The Dilbert Principle - Scott Adams

The book describes itself as “A cubicle’s eye view of bosses, meetings, management fads and other workplace afflictions”. And it is just that. It captures all the parodies that all corporate honchos, wannabes, survivors and prisoners go through.

Having worked in a corporate environment himself, Scott brings out a very real, and a not-so-exaggerated description of corporate life. It’s sarcasm that leaves you smiling… and then laughing… and then rolling on the floor laughing. I really wonder how a corporate purist would react to this book. Of course this book is not meant for the CEOs, or even presidents and Vice Presidents… it is largely for the chunk of mass which sits in cubicles and not cabins. And I, for one, could surely relate to it. The concept of meetings… change control… quality… ISO… etc, etc and my thoughts on them are pretty close to what Scott Adams thinks. The book actually makes you feel good about not being in higher management at times… But then hey, the joke is eventually on us cubicle guys. So yeah… I wanna have a cabin!

The book is interspersed with some Dilbert strips in between. Which if nothing else, do ensure that laughter stays on even when Scott can’t think of content for paragraphs to make us laugh. And as long as we are laughing, I guess we are not complaining.

And then there are the letters from his fans. And some of them are mind blastingly funny. In fact, if some of them are true, then corporate America is surely doomed!!!

But the book gets repetitive towards the end. Sarcasm, one comic strip at a time is ok. But a barrage of it for 300 pages gets a bit monotonous. Not that you will feel like you have had a dose of tranquilizer if you go through the pages, or that you will exclaim “oh what crap” when you reach the last period… it is a light, humorous book through out. But the humour simply loses its hilarity as you flip through chapters.

All said, it is a good read. All Dilbert fans will surely enjoy it. And everyone who works in an “office” and sits in a “cubicle” should go through it.

Maximum City - Suketu Mehta

Having lived with my parents for 24 years… Let me rephrase that. Having lived with EXTREMELY PROTECTIVE parents for 24 years of life, I thought that I would enjoy the independence in Bangalore, where I had to move to for work, as a member of the ever expanding IT brigade. And I do enjoy that… during the time I am not getting nostalgic about Mumbai. Oh yeah… Mumbai… with its streets over-flowing with humans, with its acne infected roads, chugging and choking traffic… and a zillion other negatives… is a city I miss SO much… that I am surprised myself.

And I happened to land on the book “Maximum City”. I expected it to take me to the Mumbai I had lived in, where I inhaled its polluted air, where I ate “Vada-Pav” right next to the open drain… but instead, it was a completely different journey. The book takes me to the Mumbai which thousands of us never see in our endless trips to and fro home and office (or college). It is the Mumbai which is so melodramatically, or perhaps not, portrayed in the films. Suketu Mehta takes you in the lives of diverse characters: a movie director, a politician, a cable-wallah, an assassin, a cop, a poet, a girl dancing in bars, a cross dresser, a family which sacrifices all worldly possessions to become hermits and of course in his own life. Such a concoction of people can only be found in Mumbai. In this book, Suketu Mehta plays a journalist, a novelist, a script writer, a friend to the people he investigates, and a Mumbaikar. It is a truthful portrayal of the innermost feelings of the author which, as a fellow Mumbaikar, I can totally relate to. He presents the opinion of a person who has seen Mumbai in the flourishing, I suppose, 70s and then in the turbulent 90s. Of course it has to be kept in mind that author had left “Bombay” as a teenager, and had come back to “Mumbai” as a writer.

The author goes through his own motions as he researches and describes about the life of various “character types” in Mumbai. He writes, and brilliantly so, about his own life in the old Bombay vis-à-vis the new and modern Mumbai. Every one of the people he describes, touch his life in more ways than one. The gangster who promises him any “favour” he wants, the feared cop who becomes a steadfast friend, the hot-n-sexy bar-dancer whose company people would die to have, a director who urges him to be a part of movies instead of writing books that only a handful of self-proclaimed intellectuals would read… all confide in the author. Everyone appreciates a person who lends his ear. And Suketu Mehta was an empathic listener. Through the book he narrates the conversations he has with the people he meets. And it’s apparent that the conversations have been translated, literally so, from Hindi to English. This might leave an “English” reader with a sense of reading a very dry narration, but as a Mumbaikar, I can hear the dialogue ringing in my ears as it must have been said, in Bambaiyaa Hindi.
Mumbai has seen some dramatic changes since this book has been published. Like the mushrooming of malls across the length and breadth of the city; the relentless rains that have wreak havoc during monsoons every year, the exponentially increasing crowds in the train (oh yeah, the trains are a lot more crowded since the time when the book was written)… but then there is only so much that you can capture about Mumbai in a single book. Every Mumbaikar’s life is a story worth telling. Suketu Mehta has done fabulously well in his 584 pages. You might watch movies which depict the sleazy Mumbai bars, or gang wars… but they lack the honesty that pours from Maximum City. In this book you truly get a glimpse of the living, dilapidated, yet thriving Mumbai. A book that you would end with a note of, “Bhenchod (an expletive, the nuances of which are better explained in the Maximum City), great book!!!”

