Basically on books and enemies

To Kill a Mocking Bird

I wasn’t quite blown over but it was a cute and intelligent book nevertheless. The funny thing is that in spite of having bought the book for like 300 bucks, I read half of it on my comp on a PDF! There are certain codes of conduct that a consultant has to follow in office, irrespective of whether (s)he has work or not (like being clean shaven and smelling nice). One such code of conduct is to open your goddamn laptop the moment you seize your desk and then keep staring at the screen for the rest of the day. I guess that explains why I had to ditch the real book at times.

Sreejith

This guy is on my gtalk. I did couple of designs for him / his company last to last year. I saw his face on the cover of Businessworld two days ago (along with three other faces) and I went like – wow! Here is the story link – worth checking out. Congrats Sreejith for being recognized as a successful social entrepreneur and in an indirect way for making IIT Madras proud. 🙂

The concept of enemy

Just like we need friends, we need enemies – that’s the latest thing that has hit me. The more I think about it, the more interesting this theory gets. I guess it is this very nature of a human being that many have exploited and shall continue to exploit. There is always something ( or someone) who you don’t like (or you are not too sure if you like it / him). There you go – that’s your enemy and you need it (him). Sometimes you fear such a thing (or person) and sometimes you simply want to finish it (him) off – forever – by fighting it (him). Even Gandhi had an enemy – curb on freedom. So he fought for it all his life. Anyway, leaving Gandhi to Vijay Mallaya and moving aside to the usage of this everyone-needs-an-enemy concept, let me get into question-asking mode.

How would you use this basic human flaw ( that is – this despness for an enemy) if you were contesting an election? Yes, you guessed it right – you would go around telling everyone what (or who) their enemy is and then telling them  how easily you would render all such enemies harmless – if only you come to power. Sweet enough. But. But, but but – tell me what would you do if you just didn’t have the balls to actually finish of any such real enemy and you still wanted to contest and more than that, to win? Yes you guessed it right again (too good) – you would create artificial enemies that you know you can handle in your perverted ways!

So for example you could address a group of Hindus and convince them that Muslims are their enemies (even when the fact could be that a bigger enemy might be something else, like may be unavailability of  water or power or some serious shit like that). You just need to be smart enough and there you go – you get all the votes.

By the way, if you think about it, love might unite two or three people but if you want a large group (group of 10 to 10,000 to infinity – anything man, just anything) to be united, then the only thing that can work for you is – yes you guessed it right once again (man, stop guessing it right all the time for God’s sake) – enemy! Recall all those stories about bees killing a poor tiger which were supposed to teach you about the power of unity (ekta me bal hai)? But you see, the story-writer had to create an enemy in the form of tiger to prove his point!

Business Plan

I don’t really have like a plan plan but what I have is a speck of an idea – you may call it a dirty beginning or something if it pleases you. Let me begin with a question: do you think that there are millions of books lying around – just like that – totally idle kissing dust – in millions of houses all across India (and possibly the world)?

I definitely think so – I see an enormous volume of useful capital resource that’s rotting away just because nobody is doing anything about this issue. I mean it’s not like just absolutely nobody in this universe is not doing nothing but what is being done is probably not good enough, or if I may say, not smart enough. Let’s begin with second-hand book-stores.

Let me tell you why it’s not the smartest way to get books out of the black hidden corners of  so many homes by way of second-hand book-stores. Many people don’t sell their books to second hand bookstores simply because the ‘money’ that they would get from selling their books is hardly anything compared to what they earn. I mean poor people don’t read books anyway and the rich don’t need change – small cash doesn’t motivate them enough to let their books pass to new readers. Sometimes these (rich) people do sell off books simply because their homes start getting too crowded  and they believe that it’s not a good thing to throw away books generally you know. So, then they do sell books to second-hand books stores. Not very smart is the bottomline.

Second hand book-stores are not the only ways to solve this issue. There is this concept of book-exchange of course. If you Google, you will see that there are several of these book-exchange sites that exist (I could find few even in India). But, book-exchange doesn’t really sound that smart an idea again. I mean, why would I exchange my 1000 rupee book (that I have finished reading) with a 300 bucks book even if like the 300 bucks book very much and I want to read it? I can always exchange my book with a book of an equivalent value but usually what I would want to read might simply be of a different value and I can’t read some crappy book just because it costs 1000k. I am sure you got my point and hence the obvious problem of book-exchange.

So I am thinking that if I could somehow make these unutilized books flow – from one hand to another by using some other way to motivate these book owners, wouldn’t it be nice? I think I need to promote the idea that it’s a BAD thing to let your books rot away unless you really have a good library of your own – that’s pretty much my plan as of now. How exactly I would execute this is a secret (LOL – even to me, if you ask me).

Phew! Loooong post! Before I end, “India After Gandhi” is the studdest history books that I have ever read – it’s like the most interesting way one could have written a book on all that happened in India after independence. Alrighty, shall leave you all on that – cyao.