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 The
book is enchanting. It takes you through the lanes of perceptions to find new
interconnected lanes of ideas. In an attempt to further simplify simple things,
the author delivers whack after whack through 12 chapters, that include, searching
for the second right answer, questioning the logic, having fun, transferring knowledge
from one area to another, the beauty of paradoxes, cultivating ambiguity, consulting
the foolish and more.
Where does one explore for
ideas? This is the central question, the book attempts to answer. One of the best
examples- and there are hundreds, is the interpretation of ‘mediocrity’ by ‘the
fool’ – ‘Being committed to incompetence is an art. Less development time, no
backlogs, and fearing nothing because we have nothing to lose (but our mediocrity).
We would have to learn how to sell and more importantly we shall succeed because
nothing succeeds like mediocrity because everybody understands it so well.’ It
is precisely this kind of reverse-swing that works the best!
Interspersed with apt one-liners,
clichés and numerous examples, incidents and trivia, the author has tried to portray
a gateway of creativity in a form that demands a once-over.
The book starts with a chapter
that has an intriguing title – ‘Mental Sex’ – that leads the reader to expect
something different, albeit for a moment (No, it is not fantasizing!). The first
whack!. Throughout the experience of reading this book, I found the need to detox
myself of my old fixations. In searching for a second right answer, I find, that
it does good to be illogical, play with my work and learn to make my own rules,
so much so that today, I find Catbert, the evil HR Director of the Dilbert Series,
funny!
The book, also briefly dwells
on ‘Getting a whack’. A Do-It-Yourself routine, that is not different from the
ones being doled out in newspapers or the Readers Digest nowadays – like ‘Are
you really a friendly person?’ etc. Here is where the book merits improvement.
All in all, the book is worth
reading atleast when all you have got to do is look at the passing scenery while
travelling from Pune to Bombay by train. A parting word of advice – Reading this
book might make you laugh without warning to your other fellow passengers. But
as the author expounds - from ‘haha’ to ‘aha!’ is only a small step.
A dear friend of mine pointed
out the danger of book reviews – that they can be too prescriptive. The reviewer
wants everyone to agree to his or her interpretations of the book. This makes
the current task even more difficult. Ultimately, to sell this book, I need recourse
to applying the right kind of ‘Whack’. Odd, isn’t it?
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The
first e-mail message
There was Samuel Morse and the first telegram. Delivered on
May 24, 1844, the message read, “What hath god wrought!” Then, there was the dawn
of the telephone era, heralded by Graham Bell’s legendary summons to his assistant
in March 1876: “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.”
Sometime in the autumn of 1971, a young computer engineer named
Ray Tomlinson sitting in his compact office in a bland building in Cambridge,
Massachusetts sent the first e-mail message. Tomlinson is remembered as the man
who picked “@” as the locator symbol in e-mail addresses. He is the inventor of
e-mail, the one single application that launched the digital information revolution
through the all pervasive internet of today.
Tomlinson worked for BBN (Bolt Beranek and Newman), the company
hired by the US Defense Department in 1968 to build ARPANET -the original precursor
to the Internet. One day late in the evening, he was tinkering around with an
electronic message program called ‘SNDMSG’, which he had written to allow programmers
and researchers who were working on Digital PDP-10s -one of the early ARPANET
computers—to leave messages for each other.
What Tomlinson did next, if he had fully grasped its significance,
might have earned him a place alongside the giants of communication history. First,
he chose the @ symbol to distinguish between messages addressed to mailboxes in
the local machine and messages that were headed out onto the network. “The @ sign
seemed to make sense,” he recalled. “I used the @ sign to indicate that the user
was ‘at’ some other host rather than being local.” Then he sent himself an e-mail
message.
The message flew out via the network between two machines in
the same room in Cambridge; and the message was “QWERTYIOP”.
Once Tomlinson was satisfied that SNDMSG worked on the network,
he sent a message to colleagues letting them know about the new feature, with
instructions for placing an @ in between the user’s login name and the name of
his host computer.
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