My review comments -> Ritesh Sharma & Neeraj Pahlajani - Joker in the Pack

Once again after “Five Point Someone”, a really nice stuff that I enjoyed reading. Again as written by an Indian writer, it is very much comprehensible and especially when used the Jargons in Hindi or some sentences in Hindi .
        The funny thing or the irony part is that, I will feel little embarrassed to refer it to my female friend or relatives due to the excessive usage of Hindi abusive language. But in real and practical life people often use such slang languages.
        What I really like about this book is how the “Janta or Fighter” class people strive for success in life. It is a sort of motivational book for me that I like to keep with me for whole life or until I achieved the same kind of success after prolonged struggle.
        Here the book depicts very clearly, how the personality of a person changed while achieving his/her desired goal in life. The switch from college loafer to MNC’s manager is great, but to achieve this its requires lots of hard work, will power, and people support (in form of family, friend, mentor or stranger).
        At the end, this book is doing a great genuine help by supporting the “Manjunath Shanmugan Trust”.

Few lines that I really liked are :
a) Page 168 (2nd last paragraph): … I felt sorry for her, and I wondered again at the price we paid in search of glory.
b) Page 174 (2nd paragraph): “Waqt se pehle, aur kismet se zyada, na kisi ko kuch mila hai, aur na kuch milega.” (Nobody gets anything more than what’s in their fate, or before it’s their time.)
c) Page 188 (last paragraph): … the single biggest factor contributing to our success was ‘being at the right place at the right time’.
d) Page 195 (1rst paragraph): … I looked back and realized that while I had been a successful middle-class dream I had lost Anoushka, the person for whom I had embarked upon the journey to realize the dream.

My review comments -> Chetan Bhagat – The 3 Mistakes of My Life

The novel is short and sweet. As it is written by an Indian author, and as I am an Indian, the language is more comprehensible or easily understandable.
        But if we go by content wise, it does not contain any surprise for me. I already expected that writer is going to tell about earthquake (natural calamity) and riots (man-made calamity), because these two events were one of the few events due to which Gujarat came into news and it effected human life in large scale.
        The most indigestible part of novel is, when those 3 friends win over angry mob of more than 40 persons.
        At last, it is good novel that let you pass the time without any headache or remorse.

My review comments -> Paulo Coelho – The Witch Of Portobello

Few good lines, that I really liked are:
a) Page 18 -> "The best way to know who we are is often to find out how others see us."
b) Page 78 -> "God hid the most important things from the wise because they can not understand what is simple."
c) Page 93 -> "What is a teacher? It isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows."
d) Page 105 -> "Music only exists because the pauses exists, and sentences only exists because the blank spaces exists."
e) Page 115 -> "Your wounds will help you."
f) Page 131 -> "When I die, bury me standing, because I've spent all my life on my knees !"


I really like the way, the writer tell the story or biography of the character. It is one of the best way to narrate about someone. "The best way to know who we are is often to find out how others see us."

Good Quotes

1) "People who say it can't be done, should not interrupt those who are doing it."

2) "Success comes easily to those who don't care for success."

3) "You will have no fear, when there is nothing to loose.
When there is nothing to loose, its mean you love nothing."

4) "Happiness is inversely proportional to Expectation."

"When expectation is high, happiness will be low.
When expectation is low, happiness will be high."

5) "I know I am here to do good to others, and what others are here for, I don't care."

6) "You can't win a person, who let's you win."

7) "To break the rules, you should know the rules."

8) "Love a person, more than yesterday but less than tomorrow."

9) "मन का हो तो अच्छा , मन का न हो तो और भी अच्छा , क्यों कि वोह ऊपर वाले ( भगवान ) के मन का होता है |"

10) "यार तेरी यारी हम इस हद तक निबायेंगे , कि यार का दिया जलाने के लिए खुद ही जल जायेंगे |"

11) "When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice."

12) "दर्द जब हद से गुजर जाता है, तो दवा बन जाता है |"


13) "The only thing require for triumph of evil is for good man to do nothing."

14) "It is so simple to be happy. But it is so difficult to be simple."


15) "Every saint had a past ... and Every sinner has a future ..."

