Rich Dad, Poor Dad

For a change, I bought a non-fiction book at Odyssey. I have been seeing this book, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, by Robert T. Kiyosaki, in the best sellers list for quite some time and wanted to buy it. I even saw a Telugu translation of the book and it really build up my expectation.

This is really a fantastic book. Every phrase of praise on the cover of the book is completely true and justified. This is the starting point for anyone wanting to get rich. The ideas presented in the book are really amazing. They are simple and straight-forward. Yet so profound!

He challenges school education throughout the book. According to him, which is very true of course, schools teach students how to work hard for money but not how to make money work for them. That is the basic difference between the rich and the poor and the most important one. The poor and the middle class work hard their lives, earn money, pay taxes, get into credit, work harder to earn more and pay more taxes and so on… this he calls “Rat Race”. The rich do quite the opposite. They buy assets. Their assets work hard for them and generate more assets.

Talking of assets, the single most important formula to get rich in the book is “focus your time and energy in building income generating assets”. This is an extremely important sentence to underline and remember. When you have assets generating income equal to or more than your monthly expenses, you are called Wealthy!

Anyone who wants to get out of the rat race and achieve freedom from having to work hard all their life, needs to understand the above formula. He talks of people who get up early everyday and hurry to work just to pay bills and taxes with a sense of pity in his tone. I couldn’t help visualize myself driving 40 kms everyday through the insane traffic of Hyderabad to go to work that I don’t love. It is my great dream to become a free lancer one day! This book provides me inspiration, to make my dream come true.

This book is all about improving our Financial Intelligence to get rich. Financial Intelligence is comprised of four things:
1. Knowledge of Accounting
2. Knowledge of Investing (Investment Strategies)
3. Knowledge of Markets (Demand, Supply etc.)
4. Knowledge of Law
It requires a lot of focus and intent to acquire the above and lazy people can not do that. We know people who are lazy to exercise their body, but the author talks of people who are lazy to make their brain work. That’s why he says self discipline is important to acquire and put to use the financial intelligence to achieve riches.

There are many other great ideas expressed in this book. The author also tells us what he did in his journey to riches. Most of them are applicable to most people. But he says there can be innumerable such formulae and emphasizes the importance of developing our own methods.

All in all it’s a great book, but mind you, only for ambitious people who are willing to develop and deploy their financial intelligence.

Love Story - By Erich Segal

When my friend suggested this book to me, I felt an irresistible tendency to read it. I was disappointed to know that Odyssey didn't have this book. What a shame! But, I was very lucky to get one of the only two remaining copies at Walden.

The first thing that attracted me was the name. A simple, yet profound one - Love Story! It felt a little strange too. How could one have chosen a generic name like "Love Story" to a novel? Imagine naming novels like "A Tragedy" or "A Comedy" !! But after reading the novel, I felt that the name was truly justified. Erich Segal must have pondered over a dozen names before coming up with this striking one!

This small and beautiful looking book - it has only 187 pages with not more than 25 lines per page of relatively big font - is the story of Oliver Barrett IV, a rich, ice-hockey jock from Harvard and Jennifer Cavilleri, a working-class beauty, studying music at Radcliffe.

This story is as simple as the title - A rich boy and a middle-class girl find themselves deeply in love with each other, get married without the approval of the boy's father, struggle through adversities before the boy gets a lucrative job. The sequence of events logically point to a happy ending. But that's not the case here because; a happy ending would have made this novel "any love story" not Erich Segal's "Love Story"!

Jenny dies young, at the age of just twenty-five, of leukemia. This is not something that comes as a big shock to the reader mid way through the novel. The author reveals the sad ending in the very first line of the novel: "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" asks Oliver Barrett. So, you know what's going to happen. It's just a matter of when and how!

I don't like novels with tragic endings, much less those that declare, in the first line, that they are going to make you weep. Yet, I finished the novel in one go! I couldn't help but marvel the way Segal has deferred the tragedy till the very end and made this book an un-putdownable read with his exceptional skill and craft.

Though the reader knows that Jenny is going to die, he doesn't feel the pinch until towards the end of the novel because he is completely engrossed in the romance of Oliver and Jenny. The conversations are intelligent, witty and romantic. I ended up reading many lines twice, sometimes thrice!

As a reader, I was hovering around Harvard and Radcliffe, in spirit, following the two wherever they went....to the Midget Restaurant, the Dillon Field House, Briggs Hall, Paine Hall, so on and so forth…and finally to Mount Sinai Hospital !

Oliver Barrett III, Oliver's father and Phil Cavilleri, jenny's father are the other two prominent characters in the novel and were portrayed equally well by the author.

As I mentioned earlier, the author has handled the tragic part - since the revelation of the fact that Jenny has leukemia to her death - exceptionally well. He doesn't over burden the reader with too much drama or emotion, I mean, he doesn't make you bang your chest and weep. He sustains the subtle humor and romance, yet infuses the right amount of gravity and emotion in to the story that makes the reader cringe with an inexplicable pain deep inside.

The image of Oliver holding Jenny tightly in a hug, on the hospital bed, as she utters her last words, "Thanks, Ollie.” will linger in the memory of the reader for a long long time.

This, without doubt, is one of the best books I've read so far and I feel happy to have joined the club of more than 21 million admirers of this beautiful and touching Love Story!