Book Review - The Intelligence Trap, David Robson

A couple of months ago, I came across a post on LinkedIn, where a senior professional with an IIM degree had shared a post about an Indian student. This student, in his late teens, was said to have secured two patents in his name already and he was also said to have rejected the invitation from  the then US President Donald Trump to join NASA. Under the message and the said student’s photograph was a nationalist slogan. The fact is, this message was proven to be a fake information more than a year ago, but our senior professional had no clue about it. Neither did he bother to check the truth before posting it on a professional forum like LinkedIn. There was this stinging comment under that post – ‘Can’t you differentiate fake news from the real ones? How the h*** did you pass from IIM?’

Well, we all have that one friend (or many, as in my case) that shares fake news or unverified information on their social media posts or through WhatsApp. While I have been able to change a few of them and make them verify anything before they share it with others – or at least with me – I have also lost friends due to what they consider to be my ‘pedantic’ approach. I have always wondered about what makes these people, most of them well-educated and in respectable professions, share fake information without ever checking its veracity. This book is an apt answer to that question.

Well, this book isn’t purely about debunking fake information, but about why supposedly smart, well-educated people do stupid things and end up with egg on their faces. Starting with how we mistake IQ as a measure of intelligence, though people with much lower IQ scores often outperform such ‘geniuses’, the book lays down its arguments for how often intelligence is nothing but thin ice – cool and shiny but fragile and pointless.

Starting from a Nobel prize winning scientist that denied climate change and HIV to detailing the whims of Steve Jobs, the man who made Apple what it is today, the book delves into the logical fallacies that plagues every intelligent mind. Becoming myopic due to their acknowledged genius, having their ideas and opinions crystallized despite proven facts to the contrary, inability to listen to the opinions and learn from others are some of the mental malaises that victimized many of the most brilliant minds in human history. This book speaks about such weaknesses and elicits lessons from their mistakes. Speaking about organizations, it states the reasons for why even the most successful organizations like Nokia went into a tailspin and why NASA had to have more than one disaster to strengthen its engineering processes.

There are still people that believe that the world is flat and, at present, that COVID is a hoax, despite glaring evidences staring at their faces. The tragedy is that most, if not all, of these people are well-educated and supposedly of sane minds. The logical fallacies that dominate their thinking is all laid bare in this book. The cure to such malaises? Curiosity and intellectual humility.

In an age when ultra-nationalists and bigots are taking over every public forum to spew venom by spreading lies and misinformation, books like these can boost rational thinking and logical abilities. It gets a tad slow at times, but is a worthy read nevertheless!

A.

Lokāh samastāh sukhino bhavantu!

 

लोकाः समस्ताः सुखिनो भवन्तु

Lokāh samastāh sukhino bhavantu!

 

"May all beings everywhere be happy and free!"

 

In the last 48 hours, I have heard about the demise of at least 4 people due to COVID. The most tragic of them being a family friend's mother and father passing away on the same day, within 5 hours, due to COVID related complications. Never in my living memory did the whole world around me need as much healing and peace as it does now.

 

Ignore all the petty differences like religion and politics and stand united. Care for one another and help those in need. If we don't learn the lessons and let go of our ego, COVID might prove to be very much the reckoning that the arrogant mankind so deserved!

 

Take care and stay safe. Mask up and stay alert. Take care of the elders at home. Remembering you all in my prayers today!

Book Review – Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons, Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson Jr.

It was the year 2008. I was happily settled in an MNC NBFC, having been promoted recently and destined for more growth. Just as I was thinking that things could only get better from here, the scales tilted and everything went on a downward spiral. Within a span of 6 months, I was left searching for jobs - twice. What was looking like one of the most memorable periods of my life for all reasons good, turned out to be an unforgettably forgettable period. Reason? The conflagration that was threatening to burn down the Wild West of American economy – the Wall Street.

While wild fires are normally limited to the geographies where they started, this financial inferno was spreading far and wide, threatening to bring down the global economy, thanks to its interconnected nature and growing ambitions. Though I had an inkling of what caused the Financial Crisis of 2008, resulting in the not-so-memorable changes in my life, I was curious to learn more about it. The aptly titled ‘Firefighting’ is the first of the shortlisted books and it turned out to be a worthy prelude.

Subprime Mortgages – these two words caused all that chaos. To tell you the background in simple terms, just like me the world was highly optimistic in the years leading to 2008. Investors were willing to bet on high-risk investments that promised high returns. Banks and financial institutions were flooding the market with liquidity. People were starting to chase the dream of owning a house. As a result, there was a boom in real estate in the US and elsewhere, with real-estate prices increasing every day. Financial institutions that were lending to fuel this boom wanted to raise more funds to lend more. One of their ideas was to repackage these loans into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and sell if off to return-craving investors, on promises of regular returns.

With the demand for MBS growing more and more, the financial institutions started giving home loans to even uncreditworthy people – people with no solid income, no credit history and no assets to guarantee the repayment. On one end, investors were pouring in money, driven by greed, and on the other, banks were throwing it all away by lending it to all and sundry, based on overconfidence bordering on arrogance. It was all based on the assumption that the real-estate demand will keep up and the prices will go on increasing.

