Tuesday, June 30, 2015

"Beyond 2020: A Vision for Developed India" by "APJ Abdul Kalam" and "YS Rajan"

16 years ago, while I was in school, I came across their book India:Vision 2020(its prequel). In it for the first time I read that India could become a developed country and that someone has generated a blueprint for the same. However, why we are still catching up with the rest of the world and why we failed to achieve that vision is another story.
"An Optimist's vision for a Developed India"


Amidst the dreary and 
tumultuous growth track we have been treading, with the beginning of the new century, comes a timely course-correction prescription from two of India's most well know optimistic technocrats.  

It seems to have been written mostly for a general reader. Unlike other such policy prescriptions (which keep getting published), this book lacks a detailed analysis. Usually in the policy framework exercise(and discourse) in our country we give far little importance to innovation, design, technology and focus more on socio-economic & political jargons. This is where this books stands different. Its scientific stand on various issue is something which makes it distinct. 
Of the 15 chapters in which the book has been divided I particularly liked, 3rd On Agriculture, 5th On Mining, 8th The Chemistry of life & 11th on Healthcare. Authors have summarized few reports from TIFAC and quoted often from their previous work, India : Vision 2020 as a benchmark. 

Although the authors tried to keep the prescriptions in their devised framework of User Community Pyramid, UCP (creating technologies and applications based on the sustainable development) and Societal Development Radar, SDR (the review and monitoring mechanism) I found it hard to see the different prescriptions, in the subsequent chapters within these two frames. So the science of devising such a framework, perhaps was not put much to use and left to the reader to be re-assimilated. 


Sunday, June 28, 2015

Zen Pencils: Cartoon Quotes from Inspirational Folks

A self help stuff after a long time. Perhaps, they should only be read after long gaps, giving us a chance to analyse how we have fared as opposed to how we wished.
It did help.


This is a quick read and gives pacy(and highly readable) illustrations of some 20 stories, touching most of the aspects of our lives. Some have been taken from Quotes, some from Books and some have been created around the lives of a few famous/notable people. 
With this, I ended my recurrent urge to actually go through ZenPencils' work (online), which I somehow always missed.


Rating: 8/10