Books and Stuff Podcast

In this episode of the 'Books and Stuff' podcast, the host discusses

A very simple question to you. Just take a piece of paper and pen or a your mobile device.

Think of any authors or creators that come to your mind when I say the phrase science fiction.

Just the top 3, 4, 5 names maybe.

How many Indian science fiction writers popped up in your list? If you are anything like me, my best guess is you probably have none in your list.

But Sumit Shetty from the Pune Writers Group can rattle off a dozen names from the top of his head. In my chat with him for the Books n Stuff podcast, he didn't stop with Indian Sci-fi authors, but also covered Chinese (and Chinese origin) Sci-fi authors as well. We, Earth people, haven't colonized Mars yet, or we would have had Sumit rattle off a few Martian Sci-fi authors as well.

Till that happens, check out some of the stories and authors that we discussed about in this exciting podcast episode:

- Inspector Matadeen

- Gollanz Book of South Asian Science

- Kyla chandar dutt - 1835

- Anil Menon

- Arjun Rajendran

- inconceivable idea of the sun by Anil Menon

- Leila by Prayag Akbar

- The woman who thought she was a planet by Vandana Singh

- Things we found during the autopsy

- Moustache by S Hareesh

- Broken Stars and Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

- Three body problem by Cixin Liu

- Story of My Life by Ted Chiang

Imagine you have 48 hours in a day and 14 days in a week. What all would you be able to achieve? Without changing your achievements, change the number of hours in a day and days in a week to the usual 24 and 7. Look through your list, you can achieve a lot more than what you think, correct?

This is the kind of thinking that Pathik Mitra seems to have taught himself. He holds an engineering degree and an MBA. He works in a company, has the same duties and responsibilities that each of us has, yet, he's managed to generate those extra 24 hours in a day and 7 days in a week to publish his book and direct several plays.

His secret sauce - he argues with himself using a 1 member WhatsApp group and irons out his ideas when he has to wait in line or wait for boarding a flight. His other succesful idea is to sacrifice sleep.

I spoke to him about his book "Scarecrow chronicles", in particular and how to nurture your creative life, in general.

He spoke about some of the stories in his anthology, particularly "Roots" and "A1 Jaggery".

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

In the second episode of the Books n Stuff podcast, Parvathi Ramkumar and Medhavi Dhyani discuss the book "Legends and Lattes" by Travis Baldree. Bala Ramadurai quizzes the two readers and finds more about the book.

The summary:

This book is called Legends and Lattes. It's by Travis Baldree. It's also published by Tor, which is an imprint of MacMillan in the US. This book is about a certain adventurer called Viv. She's tired of adventuring. She's seen her share of battles and all that. So she decides to come to a very large city called Thune, and there she decides that she wants to open a coffee shop there. And basically that's all the plot is. She comes to the city, she opens a coffee shop, she adds more things to the menu. She has a nice time, she makes friends.

And the twist here is that she has a certain artifact with her that she got on her last adventuring mission. And some people know that she has this artifact and that causes her a bit of trouble with a former adventuring partner and the local crime lord.

All's well that ends well.

That's basically it. It's simple.

Wow. It's very simple. This is the shortest summary we've had in this entire podcast.

Foundation is the first book in the Foundation series of books. There is a prequel to this book, but we're not gonna talk about that. We're just gonna focus on Foundation. So what we have here, the plot basically is that the 12,000 years there's been a galactic empire.

Imagine that a 12,000 year old galactic empire, and this empire is dying, and one person called Harry Seldon, he's a psychohistorian. And he's basically a doomsayer who's predicting that this empire will fall. Of course, the empire hates that this guy is predicting their fall, and he has a lot of followers and a lot of people who are working with him, mathematician, scientists, and not many psychologists for reasons I'll tell you about later.

However, the empire does not like this, and he and his followers are exiled to a far flung planet. Far away in the galaxy, right at the wings of the galaxy, somewhere really, really far away. And there they have to continue working on an encyclopedia that this guy wants. He cannot travel with them because he's too old.

However, he knows exactly what will happen. And basically what he says will happen is that the empire will fall after 12,000 years and then there'll be 30,000 years of darkness. He knows a way to kind of forestall that darkness and bring about a new age of enlightenment because 30,000 years is a very long time to remain in the dark.

According to him, if he and his followers work on an encyclopedia, they'll be able to bring back a second empire. So basically that's what the plot is about. However, as his followers discover over a long span of time, nothing this man says can be taken at face value. And he has his own agenda.

The Foundation, the novel, is split into five little novelettes and each are interconnected, each deals with a different period of time. And only the first section actually has this man, Harry Seldon alive. And each time he makes an appearance as a hologram, he guides this planet called Terminus. It's got absolutely nothing, and he guides this new civilization towards this intended goal.

