A good Indian wife

Yesterday night I finished reading a novel by Anne Cherian "A good Indian wife". I bought this book two weeks ago while surfing half price book store. I had not really heard the name of the novel or of author but the cover looked really interesting. The cover page definitely ignites a lot of interest in amateur people like me!

A novel should be something that you take in your hand and do not want to put it down before you are done with it. This novel is a great read, the mere proof is I finished reading it at 2:15 AM. Isn't that one of the best ways of starting a weekend? ;) The story in the novel revolves around Leila and Neel. Neel is accomplished doctor in San Francisco who goes to India to see his grand father and marries to Leila against his will just to honor grand father's wish. He has a settled life back in SF with a girl friends, mixed friend circle so he thinks about divorcing Leila even when marriage ceremony is happening. The story is about how struggle that Leila goes through. She pulls him through and justifies to him and herself that grand father's wish had a good reason behind it. You have to read the novel to know more details :)

Any marriage system that you take, there is always some flaw because marriage happens between two imperfect people. In Indian marriages girls are still looked upon a "show case item", not as a companion, friend, which kinda sucks. It just occurred to me how Indian girls are always taught to stick with the husband, forgive him whatever he did and how to continue with life by sacrificing ourself every day. Even in modern India, girls carry that thinking. I look around in the society and see how girls continue when husbands are being jerks at a times (telling wives that she has gotten fat while showing off their bellies :(.) or telling shamelessly that how somebody else's wife looked so good. I thought men knew women better than that!!

Sometimes even well educated men disallow women to work and force her to continue her house held responsibilities. I have seen girls, who were rankers in their class being at home and taking care of kids. Suddenly those girls loose all their freedom just because they are now 'Married'. How do these men do not understand that they are marrying a human being, not hiring a slave? We are not talking about mid west countries where women are not allowed to go to school, learn driving, go alone to the shopping. In a progressive society like modern India, I see bad things happening. I understand the main cause of this is lack of education, but how many light years are we going to take to treat women as human beings.

In a free country like USA too, I observe that girls are treated like secretaries even when they are colleagues. I am not feminist but my blood boils when I see above occurrences. My upbringing of 'no contradictions' kicks in and I continue to smile even though deep down I know that this is not right. 

Its a coincident that tomorrow is International women's day and I still feel a little hopeless. I know this is a little disturbing post, sorry cannot help folks. Sometimes you can not continue the show without showing what are you exactly feeling!!! 

The Pragmatic Programmer

When you get a reward certificate to be used on Amazon, you have millions of options to spend it. I was kinda confused whether I should buy a book named as "The Pragmatic Programmer" or get my favorite movie DVD  "Home Alone"? 

Hmmmm, very interesting. Is there really a book out there which tells me apart from theory how to do my job best? By my virtue of being the perfectionist at my job, I don't like the situations when people tell me that I wrote bad code, did not think of edge case. Nor that it has happened any time, but why not better myself so that it will never occur? After all its just a start of professional life :) 

Ok, I am not ready to read 800 page book on best practices where reading one page takes 20 minutes and understanding what I read takes 2 days :( After spending 10-12 hours in the office working with all new technologies everyday, do we need more reading?) 

I had heard about this book and this review helped me to make my choice ;)  

“If I’m putting together a project, it’s the authors of this book that I want. . . . And failing that I’d settle for people who’ve read their book.”

         —Ward Cunningham

It surely seems the book actually lives up to the promise. Lets review some of the first few topics that I have read.  One thing, the title of each topics are completely mind boggling! Following the tradition of "Head First" books.

1) The cat ate my source code:  

"Provide options, don't make lame excuses". 

Yes things go wrong, with all worst combination of various mishaps and downtime occurs. Monday morning is not meant to explain what I was thinking 6 months ago when I was working on the project. Hmmm.. So lets be practical. Just think what caused all this, do the analysis and do what can be done to avoid the situation in the future. 

Makes 100% sense!!!!

2) Software Entropy: 

However meticulous software engineers are, projects do not always have the best of the design and code. There is always some broken window left in the project and broken window gives the feeling that nobody really cares for the project. 

"Don't live with broken windows". Tells us to fix broken windows as soon as you find it. If you cannot fix, at least leave the comment, message to tell that you are working on it. 

I can go on and on with these handy tips of this book. 

Just amazing book! If you are a software programmer, find the meaning of word Kaizen and then your next hit is going to be www.amazon.com to buy the book :)

 I am sure you feel the same excitement  as me!!