from his previous birth about 150 years ago when he was Kartik, the founder of a secret society named Benaami (“nameless” in Hindi) that set out to drive the East India Company out of India with the revolt of 1857. He takes the help of Sheila Guha, a professor of history, to get more details of this society and of his own past life. A crazy billionaire named Ratikant Gupta wants to eliminate them and use the brahmastra (“ultimate weapon”) of the secret society for his own nefarious purpose of overthrowing the government.

There are two threads of narration in the book - one following Arjun in modern times and the other following Kartik in the mid-nineteenth century, the latter appearing in italics just in case the inattentive reader gets confused. These narratives almost always appear in different chapters to make it even simpler. The chapters themselves are very short and are further divided into little sections, perhaps to cater to easily-distracted readers. Some times the chapters end abruptly, only for the narrative to pick up from where it left off in the very next chapter.

The narrative itself is in third person and a little too direct and simple. This made reading the book feel a little awkward for me and I just couldn't shake off the nagging thought that the writing could have been a whole lot better. As someone once put it, it is the difference between writing “She left the room in anger” and “She slammed the door shut behind her” - both convey the same meaning, but the latter engages the imagination of the reader just a little bit more to make it more interesting to read.

There are also some bizarre details thrown in (as in novels by Dan Brown) that do not, as far as I can tell, add in any way to the story. For example, how is it relevant that Arjun worked on an IBM ThinkPad (not a Sony Vaio) or drives a Honda City (not a Hyundai Accent) or was being chased in a Tata Sumo (not a Mahindra Scorpio)? Are these awkward attempts at product-placements? Then there is the whole thing about Arjun being an IIT graduate and a software engineer that sheds absolutely no light on his character for the purpose of the story. (Incidentally the blurb on the cover of the book mentions that the author is an IIT-IIM graduate working in Capgemini - why is this relevant to his credentials as an author and why do the publishers think this would make someone want to read this book?)

This is supposed to be a thriller, but the suspense is mostly imagined - the plot plays out in a highly-predictable manner and there are times when you want to hit the characters with a giant clue-bat for being so slow. It feels more like watching a bad film than reading a good book.

On the other hand, this book is just one of the many “easy-reads” being published these days in India, where literary merit gives way to a more marketable formula based on tried and tested plot-lines. So it might well succeed for the publisher and the author despite all these shortcomings.

“Superfreakonomics”

2011-03-26T00:00:00+05:30

“Superfreakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner is a sequel to their successful book Freakonomics. Like that book, this one too uses some of the principles from economics to answer a number of questions pertaining to our lives. If you enjoyed that book, this book is more of the same, though much less interesting in my honest opinion. Of course, this could well be due to the number of books that have been published since the original book came out and that explore very similar topics.

Some of the chapters have intriguing titles like “How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?” or “Why should suicide-bombers buy life-insurance?” and manage fairly well to apply data and economic principles to justify their conclusions. Unlike the first book however, none of the results presented here are startling enough. The effect is like reading a second-rate story where you can predict pretty well the plot-twists that the writer has in store for you. This is not to say that the results are not insightful, just that they are not that surprising.

If you have read The Tipping Point, the chapter on apathy and altruism (eventually) provides a very different view of the Kitty Genovese murder. The chapter on global warming is already quite controversial (see, for example, Why Everything in Superfreakonomics About Global Warming Is Wrong). That chapter also goes overboard by being a little too gaga about Intellectual Ventures, a company known as a patent troll in many a quarter.

Some of the use of statistics in this book is decidedly dodgy and that gives me an uncomfortable feel about it. It reminds me of Felix Salmon's review of the preceding book. For example, they conclude that drunk-driving is safer than drunk-walking based on the reported rates of deaths for each mile traveled (see their explanation). This not only has the obvious problem that drunk drivers also endanger others while drunk walkers usually endanger only themselves, but it also seems to gloss over the fact that these are usually not comparable choices, except when the distances are very short. (To be fair, they recommend taking a cab over drunk-driving, with which I can agree whole-heartedly.)

As another example, they note that one of the ways to boost your longevity is to get a Nobel prize if you can, since prize-winners have been observed to live very long. A much simpler explanation for the longevity of Nobel-prize-winners could be that since these prizes are not awarded posthumously and are only awarded for innovations that have “stood the test of time” (translating into a gap of 20 years or more between the innovation and the prize), only those who live long enough usually manage to get this prize.

On the whole, this is a mildly interesting book that is worth a read, but only if you critically think through the material in each chapter and supplement it with alternative viewpoints from around the web. The authors should also stop writing any more books in this series.

“The Ode Less Travelled”

2011-03-03T00:00:00+05:30

“The Ode Less Travelled” by Stephen Fry is a book that attempts to teach you how to write poetry. He introduces the reader to variations of metre, rhyme and form in poetry and tries to dispel the myth that in poetry these days “anything goes”. Even if you never plan to write poetry, this is a good book to read as it illustrates the various techniques and constraints that poets work with and will very likely make you appreciate poetry more. If you do write poetry, or plan to, this is an indispensible book.

The very opening lines of this book are a delight, holding the promise of a very interesting read ahead:

I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry.

The book is written in a charmingly non-condescending and honest tone. The prose sparkles at times with a wit that makes this an enjoyable read. Right at the start the author tells you that you must practise every step of the way in order to benefit from this book. He introduces the three golden rules for making the book work for you, at least two of which apply to reading poetry as well:

Savour a poem - read it as slowly as possible, re-reading it to feel its rhythm, balance and shape. If you can, read it out loud.
Don't be afraid - do not worry about “meaning” while reading a poem. Most of the times the meaning will emerge at its own pace.
Keep a notebook - be ready to write out (not type) a line or a poem as inspiration strikes you or as you play with words and techniques in your free time.

He presents these rules as the “End User Licence Agreement” for reading the book and insists that you agree to them before proceeding with reading the rest of the book.

The book is divided into four chapters dealing with metre, rhyme, form and diction respectively. The one on metre is the longest, which is somewhat understandable as it is the defining characteristic of traditional English verse. (It does get a little tedious at times to be honest though.) This chapter starts off by explaining how the accentuated manner of speaking by native English speakers gives rise to the metre or rhythm of verse. This is especially important to understand for non-native speakers of English whose native languages are unaccented (as is the case for us Indians). The chapter describes all sorts of metre that are found in English verse, providing the technical name (invariably Greek) for each variant and several examples from the poems of famous and not-so-famous poets.

