Sunday, February 28, 2010
Testing Management Skills: Six Tests to Assess Management and Leadership Skills
This book consists of six amazing tests designed to identify particular management styles. I will recommend this book to anyone interested in management, management development. Book is also equally beneficial for people in the management. Book can be use in planning for professional development, recruitment selection or team-building workshops.
Download the book here for free
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Confessions of a Gynecologist
He exposes his own weaknesses and flaws and revels in his special successes. He bears his soul in the exposure of his own desires and needs and how they effected his life’s choices, including a revealing and delicate foray into the subconscious motivations that might cause physicians to choose the specialty of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He holds nothing back in exposing his personal life and his need for affection and love. In the end, he takes us on an exciting voyage of a solid but flawed human being, seen with his eyes, through the delicate, intricate and complicated world of an Obstetrician and Gynecologist.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
The Eleven Thousand Rods in 1999
If yesterday marked the 21st anniversary of the fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, Tuesday saw the European Court of Human Rights defend a convicted Turkish publisher for publishing Guillaume Apollinaire’s classic erotic novel, The Eleven Thousand Rods in 1999.
Contraband in Turkey, the novel was banned in France till 1970 for it’s story of an aristocrat on a turn-of-the-century lust-filled road trip. Luckily, since Apollinaire died in 1918, no one has called for his death.
Monday, February 22, 2010
The Happy Associate - free download
Energy Efficiency And Climate Change - Book download
What makes this book attractive is that it begins with the story of how it all began: the misuse and overuse of resources. It then moves on to tackling what can be done now to save whatever is left. There is also an ‘independent assessment” of the arguments and theories that are doing the rounds on climate change in terms of causes, outcomes, mitigation and policies.
For those who are new to this world buzzing with climate jargon and theories, read the first chapter. It dissects the issue of energy efficiency well. It’ll help new converts understand the basic issue of how energy efficiency links up with larger national goals such as poverty alleviation, environment degradation and green house gas emissions.
While the preference traces the beginnings of industrialisation and where the world went wrong, the following chapters take the readers through inter-relations among the environment, energy and economy, the climate, market-based measures as means to unfold climate change mitigation, commericalisation of clean technology and the role of institutions in promoting energy efficiency.
Since clean technologies is what everybody is talking about these days, the chapter on what it takes to commericalisegreen technologies will be of particular interest.
A handy book, the rather bladly titled Energy Efficiency And Climate Change has the strength to draw in a wider range of readers and not only get academics and policy wonks to nose their way through the chapters. Having said that, a line on the book cover: I am yet to fathom what the picture is all about. Couldn’t it have been made a little more interesting? After all, isn’t this the right time to get readers interested in – as some wag put it – hot air?
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Menopausal Palestine by Suad Amiry
The Quarantine Papers - MUMBAI TERI JAAN-
If The Quarantine Papers by Kalpish Ratna has a major flaw, it’s this: it turns you into an anti-social element.
I foolishly began reading it on a Thursday evening. The next day, I deeply resented the need to go to the office, deeply resented having to go out for a drink, deeply resented everyone who phoned me, deeply resented everything that kept me away from the book.
Naturally, this made my work and relationships hell for a while, but it did bring some sunshine into a couple of people’s lives. Namely Kalpana Swaminathan and Ishrat Syed, surgeons, writers and the two halves of the duo that comprise the pseudonymous writer, Kalpish Ratna. “It vindicates us as authors of the book,” says Sayed.
Why The Quarantine Papers should require vindication is beyond me. It is a gripping, highly textured, very solid novel that had drawn me wholesale into its world(s) and even now, three weeks since I finished the book, I hate being away from it.
Briefly, The Quarantine Papers glides smoothly between the Bombay of December 1992 when the Babri Masjid was torn and communal passions ran high, as lived by one Ratan Oak, a microbiologist, and the Bombay of 1896, when the plague swept through the city and intensified communal hatreds, as lived by Ratan’s great-grandfather, Ramratan Oak, a mortician. But so much is packed into the book that you could get quite breathless. For instance, Ratan Oak learns that he’s not only Ratan Oak. He’s also Ramratan Oak, his great-grandfather. And he’s part of a pact between people from several communities, a pact to stop hate.
Then there’s the brilliant sarcasm(ooh, it is lovely) that shows how colonial rule in India was not the happy Raj party that the British would have the world(and us) believe it was. There are fascinating passages on the development of medicine in India and the world. And there are relationships to sort out-between lovers, spouses, parents and children, and friends.
But where did the idea to tie the plague of 1896 with the communal tensions of 1992 come from? “Well, we’d always wanted to write on Bombay and on the history of medicine, and that’s what this is,” says Sayed. Adds Swaminathan: “When we researched a non-fiction book on the plague (Uncertain Life and Sure Death: Medicine and Mahamaari in Maritime Mumbai), and we came across so much rich material in the state archives, we knew we had our book.”
And a little help from a newspaper reporter who covered the communal carnage of December 1992, and you learn that the only truly fictional elements in The Quarantine Papers are Ratan and Ramratan Oak(But we’ve lived with them in our heads for years,” says Swaminathan) and the conversations between the characters, most of whom were real people.
The obvious theme of the book is communal hatred. That makes Kalpish Ratna very angry. “ Where is the anger of the common citizen,” wonders Sayed. “Have we haveless 9/11s in India than anywhere else? Why is what’s happening in our city happening? Who’s going to talk about this?”
But equally important for the writers is the need to change mindsets with regard to India and the world of the Whites. “Many aspects of history are so coloured with White no one gives a damn for the truth,” says Sayed.
“The voice of the native is always forgotten.”
“For instance,” explains Swaminathan, “Any standard medical text on cholera-including those that are taught in our colleges-will open with a map of shipping routes. It’d tell you there were seven pandemics of cholera in so many years, and it’d give you the number of mortalities in each. But no text would tell you that in the same period discussed in the text,23 million people died of cholera in India. The narrative of any disease has always been from a western prespective.”
But Kalpish Ratna aim to bring us these “forgotten Indian lives”. “It’s all there, all first person accounts, all archived,” says Swaminathan. When the sequel(s) to The Quarantine Papers are published (“We have 10 plots,” chukles Syed) hopefully, we’ll find ourselves. And hopefully, we’ll find ten more great books.