Then came the slump in demand for housing and suddenly there were more houses than takers. Also, the subprime mortgages were starting to go sour. With defaults piling up and the investors starting to pull out their investments fearing losses, the financial institutions that were indulging in this perilous business were starting to fall like dominoes. Their collapse resulted in serious recession and unpleasant fallouts elsewhere too – in the form of job losses, negative spends, resultant decrease in demand and in turn, more job losses – including that of people like me.

This book is written by the people who were in the forefront fighting that financial hellfire – Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Timothy F. Geithner, Treasury Secretary (Obama) and Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Treasury Secretary (Bush). Advantages of reading a book written by people who fought the fire is that you expect to get a front-row view of the crisis as it unfolded. The book lives up to that expectation. With their experience and wisdom, they have well explained the causes of the crisis, events during the crisis, the casualties and the cure administered. Comprehensive and unbiased, they have pointed out the pros and cons of the corrective measures taken by both administrations – by George W. Bush and his successor, Barack Obama. Having written the book by 2019, they have also shared their thoughts on how America is well and ill-equipped to handle a similar crisis at present, especially as it stood polarized under an uncouth president like Donald Trump.

One of the negatives is that they have written the book in a diplomatic manner and from too high a view to recount the pains of people at the bottom of the financial pyramid. Neither is there a recounting of greedy arrogance of the CEOs that dragged American economy to its nadir (but who received safe exits – ‘golden parachutes’ – sans compunction). Nor is the resulting global financial pandemonium spoken about in detail. But considering the authors’ positions and the fact that this book is mainly about the financial crisis in America, we understand that those topics are simply out of the scope of this book.

Clear and comprehensive, this will be one of my favorite books on the financial crisis 2008!

A.

Transience is all there is!

Even amidst a life gone numb with innumerable travails and turmoil, Mother Nature never fails to give me goosebumps through seemingly trivial scenes. Stepping out of the office today for a tea-break, I just looked up at the sky and saw this. 

Pure blue sky, with puffy white clouds, providing the backdrop, two trees stood side by side. One with its leaves in various shades of yellow, falling down at the faintest hint of a breeze, standing next to a rain tree that had just sprouted a whole set of fresh green leaves. Young and aged, old and new standing juxtaposed, providing testimony to the passage of Time, accentuated by the floating clouds. 

Life is all about transience. Life is all about movement. Life is all about the fleeting moments. Pains or pleasures, we are all here for a while. A very brief while! ❤️

A.

A Late Winter's Dawn

 

When I woke up and opened the doors this morning, fog and chill winds greeted me. The Sun didn't yet wake up from Her slumber and it was dark all around. Yet, up above on the sky, away from all that sombreness, a pale gray cloud shone with a lovely tint of orange on the side that faced east. Like a harbinger, signalling the impending arrival of light and warmth, that solitary cloud shone beautifully.

Waiting at the terrace, I was able to watch the Sun climb up on the East like a shy bride, appearing all decked and docile in a glowing shade of orange. If only cellphone cameras could capture her regal splendour!

P.S. Why do we always speak about the Sun in masculine terms and the Moon in feminine terms?! By sheer virtue of nourishing and nurturing all that is good on this planet, doesn't the Sun deserve to be considered a female?! And, the Moon, for all her glittering glow, all borrowed from the Sun, akin to a man who is only as good as a woman in his life?!

Book Review – Tongue-In-Cheek: The Funny Side of Life, Khyrunnisa A

Let me confess. I am that guy on whose jokes nobody laughs. Be it in school or in college, or even at work, not many people break into a guffaw when I utter, what I consider to be, wisecracks. On the contrary, there were always some back-benchers - or junior staff members now - who made people around fold up with laughter, by uttering simple grunts and groans. Naturally, I have always envied people with such astonishing sense of humor. As I grew up, I understood the most important trick of making people laugh – never trying to make them laugh. Good humor is based on spontaneity and smartness. While I assumed that I had the smartness, I was never spontaneous. I always tried to make my jokes smart and sharp, ending up sounding incomprehensible in the process.

For example, read this joke and tell me how quickly you understood it – ‘There were two retired professors sitting in lawn, sipping tea and discussing things. One of them asked the other ‘Have you read Marx?’ The other one promptly responded ‘Yeah, it’s these pesky wicker chairs’. It took me a couple of minutes to understand this joke, but as the sheer smartness of the joke became clear, the joke got etched on my mind. While such ultra-smart jokes are fun to feel, they don’t tickle you at once and make you roll on the floor. Spontaneity is what produces such end results. Very few people exhibit such a perfect blend of smartness and spontaneity – to make people laugh with jokes that stick to the heart. Ms. Khyrunnisa is one such a blessed writer.