The chapters on rhyme and form similarly show the respective variants using several examples. A nice touch by the author is the liberal use of a poem to describe a variant of rhyme or form that is itself written in that form. The author not only shows examples of good use of poetic techniques, but also several examples of bad use of poetic technique, sometimes by very famous poets like Wordsworth. Poetic forms shown here include not just the ones found in English, but also “exotic” forms like Haiku and Ghazal. Haiku in particular seems to be quite popular as a form for English poems on the Internet, but the author shows how in its native Japanese it does not quite have the commonly-believed 5-7-5 syllabic form and how it is not just about counting syllables.

The last chapter on diction and the current state of poetry is one where taste and talent understandably matter much more than for the ones on metre, rhyme and form. The author tries bravely to explain why the diction in the phrase:

...the sea-shouldering whale.

from Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser enraptured the young Keats or why:

And Madeline asleep in the lap of legends old.

from The Eve of Saint Agnes by Keats in turn made the author fall in love with poetry. As he admits, it is largely inexplicable how the diction in a sentence or phrase works for some and doesn't for others. I can relate to this feeling as I have sometimes struggled to explain what is so great about:

...I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

from The Stranger by Albert Camus, which is from a novel and which retains its power even after translation into English.

The evocative power of diction in poetry, while subject to the restrictions of metre, rhyme and form, is what makes poetry magical for the author (and for me). He particularly derides the “anything goes” style of budding poets these days who don't want to be constrained by metre, rhyme or form and just want to express themselves, irrespective of whether that expression is enjoyable for, or even makes sense to, their readers. He cautions that you need a great mastery of poetry to be able to write effective free verse, without which you just end up with an inglorious mess.

I wish this book were available several decades ago, so that I could read it as a young boy. I wish someone writes similar books for Urdu and Hindi poetry as well (there have been some amazing lines written in Urdu verse in the last 170 years or so). The way poetry was taught and asked about in school nearly killed it for me (and I suspect for many, many other people) and made me skip poems wherever possible. Such a shame. I was thankfully able to overcome this handicap over time, though free verse still makes me gloss over it most of the time.

“Khushwant Singh Selects Best Indian Short Stories (Volume 1)”

2011-01-06T00:00:00+05:30

As its name implies, “Khushwant Singh Selects Best Indian Short Stories (Volume 1)” is the first part of a collection of short stories written by various Indian authors and selected by Khushwant Singh, an eminent writer and a former editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India. These stories were originally published in English, Hindi, Urdu and other regional Indian languages and have been translated into English where necessary for inclusion in this book. Most of the stories collected here are fairly short and are fairly good, making this book an ideal read for short and long breaks alike.

In the introduction to the book, the editor notes:

[The Indian short story] sticks to the traditional rules of the craft. It is in fact short and not a novella or an abridged novel. It revolves round one or at the most two or three characters and does not have a long list of dramatis personae as in novels. It is limited in time and space and does not span decades or spread out in different locales. [...] It has a distinct beginning, a build-up and usually a dramatic end, frequently an unexpected one which sums up the story. Western short stories tend to be prolix, leaving the reader to guess what it is all about.

I think this perfectly describes almost all the stories included in this collection. Notable exceptions are the “stories” by Kabir Bedi and Hugh Gantzer, which seem more like journal-entries or essays than stories.

Some of the best-known Indian authors of short stories are represented here, including Mulk Raj Anand, Krishan Chander, Ruskin Bond, Ismat Chugtai, Kamala Das, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Qurratulain Hyder, Amrita Pritam, etc. While most authors are represented by a single story, except for Ruskin Bond and Krishan Chander with two stories each, Qurratulain Hyder has four stories in this collection. Was it because she was a colleague of the editor? Maybe, maybe not; what really matters is that all her selected stories are very nice.

Not all the major Indian languages are represented here and Urdu and Punjabi can well be considered over-represented, but that's a minor quibble. Perhaps that's just a reflection of the editor's tastes or reading-habits. Striving for such an artifical “fairness and balance” can easily become detrimental to the quality of such a collection.

It is not very clear from the introduction whether all the stories were first published in The Illustrated Weekly of India. If not, it is a little puzzling that some prominent Indian writers of very good short stories, like Munshi Premchand for example, were omitted from this collection. While the “best” in the title of the book is easily understood to be entirely subjective, it would have helped if the editor had listed some of the criteria used to select the stories in this book.

Be that as it may, the book is quite enjoyable and the quality of the stories good. I eagerly look forward to reading the second volume of this collection.

“The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis”

2010-12-23T00:00:00+05:30

“The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis” is a comprehensive book by Raj Jain on a topic that is often ignored by computer programmers and architects or is approached in a haphazard manner: the analysis of the performance of computer systems. Such an analysis is useful for capacity-planning, selection of hardware or software for procurement, identification of bottlenecks in an under-performing system, etc. To be clear about the intent of this book, it is not a cookbook on building high-performance systems or on optimising code to make it run faster. Even though it was first published nearly 20 years ago, almost all of it still remains relevant and useful. It would perhaps not be hyperbolic on my part to term this book as one of the under-appreciated classics of computer programming.

It is usually quite important to know the performance of a computer system. A high-performance system generally does more work with fewer resources when compared to a low-performance system and thus saves time and money for its users. Without a proper evaluation of its performance, you cannot effectively improve the performance of a system.

The book presents three techniques for performance-evaluation: analytical modelling, simulation and measurement. Each of these techniques is explored in great detail and the author provides several criteria for choosing among them. The book is full of illustrative case-studies and warnings against common traps and pitfalls like misleading benchmarks and inappropriate ratios. The author also presents a refresher on probability theory and statistics, as well as an overview of data-presentation, design of experiments, generation of pseudo-random numbers and queueing theory. As I noted earlier, it is quite comprehensive.

The 36 chapters of the book are spread across the following parts:

An Overview of Performance Evaluation
Measurement Techniques and Tools
Probability Theory and Statistics
Experimental Design and Analysis
Simulation
Queueing Models

Each part is preceded by an introductory overview and is succeeded by recommendations for further reading from the bibliography provided near the end of the book. Each chapter is filled with illustrative examples and is followed by exercises that test your comprehension. I must admit that the quotes before most of the chapters made me smile.

