#TeachersDay: Thoughts on Reforming Education

It is another Teachers' Day on Sept. 5th, at least in India. I believe it is celebrated on several different days around the world. Whatever be the date, the idea is similar: celebrate and honor the contribution of teachers in our lives.

But, does the world really value teachers highly today? How have teaching and the teachers around us changed over time -- over years, decades, centuries? And what about the students? Are they really putting their best foot forward and giving it their best shot -- like Arjuna did when he pierced the eye of the revolving fish with his arrow in that famous story from the Indian epic Mahabharata?

In a world getting hotter, more crowded and ever more chaotic with each passing day, these are questions worth pondering -- because the students of today will inherit that world and make it worse or less worse (making it better seems a slippery possibility, but that is for another blog post :)

As far as India is concerned, what I have noticed is that the overall quality of teaching and teachers has been coming down -- ironically, in the midst of an abundance of knowledge available through the greatest library ever created on Earth, the Internet. Barring perhaps a few hundred schools in a country of 1.3 billion people, the quality of teaching -- and consequently, of learning -- is of grave concern, as survey after survey has pointed out in recent times.

On the brighter side, there seems to be a new movement in education that talks about things like blended learning, self-paced learning, life coaching and other progressive ideas. Driven by online lectures, knowledge repositories and the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), new education ventures seem to be sprouting up all over.

However, in the midst of these mushrooming novelties, I think some fundamental things are still missing and we have quite a distance to cover before we can bridge the gap between a child's true potential and helping her realize it to the full or near-full level.

First of all, we need to completely overhaul how we currently build and run schools. We have all heard of that famous quote about not letting our "schooling" interfere with our "education" (the quote is often attributed to the writer Mark Twain but possibly it was Grant Allen who first expressed such sentiments as long back as the 1890s).

Whoever said it, we are still stuck with the dissonance between the two: schooling and education.
I was fortunate to have met or studied under some honest and dedicated teachers. I'm reminded of this definition by one such teacher (with inspiration possibly from the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi): he once told us that true education is the harmonious development of the three H's -- hand, head and heart.

Unfortunately, the schools we so earnestly built became places where hundreds of thousands of students "reluctantly went" to "mug up or cram their lessons" by rote learning. Some of those students developed keen interest in studies and turned out to be the brightest ones, acing the toughest competitive exams (and often going abroad for "higher research or studies" to succeed commercially). But they did so mostly on their own initiative and supported by private coaching/tuition, etc. The typical institution of school had little to do with their success.

In today's knowledge-rich world, (super) specialization is very much required. But I think we need to relook at the stage a child is encouraged or nudged to pursue such a specialization and not take the cookie-cutter approach (10+2 or whatever) we have traditionally been taking.

Rather than build walled classrooms where students are bunched together and given (mostly) insipid, boring "lessons" -- which most teachers now, by the way, are just too keen to "finish off" so that the syllabus is "covered" -- we must make schools into happy, joyous, fun-filled "sanctuaries for children" if you will, where they discover the importance of learning in life, are given multiple chances to identify their interests and pursue those interests with the guidance of teachers genuinely interested in their life-success.

Alas, what we have in most places in India is the spectacle of students ferrying bagfuls of books and notebooks back and forth between home and school. The things they most look forward to when going to school is not the joy of learning but the company of their friends (which is fine as an important add-on).

The curricula, too, need to be totally revamped for New Age learning. The question of why they are learning something and its practical applications (or significance of applications) is as important as what they are learning -- in order for them to show genuine interest and be more curious about the subject at hand.

Chinese philosopher Confucius is said to have remarked, "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand," way back around fifth century BCE (that's when he lived, right?) But in India the majority of schools are ill-equipped to show their students how things work or enable them to "understand by doing." Their typical approach? "Here, take these dense texts and just mug them up."

This is not to belittle the role of memory in learning. In fact, India has the oldest (and at its peak the most advanced) tradition of auditory learning -- writing of the texts came much later. But the keyword in all learning is "understanding" -- which goes for a toss when the emphasis is merely on cramming, even in higher grades when students have better grasping and perspective prowess.

The need of the hour is a revolution, not just an evolution, in learning.

Happy Teachers' Day -- nay, change that to Happy Teaching and Learning Age!