Novels that I have read

1. Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull
2. Robin Sharma – The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
3. Abdul Kalam – Wings Of Fire
4. Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen - Chicken Soup For The Soul
5. Sidney Sheldon – The Other Side Of Me
6. Sidney Sheldon – Rage Of Angels
7. Sidney Sheldon – The Best Laid Plan
8. Sidney Sheldon – The Naked Face
9. Sidney Sheldon – Are You Afraid Of Dark
10. Sidney Sheldon – The Other Side Of Midnight
11. Sidney Sheldon – Master of the Game
12. Dan Brown – The Da Vinci Code
13. Dan Brown – Angels And Demons
14. Dan Brown – Digital Fortress
15. Paulo Coelho – Veronika Decides To Die
16. Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist
17. Paulo Coelho – The Zahir
18. Paulo Coelho – The Devil And Miss Pyrm
19. Paulo Coelho – The Witch Of Portobello
20. Jeffrey Archer – False Impression
21. Jeffrey Archer – Fourth Estate
22. Jeffrey Archer – Kane and Abel
23. Jeffrey Archer – The Prodigal Daughter
24. Jeffrey Archer – First Among Equals
25. Jeffrey Archer – Paths of Glory
26. Chetan Bhagat – Five Point someone
27. Chetan Bhagat – One Night At Call Center
28. Chetan Bhagat – The 3 Mistakes of My Life
29. Chetan Bhagat – 2 States
30. Chetan Bhagat - Revolution 2020
31. Nancy Drew – The Email Mystery
32. Nancy Drew – The Girl Who Couldn’t Remember
33. Nancy Drew – The Case Of Rising Star
34. Michael Chrichton – State Of Fear
35. Michael Chrichton – Prey
36. Hammond Innes – Air Bridge
37. Hammond Innes – The Strange Land
38. Hammond Innes – Campbell’s Kingdom
39. Hammond Innes – The White South
40. Robert Ludlum – The Ambler Warning
41. Robert Ludlum – The Moscow Vector
42. Mario Puzo – The Godfather
43. Mario Puzo – The Last Don
44. Stieg Larrson  –  The Girl who Played with Fire
45. Stieg Larrson –  The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nest
46. Stieg Larrson –  The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
47. John Grisham – The Associate
48. John Grisham – The Confession
49. Michael Connelly – Crime Beat
50. Michael Connelly  –  The Brass Verdict
51. Ravi Subramanian  –  If God was a Banker
52. Ravi Subramanian  –  Devil In Pinstripes
53. Ravi Subramanian  –  The Incredible Banker
54. Ravi Subramanian  –  Bankster
55. Ravi Subramanian  –  Bankerupt
56. Tamal Bandyopadhyay  –  A Bank for the Buck-The Story of HDFC Bank
57. Lee Child  –  The Affair
58. Lee Child  –  One Shot
59. Lee Child  –  A Wanted Man
60. Nora Roberts  –  Rising Tides
61. Nora Roberts  –  Homeport
62. Tom Clancy  –  Patriot Games
63. Ritesh Sharma & Neeraj Pahlajani  –  Joker in the Pack
64. Protima / Pooja Bedi - Timepass : the memoirs of Protima Bedi
65. Kunal Basu - The Japanese Wife
66. Robert Kiyosaki's and Sharon Lechter - Rich Dad Poor Dad
67. Spencer Johnson - Who Moved My Cheese
68. John Gray - Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
69. Sudha Murthy – Wise and Otherwise, A Salute to Life
70. Nirupama Subramanian - Keep The Change
71. Gregory David Roberts – Shantaram
72. Neeraj Chhibba – Zero Percentile
73. Ayn Rand – The Fountainhead
74. Sujata Parashar – In Pursuit of Infidelity
75. Sarah Macdonald – Holy Cow, An Indian Adventure
76. Lance Armstrong & Sally Jenkins – It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life
77. Khaled Hosseini – The Kite Runner
78. Frederick Forsyth – Icon
79. Tim Bouquet & Byron Ousey - Cold Steel: Laksmi Mittal and the multi-billion dollar battle for a global empire
80. Max Arthur – Lost Voices of the Royal Navy: Vivid Eyewitness Accounts of Life in the Royal Navy from 1914-1945
81. Jim Collins - How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
82. Michael White – Beautiful Assassin
83. Komal Mehta - Nick of Time
84. Christopher Reich - The Patriot's Club
85. Mark Owen with Kevin Maurer - No Easy Day-The Only First Hand Account of the Navy Seal Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden
86. Matthew Reilly - The Five Greatest Warriors
87. Jim Stovall - The Ultimate Gift
88. James Patterson – The Beach House
89. Harlan Coben – Tell No One
90. Matthew Reilly - The Five Greatest Warriors
91. James Patterson – The Beach House
92. Harlan Coben – Tell No One

A nice motivational speech of Steve Jobs

Check out this link for whole video ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPL_NjBjUWE

This is the text of the Commencement address given by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.