Though the book presents quite a few equations and formulae, a reader with exposure to engineering mathematics at the under-graduate level should not find it too difficult to follow. To be honest, my eyes tended to glaze over some of the formulae-filled text, especially in sections that seemed to be there merely to make the book exhaustive. If you are new to probability and statistics or have largely forgotten about it, I would strongly recommend that you first read a book that delves into the intuition behind the formulae presented in this book. Misunderstood application of statistical techniques is perhaps more damaging than being unaware of them.

As computer programmers we tend to think of performance analysis as, say, measuring the execution time of our programme on a large data-set or the average of running it several times over an input data-set. Such grossly-misdirected efforts have prompted rants like the infamous “Programmers Need to Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them All” by Zed Shaw. Even if you are not a performance analyst by profession, as an engineer you need to know what to measure, how to measure it, how to analyse the measurements and how to model a system in order to predict its behaviour. This is a book that teaches you a lot of the basics that you need to achieve that goal.

“Electric Feather”

2010-11-17T00:00:00+05:30

“Electric Feather” is a collection of erotic short stories by various writers and edited by Ruchir Joshi. It sets out to correct “a dearth of good erotic writing” (in English) in the Indian sub-continent. It is a commendable and courageous effort, given the excessive prudery of people in this part of the world in recent times. I would not term it an unequivocal success though.

In his introduction to the book the editor reveals having solicited stories from several authors and quotes an unnamed author:

If it wasn't to be porn, surely a passage about sex and desire had to be an organic part of a larger narrative about something else? In setting out this model wasn't I, in fact, inviting sex writing for the sake of sex writing, i.e. that highly undesirable substance called 'bad sex writing'?

As the editor admits, this is a very good question - it is also the one that I had in mind while taking up this book. (To be sure, a variant of this question applies to other genres as well, science or fantasy fiction being prime examples, where most of the writing I have read forgets about telling an engaging story and concentrates instead on the science or the fantastic elements respectively.) After putting forth various arguments, the editor concludes “[...] the only way to properly answer the challenge was by producing a book that would hold a serious reader”. Fair enough.

What has emerged is an eclectic mixture to be sure, but unfortunately has stories that vary quite widely in quality. It is as though no editorial discretion was exercised, the publisher being simply happy to have received submissions. The stories by Samit Basu and Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan surely lie on the “pornography” side of the line dividing it from “erotica”. On the other hand are poignant stories by Sheba Karim and Sonia Jabbar. Parvati Sharma pays a tribute to Ismat Chughtai's path-breaking short story “The Quilt” in a story of the same name, though it's not much of a story and the sex therein is completely pointless. There are also some real head-scratchers thrown in for good measure.

Indian erotica has had a tough time in being taken seriously, often inviting active prosecution by self-appointed custodians of our moral values, especially when it was written by women. This book is therefore a bold attempt and that perhaps explains the positive reviews it has gathered in mainstream media. (I sincerely hope it is not due to the chummy coterie one sees in the literature and art communities everywhere, especially in India where they are much smaller.) One needs to take these reviews with more than the usual grain of salt in this case.

I liked the cover of the book that depicts what happens to most books on erotica and that is somewhat recursive. The title is a cunning linguistic metaphor taken from one of the stories. The book is worth a dekko, but don't get your hopes too high.

“Predictably Irrational”

2010-10-28T00:00:00+05:30

“Predictably Irrational” is an entertaining and insightful book by Dan Ariely that seeks to show how irrational we humans are, in sharp contrast to standard economic theory that assumes that people are perfectly rational beings acting in self-interest (Homo Economicus). This realisation forms the basis for the relatively-new field of Behavioural Economics that marries psychology with economics in an attempt to create better models for human economic behaviour. Even if you're not interested in the study of economics, this is a great book to help you understand how your behaviour impacts your ability to take rational decisions and use this awareness to minimise the effect of irrational decisions on your life.

The book uses the results from several studies to point out that not only are we quite irrational while taking economic decisions, contrary to conventional economic theory, but we are also irrational in a very predictable way. This predictability can help us make better economic choices in our lives. (I must point out that most of these studies seem to have been conducted on students at MIT and MBA students from some other universities. I wonder how representative they are of the human population in general. The author himself suggests at one point that MIT has a lot of social misfits.)

This book offers many, many insights into human behaviour - how we are wired to make comparisons even when the items under consideration are not readily comparable and how clever marketers use this to nudge us into buying something, how we are swayed by “FREE!” offers into buy something that we didn't want or into pay more for it, how we tend to value things that we own more than what others judge them to be worth, how we consider a more expensive item to be better than a cheaper alternative, etc. Each of the chapters focusses on an insight like this. The author encourages us to pause after reading each chapter and reflect upon how some of our past behaviour can be explained by the respective insight and how we can change our future behaviour to benefit from the insight.

The book is quite well-written and easily accessible to the lay person. Bibliographic references direct curious readers to books or papers where they can find more information. The amazing thing is that the author manages to explain the structure of his experiments, control groups for each experiment and elimination of confounding factors in such a way that it does not feel burdensome or distracting at all. The text is also peppered with several witty remarks by the author that make it even more interesting to read. The author must be commended for pulling off such a feat with deceptive ease.

For the more serious reader, the book does not quite explain just how economics should be updated to account for the predictably irrational behaviour of real humans compared to those of idealised humans with rational behaviour. Some of this is implicitly contained in each chapter, but I was expecting something like a grand overview of which classic economic theories need to be modified and how, based on the research of the authors and his associates. I have a feeling that this could have been achieved without making the book too taxing for the lay reader, though I do suspect that it would have bloated the book without providing much benefit to the vast majority of its target audience. Perhaps the intent of the author was to merely ask economists to abandon Homo Economicus in favour of Homo Sapiens and adjust their theories accordingly without undertaking such a venture himself.

“On Beauty”

2010-10-12T00:00:00+05:30

“On Beauty” is a lavishly-illustrated book by Umberto Eco and Girolamo de Michele (translated from the original Italian into English by Alastair McEwen) that explores the depiction of beauty in western art through the ages. It uses the art of a period as a reflection of the standards of beauty in that period and shows how these standards have evolved over time. The discussion excludes beauty in nature or literature as well as the depiction of beauty in the art produced by the eastern cultures.