(Image: Google.com)

Of Fields Medals, Maths and Mathematicians

Most of the recent headlines about winners of the Fields Medal in Mathematics have centred on how great this “Nobel of Maths” is (which is given every four years), the episode of one of the medals being stolen right there at the awards venue or the Indian origin of another winner (Akshay Venkatesh) -- but the mention of Fields Medal once again transported me into the arcane, intriguing world of Maths and mathematicians.

While I know how frustrating and exhilarating Maths can be at the same time (being a one-time Maths aspirant myself), I first heard of Fields Medal when I happened to watch a YouTube video in which Prannoy Roy of NDTV interviewed an amusingly shy Manjul Bhargava -- one of the four winners in 2014 (the International Mathematical Union or IMU, which awards these medals, has a thing for four, and you can read about it here.)

In that interview, Roy called Bhargava a “bewildering genius”. And when he read out the citation, that Bhargava won the award for “developing powerful new methods in the geometry of numbers, which he applied to count rings of small rank and to bound the average rank of elliptic curves”, he added a twist, “Simple as that, right? You got it? Simple stuff, yaar!”

The audience of students gathered to hear the interview burst out laughing.

The citations of the winners of this year’s Fields Medals are no less bewildering. To continue with our ‘Indian connection’, let’s look at the citation for Venkatesh. “For his synthesis of analytic number theory, homogeneous dynamics, topology, and representation theory, which has resolved long-standing problems in areas such as the equidistribution of arithmetic objects,” it says.

Now, that’s what is given as the ‘short citation’ on the Mathunion.org website. There is a long citation as well -- and even that notes that this is “a small sample” of his major achievements. In that, I think the comparison with a Nobel prize (for literature at least) is understandable: the award is to recognise the body of work and, in the case of Fields Medal as stated on the site, “the promise of future achievement”.

Reading the above, I swing my head from left to right on what these young Mathematical geniuses -- Fields Medal winners have to be below 40 -- might unleash by way of achievement in the head-scratching years that lie ahead of them.

As you are still trying to wrap your head around homogeneous dynamics and elliptic curves, let me throw the citations of the other three winners of this year’s awards at you.

Caucher Birkar: “For the proof of the boundedness of Fano varieties and for contributions to the minimal model program.”

Alessio Figalli: “For contributions to the theory of optimal transport and its applications in partial differential equations, metric geometry and probability.”

Peter Scholze: “For transforming arithmetic algebraic geometry over p-adic fields through his introduction of perfectoid spaces, with application to Galois representations, and for the development of new cohomology theories.”

This last one is my favourite, with no disrespect or partiality to the others. If you are someone like me (a non-Maths-genius), you might know why -- just read the citation a couple of times and repeat after me:

p-adic fields.

Perfectoid spaces.

Galois representations.

And, ahem, cohomology theories.

All enmeshed together within the linguistic space of a single, English-sounding sentence.

Wow.

Each one of these cryptic phrases deserves a paragraph of its own, a separate chapter perhaps -- maybe even a book. I don’t know. My own contribution, as you can see, has been the three-letter word: wow.

I mean, in other global awards, even if they are a bit technical in nature, one can somehow translate the achievement in words that a lot of people (if not most people) can understand. But how do you do that for Mathematical complexities that involve p-adic fields, Galois representations and cohomology theories?

Digging deeper, I did some Googling, and came up with some interesting episodes about this “most exact” of sciences and the creatures so absorbed in it — the mathematicians.

I found, for instance, that the Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman refused to accept the Fields Medal which was offered to him for solving one of the most intractable problems in Mathematics — the Poincare Conjecture. Not only that, Perelman also refused the sum of $1 million dollars offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI, claymath.org) as part of its offer of the money to anyone who could solve one of the seven most difficult problems that mathematicians have been struggling with at the turn of the millennium. Dubbed the Millennium Prize Problems, one of the seven is Poincare Conjecture; the other six remain unsolved and are known as Yang-Mills and Mass Gap, Riemann Hypothesis, P vs NP Problem, Navier-Stokes Equation, Hodge Conjecture and Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.

While I’m no liker of press releases, the one from CMI announcing the award in 2010 to Perelman does a remarkable job of simplifying what Poincare Conjecture is and how its proof in three dimensions eluded mathematicians for over a century. Curiously, two Fields Medals were awarded, one each to Stephen Smale (1966) and Michael Freedman (1986), for proving the Poincare Conjecture in five or more dimensions and in four dimensions respectively. (The branch of Mathematics concerned with the conjecture is called topology; those tenacious enough to go through the press release can view it here.)

