Vinay Wagh

The Value of Nothing – by Raj Patel. If war is God’s way of teaching the Americans Geography, Recession is his way of teaching Economics. The books title comes from Oscar Wilde’s famous quip, “Nowadays people know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” Raj Patel a B.A. economics from Oxford, M asters from London school of Economics and Ph.D from Cornell University has pointed a flaw in our unstoppable attempts to equate the price with value. This mistake in the process has created a huge disequilibrium in the wealth distribution. The free market capitalism attempts to tag everything, even the things we might shy away from pricing: Land, Labour and even Human lives. The problem in pricing things that shouldn’t, is that they get commodified and can be placed to use other than the original intention. The process of pricing anything and everything leads to financial slowdowns. Although every boom is followed by a collapse, the worry nowadays is the increased frequency ...

Blink – The power of thinking without thinking - by Malcom Gladwell Whenever we see a new person, an opinion gets built up in the first two seconds. Although we spend a lot more time trying to confirm our opinion built up by the intuitive repulsion, the decision taken by our cognitive abilities in the initial few moments is what the book is all about.   The power of our brain that leaps to fast conclusions, the power of knowing, in first two seconds is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability we all cultivate for ourselves. What do we do, when we look up and suddenly see a big truck coming close to us? Adaptive unconsciousness like a giant computer quickly and quietly processes a lot of data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings. Decisions made by this fast and frugal thinking can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. The book is not just a celebration of the power of glance, it is also a reflection of...