From the idealised depiction of proportions and harmony by the Greek artists to the exploration of light and colour in the Middle Ages and the abstract depiction of beauty in modern times, the idea of what constitutes the beautiful has certainly come a long way, though not necessarily to everyone's liking. The authors explore the “beauty of the bad” (monsters, demons, etc.) in addition to the “beauty of the good” (gods, women, etc.) as they evolved over the centuries.

There is no doubt that this is a well-researched book painstakingly put together by the authors and the editors. Apart from copious reproductions of relevant art, the book also has extensive quotes from various texts of the respective period that reinforce the points made by the authors. The art and the quotes are peppered throughout the text in situ instead of being collected together in plates or endnotes as in some other books.

While setting out to explore “beauty in art”, the book takes a surprising detour into the beauty of machines and the beauty of abstractions. The research is sorely lacking here, omitting some important material and the treatment of the subjects is insipid. For example, a well-crafted clock is an intricately-beautiful mechanism to behold, as are some machines made by people like Tatjana van Vark. Omitting these in a chapter on the beauty of machines is quite close to being sinful. The book uses an image of the Mandelbrot set that has been rendered using primitive methods and that is used as an example of beauty in mathematical abstractions. Modern tools let one create stunningly-beautiful images of fractals that could have served as much better examples.

The text seems somewhat of a letdown considering that the subject is so promising. It comes across as a bit dull and dry, very unlikely to be just an artefact of poor translation. Perhaps this is due to the philosophical undertone adopted by the authors throughout the text. The inclusion of beauty as depicted in mass-media in the final chapters on modern times is quite jarring compared to the rest of the text.

You have to be somewhat familiar with the history of western art and the various artistic movements to make sense of some of the text. Ditto for western philosophy, though to a far smaller degree. Even without this background a reader should be able to follow and appreciate most of the discussion.

“The Ascent of Money”

2010-09-20T00:00:00+05:30

I wanted to read “The Ascent of Money” by Niall Ferguson after having watched a local broadcast of the eponymous documentary-series from Channel 4. Each episode of the documentary-series was about an aspect of finance and was presented by the author himself. As they were broadcast around the time of the latest financial crisis (called the “Great Recession” by many people), it made for some very interesting viewing. Hoping to find more depth and greater detail in the book, I have to report that I was mildly disappointed after reading it. If you are totally new to the world of finance though, you will very likely find the the documentary-series (or the book) entertaining and insightful.

Apart from the Introduction and the Afterword, the chapters of the book follow the same themes as the episodes in the documentary-series and are similarly-named. They are:

Dreams of Avarice - on the rise of credit and the banking system.
Human Bondage - on the rise of the bond market.
Blowing Bubbles - on the rise of the stock market.
Risky Business - on the insurance industry.
Safe as Houses - on the real-estate market.
Chimerica - on the symbiotic relationship between China and America and how inextricably-linked they are these days.

So closely do most of the chapters follow the corresponding episodes that at times I felt as if I was reading the script for the series instead of a book proper. The book does not add significantly to the series and is only somewhat more detailed. It does provide lots of notes and references though that will help you research more on a topic should you so desire. This is not to say that the material is not worth your time, but merely that if you've either seen all the episodes or read the book, it will probably be a waste of time to then go for the other medium of presentation.

The material is quite entertaining and quite revealing at times, perhaps even for a seasoned professional in finance. I for one did not know of the important role played by financial factors in the French Revolution, the defeat of Napolean, the American Civil War, the First World War, etc. Popular history, and I dare suspect even academic history, just does not illuminate such important aspects of historical events. The author must be commended for carrying out the research to unearth these factors and the corresponding players.

It is quite clear from the presentation that the author does not really believe in the “rational actor” model or the “efficient markets hypothesis” that are a staple of mainstream economics. He wants us to be aware of the follies of men and economic mishaps of the past as we look into the future. This level-headed approach to finance enabled him to make predictions at the time of preparing this material that have since played out more or less as he had predicted.

I would really have liked a more structured look into the historical origins of the monetary system from its barter-based origins. The material focuses almost exclusively on the Western world, mentioning innovations in the Middle East, India and China almost in passing. This is a glaring omission that makes it somewhat lopsided. In each area of finance, the author focuses on a few entertaining or insightful events and characters, again making it a lopsided presentation. These omissions might have been justified given the constraints of a documentary-series, but not in a book.

“The Tipping Point”

2010-09-01T00:00:00+05:30

“The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell is a book that expands upon an article by the author in the New Yorker published in 1996. It seeks to explore how ideas, products, messages and behaviours “tip over” and suddenly spread through or recede from society, just like pathological epidemics through a population. These are termed “social epidemics” by the author. Understanding such phenomena can help us effect a desired change in society (e.g. market a product or spread a message).

The book is full of several interesting anecdotes on a wide range of topics. These include the sudden rise in popularity of Hush Puppies shoes, the sudden fall in the crime-rate in New York in the 1990s, the spread of syphilis through Baltimore, the midnight ride of Paul Revere in 1775, the continued rise in smoking among teens despite several measures by the government and social workers, etc. All these anecdotes are presented to support various points of the author's thesis, though it is not evident how you can decisively conclude anything from these given the lack of hard data. Nevertheless the anecdotes do enliven the book preventing it from becoming a dry and dull read.

The author presents three “rules of social epidemics”:

The Law of the Few - a few people with rare social gifts are key to spreading epidemics. “Connectors” are the bridges that link a lot of people from different groups, “Mavens” actively seek knowledge and spread it to others and “Salesmen” persuade people to adopt new things that they otherwise would be reluctant to try.
The Stickiness Factor - an idea or a product should have an essence that makes it memorable for people and helps it stay on their mind beyond their initial exposure to it.
The Power of Context - a social epidemic is sensitive to the time and place in which it occurs. Without the right context, it will fizzle out.

These are intriguing ideas to be sure, but there is no conclusive evidence in the book to support them or to indicate that they are the only ones that matter. There are also several leaps of logic in making deductions (“X happened and it was because of Y”) that are not at all clear to me. For example, the author ultimately attributes the fall in the crime-rate in New York in 1990s to “fixing broken windows”, while “Freakonomics” demonstrates otherwise (and attributes it to the freedom of abortion of unwanted pregnancies resulting in fewer unwanted babies).