But why did Perelman refuse those prizes? The question led me to, how should I put it, “the beautiful enigma” that Perelman turned out to be and, unfortunately, to the saga of an obnoxious battle for power in Mathematical circles (pun intended). For an engrossing account of this, read the longish New Yorker piece here (for an appetiser, know that it is co-authored by Sylvia Nasar, who had earlier written mathematician John Nash’s biography, A Beautiful Mind, that was made into a film starring Russell Crowe).

Ordinary folks might need months or even years to understand some of the most pressing problems of Maths or their significance, let alone solve them.

But then, mathematicians are no run-of-the-mill people.

Take Fermat’s last theorem, as another example, and the guy who cracked it — this one after more than three centuries!

Well, at least the theorem is relatively simpler to state. In number theory, according to Wikipedia, Fermat’s last theorem states that no three positive integers a, b and c satisfy the equation a(to the power n) + b(to the power n) = c(to the power n) for any integer value of n greater than 2.

Most of us (who paid some heed to trigonometry in middle school) can pick out the Pythagoras theorem from the above, for n=2, that is, a squared + b squared = c squared (true for a right angled triangle, where c is the hypotenuse).

I can almost hear some of you chuckle: Now you are talking Maths!

But the guy who really, really talked Maths here — tons of it, in fact — is Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat’s last theorem in the mid-1990s. Too old at that time to be given a Fields Medal (the IMU did give him a silver plaque in recognition), he was awarded an equally distinguishing Maths honour, the Abel Prize, in 2016 (what took the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters so long to award Wiles is something I chose not to dwell on at the moment of writing this.)

When the seventeenth-century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat proposed this theorem, he is said to have scribbled a note in the margin of his book that claimed that the proof was “too long” to fit there.

One look at the size of Wiles’s proof and you would think that probably Fermat was right: a New Scientist article notes that Wiles’s version spanned “several hundred pages of cutting-edge 20th century Mathematics.”

The tale of more than three centuries of mathematical quest has been crafted wonderfully well by British author Simon Singh in the book Fermat’s Last Theorem. And oh, by the way, Singh himself happens to be a theoretical and particle physicist (I think I’m going to read that book one day.)

Guys, where are the girls? Don’t tell me there are no ladies of Mathematics, the same old stereotypical thing!

As far as the Fields Medal is concerned, only one woman has thus far been awarded — Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iran-born professor of Mathematics at Stanford University. Sadly, she died of breast cancer in 2017, at the age of 40.

But there is no dearth of “world famous women Mathematicians” as Google helpfully told me through this nicely illustrated scroll of honour. And I was happy to recognise a few names I was familiar with — Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper among them (the latter and more names would appear if you clicked the right arrow in the Google results page).

Mathematics is indeed an enchanting science, mesmerising enough for its most expert practitioners to be termed as Mathemagicians.

Fantastic and complex as its domains, theorems and conjectures may be, the other scientific and technological fields would not have made all those advances — giving us the modern marvels of living such as automobiles, genetic medicine, smartphones and aeroplanes — without progress in the Big M: Mathematics. And of course, without the labour of love of hundreds of mathematical geniuses over millennia of human civilisation.

I’m reminded of this famous quote by German mathematician Leopold Kronecker: “God made the integers; all else is the work of man.”

How to Be Your Own Guru

Image: Pixabay.com

Can you recall a teacher you have studied under or met in your life whom you can call a true guru? One who not only taught a subject - but guided you through the ups and downs of life? Do you know someone who is up there among the highest mortals, imbuing you with their intelligence and helping you grow some of your own?

In the ancient Indian culture, the Sanskrit word 'guru' means one who shows you the light.

Some traditional pictures depict gurus sitting under the banyan or peepul tree, surrounded by ardent disciples listening intently to the often-bearded figures (the Buddha, the Jain Tirthankaras and a few others, however, are usually shown clean-shaven and radiating wisdom).

Such gurus could expound on the science of archery or the dilemmas of a king as easily as the ethical questions arising in the mind of a spiritual seeker.

Alas, in our current age of electricity, smartphones and artificial intelligence, trying to find a true guru sounds like a dumb idea. Why, haven't we already seen too many babas - bearded or otherwise - falling prey to the lure of lust and lucre? And while these 'fake gurus' are often glib-talkers who have mugged up tons of religious literature, listening to them involves more pain than pleasure - forget about spiritual delight.

