Rewalk in the hills

Cities are deaf to real conversations, words get lost all the time. If you go searching for the light banter and relaxed moments you shared with a friend some years ago, you will mostly draw a blank. There are no safe deposits where you can commit a memory and revisit it again to find your gold.

The slow moving camera, the long gazes, the deep breaths and gentle blues music in the background, that is how memories are made in movie and somehow it is true in real life as well. The world slows down, folds inwards closing out the outer chatter and accentuates the presence of the small space around you- the eyes, the smiles, the carefree words, the spying sun and may be the flutter of the leaves or the crashing waves or the singing birds. In the quite of the woods and the rugged hills, the words and smile, the sweat and the short breathe, the apple and the taste of wind are all frozen in time.
The real magic reveals itself when you retrace your steps and find the little nuggets of forgotten gold from your last visit still shining under the clear blue sky!

Thinking, fast and Slow-Book review

The author starts with a confession of a modest goal (enrich talks at the office water coolers) and then proceeds to reveal his decades of research on human cognition -how we make decisions, choices and memories. There are two systems, he posited, one conscious and slow and involved, the other devoted to jumping to conclusions, mostly subconsciously. The book fleshes two characters(System 1 & System 2) who embody these systems and we get to understand their individual traits and the dynamics of their interaction.

This cognitive model also helps explain illusions such as anchoring, non regressive predictions and overconfidence. The operative model of our mind makes us susceptible to these biases and in most cases we are not even aware of it. 

This is an extremely smart book, quite balanced in building its case and discussing the implications of the result. It requires attentiveness to work through the various experiments illustrated in the book to explain the different theories and ideas. Also sometimes you need to summon personal experiences to evaluate if the theory explains your individual behavior.
In the course of reading the book, there were times when the book seemed to decode my motivation for action or inaction in my daily decision making. 

If you are trying to make sense of the 2016 US presidential election, the book provides very useful framework to interpret human rationality, gains & losses perception, biases and data interpretation.

Human existence is defined by our mortality, rationality and emotionality ; our societies are shaped by the sum total and in turn feedback to the individual. Don’t worry the book doesn’t indulge in such convoluted logic, this is just my random musing inspired by the book. 

This is a well researched and logically articulated book. I am in complete awe of Daniel Kahneman's work, with his focus on understanding individual decision making, he has developed a framework for institutional decision making and public policy discourse.

As I flipped the last page, the one thought that surfaced in my brain was what am I going to do about it, now that I know how ‘it’ works? 

I guess just stop and look closely whenever I press 'Submit'!(and  submit,,,)

The Grapes of Wrath-Book review

The book is essentially a looking glass into the largest migration in American history within a short period of time. Between 1930 and 1940, approximately 3.5 million people moved out of the Plains states due to drought conditions and migrated towards the West coast only to find that the Great depression had rendered economic conditions there little better than those they had left. The large scale worker movement created demand supply imbalance, depressed earnings and created conditions rife for exploitation of the displaced migrant workers.

The novel is a commentary of the period with poverty, migration, labor rights and public policy as the key themes of the narrative using the trials and tribulations of a fictional family-the Joads from Sallisaw Oklahoma, who drove in a Hudson Motor car company saloon converted to a truck along highway 66 to reach California. When they finally reach the Promised Land after personal tragedies and loss, what they witness is unwelcome social treatment, colluding business interests and hostile law enforcement.
To a great extent the world interprets human history in terms of the stories, poems and pictures. The brilliance of the book ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is that it distilled the undeserved poverty and displacement of the self-respecting White American Joad family as representative of the collective history of the nameless multitudes that lived the era..

Although simplification of history comes with its own perils, what we get in the novel are unfaultable heroes (the insufferable Ma Joad and Tom Joad the son who breaks the law but has a heart of gold). The writer doesn’t veil his sympathy for migrants and workers' movement so we have a clear annotation of the good vs. evil clash.
When preparing to write the novel, Steinbeck wrote: "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]." He famously said, "I've done my damnedest to rip a reader's nerves to rags."

I guess when I weigh the book against the stated objective of the author, I agree that the book has served its purpose.