The book thus appears flawed to me, though it is a must-read simply to make sense of what many people keep talking about. If you hear phrases like “tipping point”, “social epidemic”, “broken windows theory”, “bystander effect”, “smoking is not cool - smokers are”, etc. dropped into your conversations, this is the book that can give you the necessary background. It is light and quick reading and available at a cheap price.

Web-Site Source-Code Now Available

2010-08-30T00:00:00+05:30

I am sharing the source-code for this web-site as a Mercurial repository hosted on BitBucket. The repository can be found at bitbucket.org/rmathew/website. The source-code uses the m4 macro processor for generating the content. It also uses make and a few helper scripts for managing dependencies. It heavily depends on the availability of a UNIX-like environment, as provided by Linux for example.

To create or update the information about the dependencies among the source-files (stored in “deps.mk” and included by the Makefile), run “make deps”. To generate the content, run “make all”. The content is generated in the “pub” folder. The source for the content is in the “src” folder, while the “bin” folder contains some helper scripts.

“Train to Pakistan”

2010-08-06T00:00:00+05:30

“Train to Pakistan” is a short and deeply moving novel by Khushwant Singh. It shows the effect of the partition of India, as the British left the country, on the simple folks of Mano Majra, a small Indian village on the banks of the river Sutlej near the border of India and Pakistan. The Sikhs and Muslims of the village, living happily together for centuries without any animosity towards each other, get caught up in forces beyond their control with the Muslims forced to flee to Pakistan and the Sikhs getting ready to kill unknown strangers who just happen to be Muslims.

The peace of the little village is shattered when a robbery at night results in the killing of the village moneylender by dacoits from elsewhere. The police arrest, without firm grounds, the village ruffian and an educated stranger out on a mission to spread communist ideals among the peasants. This turn of events ends up being just a prelude to a larger upheaval in the lives of the villagers.

The partition of India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan at the time of its independence from British rule caused about ten million people in the two countries to flee their homes and move into the other country. The accompanying riots killed about one million people and open abuse of countless women. Heavily-crowded trains carrying fleeing families would be stopped by irate mobs, their passengers slain indiscriminately and then allowed to cross over to the other country.

The arrival of such a train laden with corpses into Mano Majra brings the villagers face-to-face with the ugly realities of partition. The arrival of rabble-rousers from elsewhere causes many of the villagers to get ready to kill people fleeing into Pakistan and determined to send a corpse-laden train into that country as a token of revenge. Only the village ruffian stands between them and the execution of their demonic plans.

The prose in the book is quite simple and easy to read, though some of the phrases might seem a little strange in English without the knowledge of the corresponding phrases in Hindi or Punjabi. To his credit, the author shows no bias in laying bare the evil that overtook both sides. I am a little puzzled by the missing article in the title - surely it ought to be “The Train to Pakistan”, no?

The book leaves a lingering sadness in its wake. It is however a useful aid in understanding the deep injuries that have left permenant scars on the two countries.

“Above Average”

2010-07-30T00:00:00+05:30

“Above Average” by Amitabha Bagchi is a novel about a smart boy with a middle-class background and his life before, during and after his stay at IIT Delhi. It is the story of friendships forged and lost, love blossoming and withering. It is a coming-of-age novel that has also been termed a “campus book” because of the many recent Indian novels based on life at the IITs and the IIMs. However it is certainly one of the better-written novels of the lot.

The comparison with the other popular novel based on life at IIT, “Five Point Someone” by Chetan Bhagat, is inevitable. This book is surely the better of the two, while retaining the simplicity of language and a reasonable price. There is no straight narrative in this book as it keeps going back and forth in time and place. I was reminded of the writing-style of Amitav Ghosh while reading this book - “The Shadow Lines” does in fact make an appearance in the novel and the narrator praises its writing-style.

Our hero is an above-average academic achiever from a middle-class background, born to a Bengali family, raised in Mayur Vihar in New Delhi and has a keen interest in rock music and writing. He prepares for and gets into an IIT, where he meets people with varied backgrounds and with some of whom he forms lasting bonds. He goes on to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the US. Some of the biographical details match those of the author so much that the book seems autobiographical, at least in parts. Being from an IIT myself, I can attest that the author paints a fairly accurate picture of life in an IIT, though with a little exaggeration here and there.

Some of the details in book were a little jarring for me. For example, our hero, majoring in Computer Science, takes a class on Algorithms only in the third year and describes it as the “toughest of all the theory classes we were required to take”. Algorithms is usually taught right at the beginning of the second year (if not within the first year itself), is one of the easier courses and is full of practical material. As another example, the hero is a boy in his late teens and has thoughts that are a little too mature for his age - it's not impossible, but it's unlikely. Finally, the usual confusion between “invariably” and “inevitably” is on display here, which is a little out of character for someone who is supposedly good at writing in English.

Despite what another reviewer would have you believe, this is not in the same league as “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce or “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust. It is however a good read, well worth the time and money spent on it.

“Head First Statistics”

2010-07-12T00:00:00+05:30

I have come to believe that statistics is one of those important subjects that most of us know woefully little about even as we increasingly rely on the results of various studies to drive our lifestyle choices or on data visualisation to take decisions at our workplace. That said, I have been procrastinating on my resolution to study this subject in greater depth than what was afforded by an introductory course I took in college ages ago. The first step towards that goal has now been precipitated due to the nature of my current work. Unfortunately for me, most of the books on this subject looked too dull or intimidating to serve as a useful review of the basic concepts. “Head First Statistics” by Dawn Griffiths presented a welcome contrast with its pages full of informal text and fun pictures, though I was sceptical at first of its utility. I am happy to report that my scepticism was entirely misplaced.

The book is another in the series of “Head First” books by O'Reilly. True to its pedigree, this book uses lots of little stories, pictures and exercises to provide a gentle introduction to otherwise complicated-looking topics. Each chapter asks you to help denizens of the fictional town of “Statsville” with their sundry problems using increasingly-complicated statistical techniques. Unlike most text-books where the exercises are lumped together at the end of each chapter or section, sometimes without solutions or hints, this book makes the exercises an integral part of its flow and works out the solution for each of them in full after letting you take a crack at it first.

All the usual suspects of statistics are here: data visualisation, mean, median, mode, standard deviation, probabilities, probability distributions, normal curves, sampling, hypothesis tests, t-distribution, chi-square distribution, etc. I was frankly a bit surprised that the author managed to cover so much ground in a book like this. My kudos to her for making most of it so accessible to the lay reader.

