Cyril Maithily Gupta's Blog

Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein is a classic so popular that it is a required reading for any science fiction fan. This book has consistently made it to top ten of almost every sf book list ever conceived and for a reason. This is the original space military saga, everything else came later.

I’ve already watched the three starship trooper movies and I liked them because of their chic originality and their take on society, politics, religion and of course the startling concept of closed citizenship.

Starship Troopers Paperback

The book tells the story of one Johnnie Rico, a young lad who signs up in the army because it’s the cool thing to do, and because the girl he likes is signing up. The story maps the growth of Rico from a fresh recruit in training to a splendid soldier, an officer and then the commander of his platoon.

As Rico tells his story we learn about the times, the lives, the rules, the science, the conflicts and the issues in a society that is like ours and unlike ours in so many ways.

I’ve read three books from Heinlein till now: Friday, Stranger in a strange land and now Starship Troopers. In each one of the books Heinlein creates a new world, a very believable new world where the people are very real even though they think differently and they live by different rules.

That is why Heinlein’s books are so amazing. His future is not just about aliens, ships, planets, galaxies, it’s also about evolving societies and truthfully that’s what he is concerned about the most, the rest just a facade to make the analysis look good.

In this book it was the idea of a closed franchise, where citizenship and the right to elect and govern was not given to you at birth. It had to be earned. Before you could vote or stand for office you had to prove you were ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for Earth if needed.

Heinlein brought out all the glaring failures in our system that gives the election franchise to all and sundry without checking whether they are fit morally or mentally to elect the right leader.

The world that Heinlein concocts in this book has found a solution, but there are new questions.

Read the book, it’s by R A Heinlein.

I’ve been a part of a small company from the last 10 years, watching, participating, helping it grow from shrimp-size to salmon-size. It takes time and effort to build a business and sometimes you’re up against market situations that cannot be overcome no matter how creative you are (for me it is software piracy).

But is that sort of thing the biggest challenge for a small company? I don’t think so. The biggest challenge in my opinion is finding skilled people and getting them to stick around.

We’ve got an enormous amount of training going on here in India, and there are a lot of qualified good people who have the skills and the drive to make things happen. Sadly they are not here for the likes of me. They’ve all been grabbed by the bigger fish in the pond who’re ready to offer them bigger salaries and better perks. A small business has to depend mostly on the promoter’s skills to grow until it turns into a mid-sized business at least.

I’ve learnt along these years that the people I’ve spent months training will leave for a small job in a big company. Nobody has the patience anymore to stick around and wait for a small company to get bigger and grab a bigger job. Is that because they don’t have enough confidence in the potential of the small company to get big? Or they would rather work in a bigger name as soon as they can?

So while bigger companies attract the star talent, the smaller companies have to depend on their entrepreneurs and untrained people who they will train so that they may become worthy of bigger companies.

Not that I find anything wrong with this system. After all small companies cannot afford to pay so much and they manage to get productivity out of their people.

Don’t ask me for any solutions to this problems though, I am still battling with this.

The World is Flat is a popular book and it has been in the market since a long time. I am probably going to be the last guy to write a review on it. I bought it because I saw Friedman’s new book ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded.’ I thought if a book spawns a sequel it ought to be good. So I finally bought myself a copy from the Book Cafe located in Noida Shopprix Mall.

The World is a Flat is a book about a trends that’s now and here. It’s about Globalization, the impact of the Internet, new technology, emerging markets and economies, and things like that. It was first written in 2005 and the future that it talks about, is now. So for me the book read like a lesson in contemporary society. Certainly there were many updates and new information was added to keep the book updated, but the spirit of pre-2009 economy is pretty much evident here.

So I am going to say here that the book is great. It has some amazing interviews, stories, anecdotes and analysis, but if you are looking for an insight into the near future you don’t want to read it. This book is about now, the times we live in, and you don’t need a book to figure out Now.

You see, the world is flat.

Read it if you are interested in Today, and you want to understand the journey that brought us here.

I am going to read Hot, Flat and Crowded when I am done with the four books I have added to my reading list

- Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish (Rashmi Bansal)
- Business Stripped Bare (Rich Branson)
- Entrepreneur Journey (Sramana Mitra)
- Starship Troopers (R A Heinlein)

Whenever I look at a CSS file and see all those entries I get confused. Why have so many of them? In one CSS file we put entries that are related to so many different pages. Isn’t that an awful waste?

Yep, I do realize that CSS files are pretty small and I don’t really need to worry about the bandwidth implications most of the time… but yet.

So some time ago I started the practice of putting only common CSS in the file, and all the CSS entries that would be unique to the page would be in the page itself. Maybe many people think that I am inviting trouble because there will be inconsistencies as if I make major changes in the main scheme they may not filter down to the pages, but my point is that if I make any breaking changes to the design, I will have to modify the individual CSS entries anyways.

So why not have them in the individual page anyway? That makes my job easier.

Well, this is the system that I am sticking to now. If there are problems, you’ll hear about them here.

I have traditionally ordered books only in bookshops. Walking into them, reading the back-covers, the author bios, one or two pages off the content and maybe even the preface before I buy the book. But sometimes you want titles that are not in stock and there’s an inevitable promise of ‘We will get it,’ and then repeated enquiries.

So I decided to do some shopping online for a change. Started looking for good bookshops. There are a few like rediff bookshop, a1books.com, bookcafe.in and others. But all of them are crappy.

I was specially surprised to see how badly a1books.com is designed, after all they are supposed to be a 100% online agency. It seems they don’t believe in there own stuff. There’s no bestseller list, no categorized way to see top-selling stuff in each category, etc.

And bookcafe.in, it’s promoted by the guys who own the Book Cafe chain that I frequent so often, but their online website is really bad. It convinces me they don’t want to sell online.

I thought buying books online in India was a bad idea and was about to give up until I got to flipkart.com. This is one well-designed, user-friendly, nicely indexed online bookstore and I had fun browsing it.

So I ordered some books and hopefully in 3-11 days I will be the proud owner of:

1. Starship Troopers by R A Heinlein (at 19% discount!)
2. Business Stripped Bare by Richard Bronson
3. Entrepreneur Journey by Sramana Mitra

and my wife will own:

1. The White Teeth by Zadie Smith