Book-Summaries

An amazing book which describes Google’s journey right from its beginning in the Stanford dorm. The author interviewed several top echelons of Google and presented several interesting insider anecdotes and stories of Google. The book provides details of major projects like Gmail, Google Desktop, Google News and Google Toolbar, Google Books and the failure of Orkut. It also describes the process of acquisition of YouTube, Blogger, Docs, GrandCentral and Double Click. Following are the few salient points. The book has many more interesting anecdotes which I am forced to skip here.

The book presents a generalists view of post-independent India. Unlike India Unbound, this book focuses primarily on post-independent India and takes a more pragmatic approach towards understanding the problems of contemporary India. The best parts of the book are the interesting contradictions that the nation went through - love/hate relationship with the English language, fear of technology, and neglected urban development. Overall, the book is divided into four sets of ideas, that have arrived, that are in progress, that are still being debated, and finally, that have yet to become part of public debate. I have highlighted the best sections of the book in bold.

The book is divided primarily into three parts, the pre-independence era [focused on the British Raj including some stories of the Mughal period], the post-independence pre-liberalized era, and post-liberalized India. The author was born in 1943 in West Punjab, which is now under the occupation of Pakistan. The author narrates his personal experiences of the economic conditions of India from 1947-2001.

The book interprets events in Mahabharata while trying to draw parallels from the contemporary world. Following are the key takeaways based on my understanding of the book. I am assuming some familiarity with the story of Mahabharata.