Blessed with perfect command over language and a keen eye for the innate quirks of human minds, the author has beautifully documented all those tickle-worthy moments of our day-to-day lives. From simple household chores to showy weddings, health fads to age-related ailments, silly fetishes to serious mishaps, there are so many things that we go through on a daily basis, blinkered and blind to our idiosyncrasies. This book will make one stop and think about similar incidents in one’s own life and smile in hindsight. I loved how the author repeatedly kept pulling the mickey out of herself and her own family members. Even while documenting the hilarity hidden in the acts/thoughts of the people around her, she makes us laugh, without exactly making them the laughing stock.

In a world that is increasingly feasting on silly, senseless, scatological ‘jokes’ and sexual innuendos, her style of writing, steeped in subtle, sensible, decent wit all through, feels like a breath of fresh air. Her style of alluding to things past and present, historical and everything else, wordplay and funny flow all remind me of Albert Uderzo and Rene Goscinny, famed creators of my favorite Asterix and Obelix comic series.

You may not ‘LOL’ at the end of every other sentence, but the genuine hilarity of these tales is guaranteed to give you a lightened mind and some hearty laughter. Tongue-in-Cheek is cheeky indeed!

A.

Book Review – The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee

My first introduction to the dreaded disease of cancer was through movies, where the hero bleeds through his nose, wraps a shawl and goes around with unshaven face, singing sad songs about his plight. My mother’s narrations about her elder sister’s traumatic experience with breast cancer and resultant mastectomy at a young age didn’t make much of an impact on me. As I grew up, there were so many characters with cancer in so many movies that the word cancer itself started to feel like those foreign locations that the lead characters go to for their duets – exotic, intriguing, yet faraway, having nothing to do with me. But as I matured into adulthood, I started seeing relatives, families of friends and colleagues bear the brunt of this ominous disease. My brief volunteering with an NGO that works for cancer patients brought me face to face with the seriousness of this scourge of humans. Young children suffering from leukemia, men in their early twenties fighting lung cancer caused by smoking, elderly people disfigured by throat cancer due to tobacco use - cancer was no longer exotic and faraway. It was close and gross.

When recently someone near and dear was diagnosed with cancer, I felt my curiosity piqued. I was looking for resources to learn more about this disease and do what I can to spread awareness. That’s how I found this book. And, what a worthy primer this turned out to be!

Cancer is not a modern illness. Its ancientness parallels that of our own. For millennia, people have suffered from and succumbed to cancer. But what makes this dreaded disease unique is its ability to evolve at the same rate as we do. Every time we find a cure and hope to kill this disease forever, cancer evolves and moves the bull’s eye. To borrow an idea from the author, imagine an Achilles whose vulnerability shifts someplace else, just as you target an arrow at his heel.

All those centuries of painstaking research has taught us one thing – this disease emerges from within. While external agents – like viruses and carcinogens - play a crucial role in waking this demon from its slumber, cancer is something internalized. It is our own body cells gone rogue, disobeying the lifecycle of birth-growth-decline. In a cruel twist of fate, our own body cells, nano-representations of our own selves, find a mutated vigor for ‘life’, start proliferating so profusely that they end up killing us, their collective image. Killing a harmful virus or bacteria has been relatively easier, because they have definite shape, purpose and, especially, are apart from us. But cancer is a part of us, our own cells, our genes, DNAs gone rogue. Not just that. Each of these mutations takes its own unique form as there are individuals. Cancer isn’t one single disease to find a cure against. It is a bunch of mutations, the perverted race of cells to proliferate and spread all over.

This book taught me those things in an intense way. Starting from the earliest mentions of this disease in history, nearly 2500 years ago, to the latest development in the field of oncology, this book tries to light up a very vast area. And, it succeeds too. The tug of war between cancer and science, the misunderstandings, poorly designed treatments, lessons learnt, sacrifices by patients as well as physicians, their tenacity in the face of adversity, emotional / physical reliefs brought by discovery of cures, relapses and remissions, egos and ebullience of the people involved, this book tells it all. If you are looking to learn what cancer is and what a devastating trail it has left all through the annals of mankind, then this is a book you must start with. The sheer effort and research that fills these pages is astounding. Dr. Mukherjee has put his heart and soul into this book.

The book is comprehensive but not complete though. For example, the book doesn’t dwell into ovarian cancer, something that I was so keen to learn about. The book doesn’t provide any advice on how to prevent cancer, if at all it is possible, or what kinds of lifestyles are prone to the risk of it. But, of course, the good doctor promptly justifies his reasons in the annexures.

This book doesn’t tell you everything that you would like to know about cancer. But it will tell you all the basics that you need to know about it. If you are pursuing the subject with curiosity, this is a good book to begin with. Not an easy read, but definitely worth the time.

As I finished reading and sat staring at the covers, I had this strange emotion – in their traits of reproducing profusely, migrating to wherever possible, reshaping the landscape of their destination (organ), and increasing ability to defy death that results in the ultimate demise of the host organism, isn’t cancer quite akin to us humans? Are cancer cells the microcosmic parallels to what we humans are to the macrocosm, i.e., the Universe?!

Who knows?! May be, we are!