The White Feather - P.G. Wodehouse

A simple, straight, sweet book. I would have thrown it away in the empty fields beyond my bedroom balcony if Wodehouse had written anything else. I read P.G. Wodehouse mostly for his way with words. His light sense of humour helps, and the happy endings always cheer me up.

The book is about the horrors and helplessness of a typical geek in a setting which demands physical prowess. Sheen, the geek, fails miserably short of expectations. He then ends up being the disgrace of the house, the black sheep. And the seething and boiling that ensues in his soul in the weeks following the unfortunate incident, drives Sheen to take some remedial, if not drastic, measures. Fortunately he has a mentor to guide him. And a world renowned mentor, at that.

So how does the story unfold? Does Sheen manage to win the glory back for his house? Does he redeem himself fair and square? This is nail-biting, blood stopping, breath freezing suspense. Actually, its not. It’s P.G. Wodehouse for crying out loud. I read him for just plain fun. Predictability be damned. And that’s what a P.G. Wodehouse book gives me. Do not expect this book to be a crash course on “boxing”. Because while it is the central sport in the book, and a “straight left” can apparently knock down even Hercules himself, there is a lot more to boxing than Wodehouse cares to explain. But one thing that he does contribute to boxing, which was never before present in the sport, is his quintessential humour.

You can relate to the Sheen the geek, or Drummond the good guy who everyone in school listens to, the school days rowdiness... all of it. Really speaking, the book is not as funny as some of the other Wodehouse books, and the plot is quite simplistic as well. This is a work from the initial part of the Wodehouse’s career and is not nearly as “totally awesome” as his later works. Yet, I enjoyed the book immensely. A Wodehouse fan will definitely love this book. I guess the other readers could give it a miss. In fact, if I were to be neutral this book would get pretty low ratings. But as it turns out, I am a Wodehouse Fan. So Five Stars for the book!

Misery - Stephen King

Stephen King as you would expect him. Gory… Vivid… and masterful at creating frightening scenarios. As you read the book you get more and more convinced that King deep dived into himself for playing out the thoughts of the protagonist, Paul Sheldon.

The book does have a close resemblance to one of his other works, Gerald’s Game. Of course this had more content to write around, as an author. After all, there were two people in this book: Paul and his captor, Annie Wilkes. And Paul had a specific task at hand, other than escaping. On the other hand, Gerald’s Game is about one woman who is trapped in a secluded house, hand-cuffed to a bed and the whole book primarily about her getting back to the world again. Surprisingly, in terms of volume, Gerald’s Game manages to beat Misery. Misery, in fact, is one of the shorter works of Stephen King!!

The plot veers more towards gore than horror. There is no paranormal activity here. Its just two humans, one, Paul Sheldon the writer, rendered a wreck by an accident and another, Annie Wilks, a psychotic fan of the writer who brings him home and provides care and medical help to the writer. As it turns out, Annie is not all that noble, and not very tender when you “beg to disagree” with her. The movie actually had to play down the nastiness of Annie Wilks in the novel, just so that the audiences didn’t leave the theater in a stagnant pool of puke that might have erupted had they actually seen what Annie does in the book. The story then goes through the trials of Paul as he is given a task, to write a novel, just for Annie.

The book offers plenty of scope to describe Paul’s state of mind, which would be as turbulent as twister, and more violent than the battle between King Kong and T-Rex. Wodehousian similes aside, the mind is King’s element. And he lets it flow as he goes through the hells that Paul Sheldon is subjected to. The book could have very well been written in first person since none of the scenes ever describe anything that does not have Paul Sheldon himself. Annie Wilkes too, is a very well constructed character, with her tantrums, though random, totally befitting a mentally unstable person. The balance between stupidity and sharpness, cruel and caring, obdurateness and yielding… all are well brought out in Annie’s persona. The ending is, as Annie would have put it, “fair” and believable. Stephen King offers a complete, entertaining package with this book.

As a book, Misery is a lot pacier than some of the other King books. So if a person has to begin reading Stephen King, Misery would be a great first book. If one has an appetite for this genre, it would be easy to get hooked on to Stephen King with Misery…