Of course, despite her valiant efforts the author loses her grip on lucidity in the latter half of the book that covers advanced topics and where many a formula or statement is left hanging with an implicit “Just take my word for it”. This could be deeply dissatisfying if you are of an enquiring disposition. There are no references to books, papers, articles or web-sites where the reader can go to find more information or get a deeper understanding of the concepts. There should have been some practice problems for the reader to test their understanding, with the solutions perhaps available from a web-site. One of my major grudges was the sudden switch to probability from statistics in the early chapters without any explanation - only if you persist do you discover in the later chapters how closely the two are linked to each other and get your “Aha!” moment of understanding. Finally I really believe that the book could have been thinner given the ground that it covers.

While I feel that this is a great book to use to get introduced to this important subject, it is not suitable for use as a reference or as a guide to get a deeper understanding of the concepts. It will certainly whet your appetite for the subject and is a great book if you find yourself scared by the subject.

“Distributed Systems”

2010-04-15T00:00:00+05:30

“Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design” by George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore and Tim Kindberg is an introductory text-book on distributed computing. It provides a broad overview of the basic principles as well as the major issues in building such systems. Since I happened to have the second edition around, I decided to read that instead of going for the currently-available fourth edition (a fifth edition is in the works), as the two editions didn't seem to differ significantly. This turned out to be not that bad a decision.

There is a great amount of overlap between the foundational chapters of this book and decent books on computer networks and operating systems. The useful bits of the book comes more than half-way into the text. The discussion of the design of distributed systems and the implementation of distributed algorithms is at a high-level - this is the book for you if you want to quickly get an overview of the issues and the general approaches but not if you want to actually implement any of the algorithms.

That said the book is quite comprehensive in its coverage. The problems in synchronising disparate clocks, coordination, replication, concurrency control, transaction management, recovery, fault-tolerance, etc. are all covered here along with the major approaches to solving these problems in distributed systems. The language used is fairly friendly and formalisms are used sparingly.

If you are a student, you can use this book to get an overview of the field and perhaps to see if this is an area worth pursuing. If you are a professional faced with building a distributed system, you can use this book to get an idea of the challenges you will run into and the approaches you can use to tackle them.

Distributed computing is a field with some very interesting problems for many of which there aren't any perfect solutions. Some of the current distributed systems used for serving web-based solutions are massive and on a scale far bigger than what could be imagined just a decade back. This is a subject that now needs to be a part of the core computer science and engineering curriculum instead of being a specialised course. This book provides a useful, but by no means sufficient, guide to the field.

“Introduction to Algorithms”

2010-03-22T00:00:00+05:30

I put off reading Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas Cormen, Charles Leiserson, Ronald Rivest and Clifford Stein (popularly known as “CLRS”) for quite some time because I was somewhat intimidated by its bulk. The recent release of the third edition of this tome finally made me get a copy and give it a dekko. This compendium of a number of algorithms and data structures for computer programming is bulkier than its predecessors, but it does not disappoint. It should serve as a good reference for this field, though not quite as an introductory text for beginners. A serious professional will have a copy handy at all times. Somewhat surprisingly, it does manage to leave out some commonly-encountered data structures and algorithms, so it is not as comprehensive and up-to-date as I would have liked.

With 35 chapters and four appendices, this book packs in a lot of material. The main content is divided into eight parts, beginning with the foundations of algorithm design and analysis and ending with a set of special topics. Many of the algorithms are presented in pseudo-code that can readily be translated into an imperative language of your choice. Most such algorithms are also analysed for running costs, usually by solving the appropriate recurrence relations. The mathematics used in the analysis is not that complicated and the appendices refresh your memory in case you have forgotten it since high-school or college. The notation used throughout the book is thankfully one that is now widely used.

Despite its name and the claims of the authors in the preface, this book is not suitable for absolute beginners to the subject. In most places it just assumes that you know the basic concepts and proceeds to expand on them. It does not clearly explain to the beginner why they need to study so many data structures and algorithms and how to choose an appropriate data structure or algorithm. Somewhat surprisingly for a book on the subject, it does not tell you what is an Abstract Data Type (ADT). The authors use the term “dynamic set” instead of the more common “collection” and this might unnecessarily confuse some people.

I was surprised to find many a commonly-encountered data structure or algorithm missing from this modern tome. For example, trie, skip list, splay tree, dancing links, A*, Judy array, etc. are either not mentioned at all or are referred to merely in passing. Looking at the current trends in computer architecture, it is high time such books explain some cache-oblivious algorithms that can run efficiently on modern CPUs. The chapter on multi-threaded algorithms also seems to have been added as an afterthought. For example, it does not talk about super-linear speed-ups that are possible with concurrent algorithms. Finally, we have to increasingly deal with huge data-sets that do not fit into a single computer's RAM or even hard-discs - learning to efficiently store and process such data is important in modern computing (just as it was in the old days) and a book like this cannot afford to leave it out.

Unlike many other text-books, the problems in the exercises further explore the topics introduced in the associated section instead of merely testing the reader's comprehension, some times providing more details or introducing a variant. Some of the problems use mostly-funny names for professors - the authors provide explanations for these names in case you don't “get it”. The bibliography is quite extensive and useful when you want to find more information about a given topic.

“Programming Pearls”

2010-03-03T00:00:00+05:30

Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley is a book based on a collection of articles written by the author for the eponymous column in Communications of the ACM. True to its name, the book presents several pearls of programming wisdom based on the hard-won experience of a brilliant computer programmer who was also lucky enough to be associated with some of the brightest minds in computer programming (the group at Bell Labs). The icing on the cake is the clarity and brevity of the book. I have read the book at least three times over the years and I continue to learn new things from it - no wonder this book is considered a classic in computer programming.

The book is divided into three parts with five chapters per part. The first part presents the fundamentals of programming, from programme design to algorithms, data structures, programme verification and testing. The second part focusses on performance and shows how to perform rough estimations of running costs, improving algorithms, tuning code and saving space. The third part applies the principles of the previous two parts to problems in sorting, searching and string-processing.

The chapters are short, clear and peppered with interesting anecdotes. These make them easy to read, though it would be a terrible mistake to zip through them. The author himself recommends that you take the time to understand the concepts presented in a chapter and attempt solving the given problems yourself before taking a look at the solutions. The chapters only give you a flavour for some of the concepts - you'll have to supplement it with reading a suitable book if you are not familiar with these concepts. Here the author has some recommendations and the usual suspects (The Art of Computer Programming, Code Complete, The Practice of Programming, etc.) all figure prominently.

