The BookWorm

"The road to knowledge begins with the turn of the page."
-- Anonymous


Reading is one of my greatest passions. It is fun, offers a different insight, helps me to learn things, and makes me travel around the globe (and beyond, at times). Here are some of the books that inspired me

End of Eternity : (Issac Asimov)
Genius of an author in the sci-fi category. It is amazing how Asimov can come up with the idea of intergalactic politics or the complexities that the laws of robotics might pose. End of eternity is a fantastically woven story with intergalactic politics and science. (The problem with asimov’s work is that it is not available in our place as much as I would like, sigh…).


Lord of the Rings : (J.R.R Tolkein)
Lord of the rings has its own universe, its own characters, and its own material. It took almost one complete month for me to read the entire book (and while I was at it I only did just that, read…) How far can man’s creativity reach, read for yourself in this book.

Andromeda Strain: (Micheal Crichton)
I won’t say I like all of his books (especially NEXT - a real bummer), but the books I liked are science fiction’s magnum opus. Apart from making you sick and helping you with the digestion process what else can a bacteria be used for? Hmm... Let’s see, to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, perhaps? If you are confused to visualize the concept, read for yourself in this book (if you are a movie freak, watch the movie of the same name).

Freedom at midnight : (Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins)
Sheds so much light about the pre freedom India that I felt ashamed that there is so much I don’t know about my own country. Normally I won’t go for non-fictional work or self improvement book. But this one has opened my eyes towards this genre. (Jai Ho)

The Collected Short Stories & Cat of nine tales (Jeffrey Archer) :
He is known as a master storyteller and my inspired books cannot be complete without his work. How can one forget ‘the steal’ or ‘the maestro’ or ‘the old love’? (or Mr. Robert Mallory from his recent work ‘Paths of Glory’).


Mahabharatha:
The great Indian epic. One cannot simply categorize mahabharatha as a book. Rather it is a life in itself. From endless drama to never ending action mahabharatha is one of the finest books there is. It draws inspiration from life and many of us Indians find spiritual guidance in its phrases (I wonder whether Tolkein had the chance to read this one).

Search of truth

Having watched the movie contact was, kind of enlightening. Not that the facts handled in the movie was unknown, but the way it was told makes it more realistic.

Apart from the political drama, it was very well done.

Now for some of the facts that I have gathered:

SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), was a program originally launched by the United States government. The U.S contributed to earlier SETI projects, but recent work has been primarily funded by private sources.

In 1960, Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake performed the first modern SETI experiment. Since then only once a possible non-terrestrial radio signal was found. It was named the WOW signal. After that SETI project has never aroused much interest. Perhaps, due to the fact, that the space is too big for the humans.

Although, this part of science doesn’t get much respect in the field of astronomy, postulating regular communication in several star systems makes a successful SETI effort more defensible.

In other words it is highly unlikely that we are going to make contact with a Extraterrestrial civilization with just SETI. We need intergalactic travel systems for that. Which is extremely expensive, so much expensive that the entire human society funding for a intergalactic travel will not be enough.

Despite all these facts, I believe there is definitely some one out there. As it was told in the movie

“if it is just us... seems like an awful waste of space”.