Book review : 3 mistakes of my life, Chetan Bhagat

Finished this one last night. The book starts off dramatically like the other two Chetan Bhagat books. The author presents a scenario to grip the reader and introduces what made him actually write this book. The story starts beautifully. Three friends, cricket fans, high on each others company, worrisome about the future. Then starts the entrepreneurial part. They actually start a profitable business and the protagnist shows astute business sense. They diversify, expand their core comptencies and are successful.

But like any other business, the story is not completely rosy. The infamous Bhuj earthquake of 2001 occurs and the boys lose all their money as a mall collapses in which they made a huge deposit to book a prime location shop. Following this loss, the protagnist falls ill and is dissappointed. However the friends, who were a little clumsy till now rise to the occassion and keep the shop running. Things even out finally and they get into whole sale business and make lots of profit.

Nice read. Uptil now. But catering to ‘formula best seller ‘ genre, the author digresses from this well crafted theme to actually throw in romance, guilt, a gifted underdog and the fight between friends over a family matter. The ending is horrible in which a actual screenplay of a movie is written (Our heroes defend the underdog from a mob during the Gujarat riots - one of them dies in the process). The last 60 pages of this 260~ page book are horrible.

Apart from the end part, it makes for some good light reading, if you are not doing much on a lazy sunday afternoon. :-)

Stay Hungry..

I bought this book by Rashmi Bansal a few days ago. Loved it. It has 25 chapters about 25 IIM A grads who are doing their own thing. Yes, thats the best way to describe it, doing their own thing. One of them is actually not an entreprenur per se , meaning he is an employee, with a nominal ownership stake like many of us, but he does his own thing.

In all 25 chapters their are remarkable similarities and yet stark differences. The advice to young entrepreneurs section after each chapter is quite enlightening. But again, contradictory points are made from one such section to another.

I have not decided which is my favorite chapter as yet (we don’t decide favorites we just know them, well sometimes we do).

Also there are certain patterns to which a certain group of people adhere to and the others have something else of their own. This post is just a signal that I have finished the book and soon the pattern matching analysis will be posted here. So watch this space.

Am reading this, this and also this now. Yes I have read the last one before (like everybody else) but this has pictures and everything of the important things and the user experience is markedly different, also a friend was kind enough to lend it to me, so there you go.

So I am finally in the elite league of people who read multiple books at once. Yay ! Took me long enough, but I got there finally !

Greed, Doctors and a Life

Here