Rather than radiate wisdom, they exude wealth.

Instead of simplicity, their appearance reveals affectedness.

No thatched huts and long walks for them - but a retinue of confidants officiously commanding the Mercs and the Audis to take them to their mansions often as palatial as their egos.

Enough madness.

Where does that leave you, a seeker in search of a spiritual guru? How on earth are you going to find a divine persona to show you the light and guide you on a path you can proudly call your dharma?

It doesn't look likely in this largely chaotic, greed-infested world where anyone you may repose your faith in today could turn out to be just another impostor tomorrow: there are too many of them in the swindlers list!

(Also read: My Experiments with Sudarshan Kriya, Pranayama and Meditation)

What, then?

Who, where, how, when?

Now, just do as I say. Stand in front of a mirror. Take a deep, penetrative look at the face staring at you. Frown, smile or make faces for a while if that helps. But come back to the gaze. You gazing at you - like never before.

Do it for a few seconds, minutes, hours...length of time does not matter, strength and sincerity of the gaze does. (But hey, don't do it for days or weeks, okay :)

What words come to your mind, what thoughts? How do you regard yourself when seen in the mirror like this perhaps for the first time?

Now do another thing. Sit down in a relaxed pose, close your eyes and think thoughts of yourself.

Both in front of the mirror and while sitting with closed eyes, try and sift through the major attributes of your personality. The defining moments of your life. Your decisions that mattered to you and to those around you who you loved and cared for.

I am reminded of a famous quote of leadership coach and author John Wooden: "The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching."

As you look deep inside yourself and no one but you is watching, you will find a rare clarity emerge. You will know, in hindsight in this 'exercise' - which can gradually turn into here-and-now-wisdom and maybe foresight over time - you will know why those decisions and choices turned out the way they did.

You will know the warts in your thoughts and not just on your face. You will know that perhaps the little things gave you more joy than the big rewards - and the problems that once seemed insurmountable are all but gone now (That there are new problems now is another matter).

More important, you may realize how foolish you were to blame others or fate for your own doing.

Spending more time like this in the honest reflection of your thoughts will help you see the power of your own inner light.

In fact, most of us know - through intuition and traditional wisdom passed down the generations irrespective of religious leanings - the ever-presence of such an inner light in the core of our being.

While our upbringing, the social and economic environment we live in, and the life imperatives we have bound ourselves to, may have some impact on the brilliance and the frequency of 'visibility' of this light, it is my belief that the light itself is integral and essential to us.

I tend to be in agreement with Mark Twain's words: "In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice."

This inner light imparts a keen sense of perception, of what is right and wrong at any given moment, what one should or should not do in certain circumstances. It can indeed prod us to higher, better versions of ourselves - much like the collective wisdom of open source programmers these days can shape a beautiful piece of code.

Guiding yourself by your own inner light is perhaps how you can be your own guru.

So, why not give it a try?

Happy Guru Purnima to You!

How Paytm Uses Tech to Manage 200 Million Users

Key points:

- Paytm processed 1 billion transactions in the quarter ended March 2018
- The firm employs 200 product managers and over 700 engineers
- Its data science lab in Toronto, Canada, develops key tech tools
- App analytics and machine learning are used to retain users and for up-selling

Mobile wallets--mobile apps used to pay for recharges, groceries and other daily items--may have come of age in an increasingly digital India, but much goes behind-the-scenes to keep them working well and users hooked.

Paytm, which has 200 million monthly active users and processed close to 1 billion transactions in the quarter ended March 2018, is a case in point. It competes with MobiKwik, FreeCharge, PhonePe and several others in this space.

Discussing the tech strategy at the company in a recent interview, Deepak Abbot (pictured), senior vice president of One97 Communications Ltd, which owns and operates Paytm, said, “Though a payments firm, we are a technology company at the core and everyone here, including Vijay, is a hardcore techie--he even calls mid-level engineers sometimes to discuss architecture design.” (Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the chief executive of Paytm.)

Abbot said that most in top positions at the company either have technology background or are “quite comfortable” with tech. “Culturally, we have a tech mindset. That is another reason we have been able to build a very complex product in a flexible way.”

Sharing insights into what goes on ‘under the hood’ as they say in tech, Abbot said that quick decision-making and a product-centric approach drive software development. “In our meetings, once an idea is crystallized, Vijay is very clear about what product to build. As a result, the product managers are also clear how to get it done. And when the engineers are given very specific details, they are able to quickly build it,” he revealed.