The author ends the book with a couple of amusing epilogues presented as interviews with himself. He takes a dig at himself for the frequent references in the book to his colleagues from Bell Labs. One of the appendices contains rules for code tuning adapted from his now-out-of-print book “Writing Efficient Programs”. I suspect that an absolute beginner would have some trouble understanding these recommendations since they are presented here without much elaboration or examples, though there are references to related material elsewhere in the book. Another appendix presents a model for estimating the costs of various data-types and operations. These can be used to make quick back-of-the-envelope calculations about the time and space that will likely be taken by a given function during its execution.

Some of the material, like that on performance improvement or programme verification, might not be very fashionable today, but no serious computer programmer can afford to ignore it. Much of the advice in this book is timeless and will definitely help you become a better programmer.

Note that the web-site for the book as given in it, “www.programmingpearls.com”, is not valid any more as a domain squatter has snatched control of it - the correct web-site is http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/.

The sequel to this book was published as “More Programming Pearls: Confessions of a Coder”. That book is a little hard to find in most book-shops as it did not become as famous as this one.

“Code Complete”

2010-02-24T00:00:00+05:30

Books filled with good practical advice about constructing software are rare. Code Complete by Steve McConnell is a well-written rarity in this field and has a well-deserved reputation as a classic. It is one of those books that every computer programmer ought to have read. I had read the first edition, published in 1993, as a budding programmer and the book left a lasting impression on me. With the benefit of several years of experience, I find myself agreeing almost entirely with the updated second edition, published in 2004. When someone asks me “How do I write good code?”, I point them to this book without hesitation.

The book is about “software construction” - as the author notes, this includes coding and debugging, detailed design, construction planning, unit testing, integration, integration testing, etc. The bulk of the book focusses on coding since most of the effort in construction is spent in coding. The emphasis of the book is towards creating a toolbox of effective software construction techniques and on the importance of using the right tool for a given job. In particular, the author repeatedly advises you to programme into a language rather than in it.

An endearing quality of the book is that instead of pontificating, the author offers copious references to papers, articles and books to back up his claims. The tone of the book is entirely non-condescending and you can see that the advice is coming from a wary professional with years of experience working on real projects with real people rather than a wily snake-oil salesman. Rookie programmers will do well to heed the advice in the book and experienced programmers will find themselves nodding every now and then as they read the book.

At around 960 pages the book might seem intimidatingly big, but it is worth spending the time needed to read it from cover to cover. The book is divided into several parts, each part comprising several cohesive chapters. Each chapter begins with an overview of the material covered in the chapter and ends with pointers to additional resources, a summary of the key points of the chapter and a check-list to help you verify if your code adheres to the guidelines prescribed in the chapter. The side-margins of a page are used to provide cross-references to material covered elsewhere in the book, insightful or funny quotes, a short URL on the book's web-site that contains additional material and icons to bring something to your attention. These icons are “Hard Data” (typically a reference to a study backing some claim), “Key Point” and “Coding Horror” (an example of badly-written code). This structure makes it easy to find the material you're looking for as you refer to the book from time to time.

The focus of the book is on imperative programming and it mainly uses code in Visual Basic, C, C++ and Java as examples. Functional programming enthusiasts might particularly take offence to the material on recursion where the author seems quite disinclined to use it and advises minimising its usage. The author gives an example of a recursive implementation of a factorial function and says that it is slow and has an unpredictable impact on memory. In fact, the code uses a tail-call and is therefore a prime candidate for tail-call optimisation using a decent compiler. A good programmer can use recursion to create neat functions without adverse effects in many a case.

The author rightly points out the perils of premature optimisation of programmes, especially that done without proper measurements to identify the real bottlenecks. The primary emphasis should be on creating correct and maintainable code with performance improvements taken up at the end, if it is needed. I generally agree with this, but would point out that many a time you would barely have time to tackle performance in the end if you're working on a tight schedule (as most of us are forced to do). Many programmes also have a flat profile in that there are no obvious bottlenecks and yet the programme is unacceptably slow. If you have automated regression-testing set up with comprehensive code-coverage (as the author recommends elsewhere in the book), performance becomes important even if it doesn't matter during a single run of the programme or during a typical user-interaction. In such cases, it might be better to keep an eye on the performance of a programme during most of its construction.

There are at least three important aspects of software construction that the author unfortunately leaves out of this otherwise excellent and comprehensive book: security, supportability and concurrency. Writing secure code is difficult, but very important and precious few programmers are aware of the necessary techniques. The supportability of software determines how effectively you are able to diagnose problems encountered during its deployment - logging, state-dumps, etc. are techniques that help here. Concurrency is important but is made difficult by constructs available in mainstream programming languages. To be fair to the author, it is only relatively-recently that security and concurrency have come into increased focus with the Internet and many-core CPUs being the prime drivers respectively.

With an additional 10 years of experience gained before the publication of the second edition of this book, the author has slightly revised some of his earlier recommendations and freely admits it. For example, the first edition recommended a pretty-formatting of code where the “=” operators of consecutive assignment statements line up like this:

int foo       = bar;
boolean snafu = wombat;

It turns out that while this looks pretty in the beginning, it leads to additional effort as the code changes (e.g. variables change names) during subsequent maintenance. It is not much worse to have a simpler formatting that does not place unnecessary burden on maintenance. The second edition also covers object-oriented programming and agile development methods, but presents them in an even-handed pragmatic manner. Much of the advice from the first edition remains intact in the second edition.

The quality of the Indian reprint, published by WP Publishers, is unfortunately quite disappointing. It has very thin pages because of which some of the text and graphics on the opposite side of a page show through. The ink doesn't have a good consistency and fades a bit in some places. These make it a bit hard to read this reprint. At a price of Rs 600, they could have done a better job.

If you are a computer programmer and wish to improve yourself, get this book and read it.

“The Practice of Programming”

2010-01-23T00:00:00+05:30

In their book The Practice of Programming, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike aim to advise computer programmers on things like testing, debugging, style, performance, design, portability, etc. that they are not usually taught in computer science classes or programming courses. This is what they call the “practice” of programming. Many pick these up over the course of their careers with some trial and error; many simply don't. This is the kind of book that has lessons for both rookie and seasoned programmers and that deserves multiple readings over the course of one's career.