So each time there's a crisis on the Terminus, this man makes an appearance right on cue and they've come to expect it. And it's almost like clockwork that he makes an appearance, everything that happens to this planet Terminus, he's able to guess. And because of psychohistory, which is basically a mix of mathematics, science, and psychology. And anything the human race does, this man is able to predict because apparently we are not as free as we thought.

And everything can be predicted. Everything is set into a pattern. So that's what this book is about.

Acknowledgements:

A big shout-out to Akhilesh (for his voice for the intro), Anita Nagarajan (for her voice for the sign-off)  and Parvathi Ramkumar (for her Gottuvadhyam adapted rendition of Simon&Garfunkel for the intro music and for Raga Garudadhwani Thyagaraja kriti outro music) for her help with editing the text, and lending her voice for the sign-off of the podcast.

Software used:

-   Podcast banner: http://canva.com

-   Audio editing: Shotcut & Descript

-   Podcast recording & hosting - Anchor.fm

-   Blog post editing: Org Mode

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Welcome to the Books and Stuff Podcast Series.

Books and Stuff Podcast series - What can you learn from philosophy, physics, maths, sociology to help you in investing? A well oiled mind to look at the stock market from various perspectives and hopefully, benefit from these perspectives. This is precisely the core idea of the book that Krishna to discuss with Bala - Investing - The Last Liberal Art by Robert Hagstorm.

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

The Warren Buffett Way

Here is the podcast that we recorded. Enjoy the podcast!

Image Source - Amazon

You can buy the book on Amazon.

Acknowledgments

A big shout-out to Anita Nagarajan for her help with editing the text, and lending her voice for the intro and the sign-off of the podcast.

Software used :

Podcast banner: Canva Audio editing: Audacity Podcast recording & VOIP: Zoom.us Blog post editing: Org Mode Podcast hosting: Archive Intro music: Too Cool Kevin MacLeod

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Welcome to the Books and Stuff Podcast Series.

Books and Stuff Podcast series - Earning and learning seem to distinct spheres of life. However, Warren Buffett through his investing has shown us all that they needn’t be separate things, in fact, Bala and Krishna believe that they are one and the same. But how does one learn about earning?

The book The Warren Buffett Way written by Robert Hagstrom points out the 4 mined from the billionaire investor’s life long learning, er… earning, er… investing journey. (These questions are our own interpretations of Hagstrom’s explanations)

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

Here is the podcast that we recorded. Enjoy the podcast!

Image Source - Amazon

You can buy the book on Amazon.

A big shout-out to Anita Nagarajan for her help with editing the text, and lending her voice for the intro and the sign-off of the podcast.

Software used :

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Books and Stuff Podcast series - How to get rid of the habit of staring at the screen for every idle second of the day? Simple, follow a digital diet. Listen to Krishna’s experiences of a 7 day digital diet. Can anybody learn anything from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert? Are you serious? Krishna seems to think so. We will listen to Krishna’s formula for happiness or atleast how to increase probability of happiness. This is a LOGO podcast - Listen to One Get One

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

Enjoy the podcast!

You can buy the books here - Digital Minimalism and How to fail at almost everything and still win big

A big shout-out to Anita Nagarajan for her help with editing the text, and lending her voice for the intro and the sign-off of the podcast.

Software used :

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Books and Stuff Podcast series - Bala dares to read a sci-fi book on his own and talk about it to Krishna. The tables have turned and Krishna watches the fun and asks Bala to summarize the book. What if a giant spaceship was sent to the earth with advanced technology? How will humanity respond to that? Will be treated as a purely scientific venture or a military mission to protect the sovereignty of the earth? “Rendezvous with Rama” deals with the theme of uniting under an external threat. Explore the vast and massive world that the Ramans had built to be sent out to the nook and corners of the universe.

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

Enjoy the podcast!

You can buy the book on Amazon

A big shout-out to Anita Nagarajan for her help with editing the text, and lending her voice for the intro and the sign-off of the podcast.

Software used :

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Books and Stuff Podcast series - Are you sure you know the world around you? Let’s have a quiz, shall we? Given the current population growth rate of the world (1-2% per year) and given that today, we have about 2 billion children, what will be the number of children present in 2100? 4 billion, 6 billion or 8 billion.

What kind of biases plague us? What should be do to watch out for those? How can we aware of what is going on in the world? What are the worldly facts that we have got wrong? Do smarter people on the planet get all these facts correctly?

Take the test here first - http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

Also, check this site out for https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness/

Uh… oh! A ton of unanswered questions. Listen to Krishna as he talks about the book “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling

Enjoy the Books and Stuff Podcast!

Enjoy the podcast!

You can buy the book on Amazon

A big shout-out to Anita Nagarajan for her help with editing the text, and lending her voice for the intro and the sign-off of the podcast.

Software used :

This podcast is licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/