The simplicity of the Paytm app belies its complex architecture and the number of people that work on it. For instance, Abbot said that there are as many as 200 product managers and 700-800 engineers working on different aspects of the app.

But how does Paytm define a product? “At Paytm, a product is defined as anything a consumer—be it is an end consumer, a merchant or a marketplace seller--interacts with,” said Abbot. For example, recharge is a product in itself. Paytm’s implementation of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), again, is a product (UPI is an easy, instantaneous payment system built by the National Payments Corporation of India or the NPCI). “And then you build use-cases on top of UPI such as P2P, P2M and B2B payments. Wallet--the most used product of Paytm--is another,” said Abbot. (P2P, P2M and B2B stand for person-to-person, person-to-merchant and business-to-business respectively.)

The idea of keeping all these products within the same Paytm app, according to him, is that users should move from one product to another seamlessly—something that requires “a highly scalable product” to be built.

Integration of multiple products within the same app also helps Paytm cross-sell more easily to customers, who may first use one product before being “nudged towards” others, said Abbot.

Talking about stickiness of the app and up-selling to users, he said, “We have observed that if a customer has only used Paytm for recharge, then the retention rate for such a user is 40% after three months. But if we can upgrade him to send money to others, they become power users of Paytm and the retention improves dramatically to 70%.”

Industry experts forecast bright days ahead for mobile wallets. The number of mobile wallet users is expected to grow from the current 200-250 million to around 500 million in the next couple of years, according to Probir Roy, co-founder of Paymate and an independent director at Nazara Technologies. While he believes that “the next big thing” will be “interoperability” among different wallets, he noted that it is a tough space to operate in and some consolidation is “bound to happen” in the coming years. “My guess is that the top two or three companies will have 80% of the market,” he concluded.

------Paytm Labs: Managing customer lifecycles-----

To make the most of app analytics that capture user behaviour, Paytm’s data science lab, Paytm Labs, in Toronto, Canada, works on developing multiple software tools. One such key tool is CLM or Customer Lifecycle Management.

According to Deepak Abbot, senior vice president of the company who is based at Paytm’s headquarters at Noida near Delhi, what CLM does is “catch every ‘signal’ from the app”. Explaining how it works, he said, “If you use the app for UPI, it segments you as a UPI user; if you do a recharge, it marks you as a recharge user. It also upgrades you automatically based on your behaviour or purchase history. So, for instance, if you make an electricity bill payment or a post-paid bill payment, it upgrades you to a post-paid user.” There is a lot of granularity built into the CLM tool to classify and reward different levels of users at different times.

The tool puts users in different segments and generates actionable triggers accordingly. “For example, if a premium user who earlier made a money transfer of Rs 5,000 has not used the app for a month, he will be shown a cashback offer or an ad on Facebook,” said Abbot. Similarly, alerts are shown for soon-to-expire mobile recharges and other bills. “The CLM tool uses such alerts and offers to get those customers back into the app. And if they are already in the app, it will customise the view for them by showing up frequently used icons upfront and hiding others,” he explained.

The entire user data in the Paytm app goes into a “data lake”, and the team in Canada uses it to formulate the rules of the risk engine and other software. The data lake, Abbot explained further, is a repository of multiple sources of data, including phone usage data, hardware data and address book; then there is transactional data plus the behavioural data (where the users navigate inside the app, how much time they spend shopping, etc). All this data is used through machine learning (ML) algorithms so that the alerts and promotions can be automated and personalized.

The Toronto team comprises 70 data scientists and engineers and, besides the CLM tool, has developed the company’s risk and customer score engines. “We just plug those products here (in India) and start using them,” said Abbot.

---##----

(Note: An edited version of the above post first appeared on www.livemint.com - where I used to work until recently. The interaction with Deepak Abbot took place during my Mint tenure.)

Six Bright Gems to Shine a Light on World Book Day

Image: Pixabay.com

In this age of reality TV, Twitter and Pokemon Go (which seems to have really gone somewhere), one may be tempted to ask the question: Why read? In fact, the late Steve Jobs once famously remarked (while discounting Amazon’s Kindle reader): “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

Thankfully, people continue to read—even though there are skirmishes about whether it is the printed books or the digital ones doing better (or worse) than the other. What one hopes, though, is that it is not the same book or set of books that most people end up reading—be it a JK Rowling in the West, or a Chetan Bhagat here in India (no offence to either writer, even though it may make Rowling squirm and Bhagat smirk). The diversity of both the readers and the books they read—and obviously the writers who write them—should grow, I feel. Okay, change that to must.