I first read this book about a decade back when I was a relatively-new professional programmer with a couple of years' worth experience. Reading this book again after all these years makes me appreciate the wisdom contained in these pages and agree with almost all that the authors have to say. In fact, I think this is a great approach to becoming a good programmer - learn the basics of programming, spend a couple of years writing lots of programmes for fun or profit, read books like this to improve yourself and come back to such books after several years, having applied their principles in the interim. If you read such a book immediately after learning the basics, you might not really understand the reasons behind the advice in the book and will have to just take the words of the authors at face value.

This book is a typical “Kernighan book” - it is short and to the point, the language is clear and simple, the material is logically ordered with a natural progression and some of the examples show that it is simple to implement things (e.g. a regular expression parser) that might appear hard otherwise. It is also an old-school Unix book in that it uses the command pipe-line:

grap | pic | tbl | eqn | troff -mpm

for type-setting instead of using something like a system based on TeX.

The programming languages used in this book are C, C++ and Java with an occasional sprinkling of AWK, Perl and Tcl. Most of the examples use C however and some of the advice can be considered specific to this language rather than being agnostic. That is not as bad as it seems since every serious programmer must have C in their arsenal and not be wedded to a single language or a narrow set of languages.

The book is full of pearls of wisdom that you might miss on a quick skim through it. For example, in a section on debugging a problem, the authors say:

Resist the urge to start typing; thinking is a worthwhile alternative.

When faced with a bug, most of us either fire up a debugger or start modifying our programme in the hope of making the bug go away. With experience we learn that carefully reading the code in question and thinking about it lets us resolve the issue faster and some times exposes other latent bugs. As another example, in a section on performance, the authors say:

Thus the first principle of optimization is don't.

Once again many of us spend a lot of time trying to optimise rarely-used programmes or portions of a programme that we determine to be bottlenecks based on reasoning and intuition alone. We have to ask ourselves if the programme in question is worth speeding up and then use measurements to determine the real bottlenecks. Even then, using better algorithms and data structures coupled with clean and simple code can provide greater benefits than complex code that tries to be clever.

The last chapter in the book goes into topics like creating domain-specific languages or compiling code on the fly with an emphasis on using the right language for the job. It is better to create little specialised tools that work with text files on their standard I/O streams and that can then be combined in various ways (using Unix pipes for example) to solve different problems. This is, of course, the Unix philosophy. As an example, the authors create scripts for getting the document for a given URL, removing HTML tags from a document and formatting a text document into 60-character lines (written in Tcl, Perl and AWK respectively). They then combine these scripts to create a very simple, command-line-based, “web browser” that shows a web-page as formatted plain-text.

In short, read this book if you want to be a better programmer. If you have read it in the distant past, read it once again - you might have missed some things the first time round.

“Economics: Private and Public Choice”

2010-01-10T00:00:00+05:30

If you are looking for a comprehensive and accessible introduction to economics, “Economics: Private and Public Choice” by James D. Gwartney, Richard L. Stroup, Russell S. Sobel and David Macpherson is the book for you. It covers both microeconomics and macroeconomics in addition to the core principles of economics. Though it is a textbook meant for an undergraduate course in economics, it is also suitable as a gentle introduction to the dismal science for the lay person. I read the tenth edition of this book that was published in 2003.

This is a “modern” textbook in every sense. It is quite colourful and is richly illustrated with several pictures, graphs and icons. The chapters are not too big and are written in a simple language. They begin with an overview of the chapter and end with a summary of the key points learned in the chapter, a sneak preview of what is in store in the next chapter and several critical analysis questions for testing your comprehension (only some of which are answered in an appendix). Several boxes sprinkled throughout the text either talk about applications of economics or introduce a noted economist. Teaching aids for the book like presentation slides, instructor's manual, etc. can be separately obtained from the publisher. The book comes with a ridiculous CD-ROM containing a single HTML file that in turn redirects you to the “Gwartney Xtra!” web-site containing supplementary material for the book. I cannot help but wonder why the publishers could not just provide the URL for the web-site in the book.

The book is divided into six parts, each containing closely-related chapters that progressively expand upon the respective subject of the part. These parts are:

The Economic Way of Thinking
Markets and Governments
Core Macroeconomics
International Economics
Core Microeconomics
Beyond Basics

I was surprised to see macroeconomics presented before microeconomics - I would have expected it to be the other way round. The last part is a collection of 14 special topics on subjects like the burden of social-security, rising healthcare costs, increasing national debt, etc. that still seem quite relevant. The focus of the book is on the United States, but international readers will not feel lost while reading the book as the core issues that are discussed remain universally relevant. The thrust of the book might be termed right-wing or republican as it argues for a reduction in taxes, smaller role of the government, etc.

Unlike some other textbooks on economics, this book is not math-heavy. Like some other textbooks however, there is a lot of hand-waving and the reader is expected to just believe the authors. For example, at least in the beginning the authors could have shown how supply curves are derived from empirical data and how they shift under changed conditions. This book also seems to be revised every couple of years like other college-level textbooks - this is a very expensive textbook and these superfluous revisions can be seen as an underhanded attempt by the publisher to kill the used-books market.

The book presents a strong case for capitalism, but does not explore why communism or socialism became more popular in other countries. It does provide excellent insights into why the democratic process does not quite work the way people expect it to work. It shows how people are forced to choose among candidates who might not represent their stand on all the relevant issues, only some. It explores the rent-seeking behaviour of special-interest groups who use campaign financing and intensive lobbying to get politicians to pass laws that strongly benefit them but weakly harm the general public, sometimes in not-so-obvious ways. It explains how politicians have a strong incentive to take decisions that have short-term benefits but long-term hazards.

I felt that the book did not cover the very basics of economics and finance in much detail. For example, the origin of money or the evolution of the banking system could have been expanded upon. While the book presents almost all the fundamental concepts, it does not put it all together to illustrate how the student can perform economic analysis on their own in a given situation. For example, how can you arrive at the value of a house or a stock and decide whether an offered price is cheap or dear? Concepts like opportunity cost, interest rate, present value of money, inflation, etc. could have been used in the analysis for such a case.

It is my firm belief that everyone should be familiar with the basics of economics since it is so important in our times. If you have never been introduced to the subject before, this is a good textbook to get started provided you can afford the price.