Book Review - Hit Refresh, Satya Nadella

Mr. Satya Nadella begins the afterword of the book with some serious questions of existential nature. He uses questions like, why am I here, why Microsoft exists and so on, to explain his points. Wish he had asked a similar question about the purpose of this book, clarifying himself before even penning the foreword, for this book is a potpourri of thoughts and ideas, all lying disorganised across the pages.

What is one allowed to expect from a book written by the CEO of a tech giant like Microsoft? Imagine. Microsoft rode to the pinnacle by leading the PC revolution. Then lost their reputation due to questionable, predatory business practices. They also lost revenue by not taking the explosion of market for mobile devices seriously. It was Microsoft that produced a ‘tablet’, well before Apple was even a force to reckon with. But they were not able to make enough people interested in it and lost out. The whole world was switching to mobile devices from PCs, but Microsoft sat basking in the past success, entering the market only at the point of saturation. Just as people were starting to write off Microsoft as another giant about to bite the dust, it turned the tables and rode to the forefront of the Cloud revolution. Today Microsoft has caught up with Amazon and provides cutting-edge cloud solutions to the customers, on par with Amazon’s AWS.

When a company has such eventful history, you expect the CEO to churn out a book full of management wisdom and interesting anecdotes. But this book happens to be a damp squib. This book is not a memoir/autobiography, since very little and only the essential information is shared about Mr. Nadella’s childhood in India, his migrating to the USA for studies and eventually for a job at Microsoft. This book deals about his elevation to the role of CEO and his attempts at changing the ‘culture’ – a word hackneyed to the point of irritation – in only a superficial manner. The book then delves into the future of computing – Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Mixed Reality and Quantum computing – again as an overview without offering much to take in. The book ends by exuding positive beliefs about the future of technology and the co-existence of humans and AI. Trying to convey all these things at once, this book ends up being dull, uninspiring, repetitive and boring.

Incoherently and insipidly written, this is a book that you can safely skip.

Book Review - Why I Am A Hindu, Shashi Tharoor

I remember a line from the early days of my reading and it goes like this – ‘If a poet falls in love with you, you will forever be immortalised’. That was the feeling I had when I finished reading this book. On one side are trolls of social media, simply bashing you for any and every point that you express. The validity or otherwise of the point matters the least to them. All that they want is to put you down and insult you. They turn every debate into a bitter argument and leave a bad taste in the mouth. At the other end of the intellectual spectrum are people like Shashi Tharoor. These are the kind of people that you don’t normally mess with, or else they ‘immortalise’ you by writing in reams to prove how dumb you and your opinions are.

This book is co-authored by Shashi Tharoor, the intellect, and Shashi Tharoor, the politician. The intellect Shashi Tharoor begins the book beautifully, elaborating on the core tenets of Hinduism and all things that makes Hinduism not just a religion, but the very way of life worth emulating. Briefly delving on the probable origins of Hinduism, the challenges it faced all along its many millennia-old existence, the ways in which it overcame those challenges and the innumerable saints and holy personae that stand as shining beacons for all the virtues that Hinduism is all about. Ironically, Mr. Tharoor makes you feel proud about being Hindu, more than all the antics and assertions of the so-called saviours of the ‘Hindutva’ brigade.

The second and final part of the book are used by politician Shashi Tharoor, who uses it as a canvas to paint a poor – many times, correctly so – picture about his political opponents, especially those belonging to the Hindutva brigade. Starting from the patriarchs of RSS, Golwalkar and Savarkar, who used hatred for another religion to fuel the passion for their own, touching upon the somewhat sensible life of Deen Dayal Upadhyay, to the present day leaders of BJP, who rode upon paranoia and hatred of a huge scale to attain their political gains, Shashi Tharoor has ‘immortalised’ everyone with his systematic arguments against their narrow ideologies, setting them against the all-encompassing backdrop of Hinduism.

In an age of manipulation through fake-images and messages spread through social media, people have been taught to hate the real soldiers of India’s freedom struggle, forgetting that these ‘Hindutva’ proponents made little or no contribution during the struggle for India’s independence. But Shashi Tharoor is no pushover to let them go easily. His book is a timely and sensible argument against the malady that is ‘Hindutva’, a product of fear and paranoia.

Those belonging to Congress will be all praise for this book. Those supporting the BJP will call this book as biased. But any unbiased reader, especially a Hindu who loves his religion, but doesn’t allow that love to become a license to spew paranoia and hatred against practitioners of other religions, will find this book to be a worthy argument. A sensible read!