Having said that, I’m in a difficult position to proceed with this post. Because, out of a few hundred books I have read in my life thus far (should have been in the thousands, I know!), I’m only going to pick up six. (I promise to make a long-list of my favorites someday.)

So, without further ado, let me say something about each of them before the World Book Day gets over--and before some people might be compelled to think it is all right to skip reading books! Here goes (in no particular order):

The Old Man and the Sea: Master storyteller Ernest Hemingway indeed crafted an amazing tale of endurance in which an old fisherman is pitted against the might of the sea and one of its creatures he struggles to catch after a really long patch of bad luck. How he manages this adventure, what he says (I remember him saying something like that the fish he was trying to kill was like his brother in a setting I would never forget; you must read it to know what I mean), and how he behaves after his ‘victory’…The old man is a real-life hero and the book, a rare gem.

A Search in Secret India: Paul Brunton’s classic quest to seek out and meet the real yogis of India in the early part of the nineteenth century is largely credited with introducing Raman Maharishi to the Western audience. What endeared me to this book--besides of course the desire to know more about the Maharishi and his message of ‘Who am I?’—is the honesty of purpose and the integrity of a journalistic writer to get to the bottom of the truth (whether he did get to the truth or not is something I’m still exploring, since I haven’t read his oeuvre and am myself at a ‘seeking’ stage). He met lots of charlatans and frauds but apparently some genuine yoga practitioners as well, before finding his inner peace at the Maharishi’s ashram in southern India.

Autobiography of a Yogi: One of the most widely read books in the spirituality genre, what Paramahansa Yogananda did in this life-changing book was give a first-hand account of some of India’s sages and saints—besides a glimpse of his own tenacity to promote yoga and the teachings of his guru, Yukteshwar Giri. Not to forget the mystical, all-youthful and divine figure of Mahavatar Babaji—Google it to unlock a cornucopia of information. (Ironically, it is one of the books Steve Jobs is said to have read many times over, though we cannot be sure of how much he believed in the book’s divine incidents and miracles.)

Siddhartha (by Hermann Hesse): That this tiny book continues to engage and enchant millions of readers more than 90 years after its publication is testimony to its power and message of spiritual journey and self-discovery. It doesn't matter that it draws from ancient Indian spiritual and Buddhist thought; what matters is that it weaves in a simple narrative the recurrence of everything in our lives, the deceptive nature of our day-to-day rituals, the joys and sorrows of mundane human existence and, ultimately, the "song of the river" that keeps humming forever in our soul. Beautiful, heartfelt, ethereal, simple and profound all at the same time, Siddhartha cannot be recommended highly enough.

Atlas Shrugged: While Ayn Rand’s more famous book is The Fountainhead (which I tremendously like as well), I have picked up this one here for two reasons. One, it is the bulkier of the two and you get to stay with Rand all that bit more (if you are a Rand fan, you’ll know what I mean). Two, I found it more detailed and expressive of her philosophy of objectivism through an even more richly woven tapestry of super-solid characters: Dagny Taggert, Henry ‘Hank’ Reardon (whenever I thought of steel after reading the book, Reardon’s name reared in my head!), Francisco d’Anconia, Hugh Akston (“Contraction does not exist; check your premises”)…and, how can anyone miss it, John Galt! Check it out yourself—who is John Galt to ask you to read it?

The Outsider (also published under the title, The Stranger): This quiet reflection by Albert Camus on life and what matters--through a seemingly simplistic but profound story of a man accused of murdering his mother (the accusation resulting mainly from the observation that he did not follow the norm of crying at her death, if I remember correctly)--is one of those books that touch you gradually but deeply, irrevocably. It is all right not to be too ambitious but lead a joyful and uncomplicated life—that is the message I get again and again from the book, besides revisiting the notions of what it really means to love, be loved and lose those you love to time’s strange ways. Simply superb and highly relevant in our consumerist, gadget-obsessed times.

Like I said before, this is a woefully short list—but I’m happy to have shared it with you for what it is worth. Hope you will find at least one or two of them useful.

Happy reading :)