First book is 'Freakonomics' written by Steven D. Levitt, a professor in Economics. What he does basically is 'exploring the hidden side of everything'. He answers some apparently trivial questions - like 'What does Sumo wrestlers and School Teachers have in common?' Or 'Why does drug dealers still live with their moms' etc - on the basis of various economic and social data available to him through his research. What is special about the book is that it forces you to question things you have taken for granted and to see them in an entirely different light. How did this book affect me? I believe it has made me more open minded to ideas. It has forced me to ask 'What if I am wrong?'. I have started thinking of the cause-and-effect cycle in an entirely different way. It has taught me to ask questions about even the basic things in our life that we take for granted. For example would the Cola we drink taste as good as it does now, if it were packaged in a different way? Everything we take for granted in our life has a story behind them. And the story what we think are true aren't always true.
Second book is 'The God Delusion' by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (who is regarded as number one enemy of creationists around the world).As the title suggests it is a book on atheism ,he debunks the various myths associated with religion (mainly Christianity and Judaism) and offers an alternate explanation to things we think are rooted in religion. Like morality, does morality comes from religion? Or is that humans, through the process of evolution, have reached upon a certain set of things which are considered good and bad? So what did this book teach me (apart from strengthening my atheism?).Basically it reminded me again that we homo sapiens are just another species on earth. Simple enough. But the thing is most of us don't act as if we are conscious of this fact. In our thinking we have divided the living things into three- plants, animals and human beings. But this book has forcefully reminded me that the divide between animals and humans doesn't exist. We too are a product of evolution through millions of years .But in a blink of time (in about 35,000 years) we have come to control the earth and nature unlike any other species before. And this not because of any divine providence, but because of different physical advantages and skills we achieved through the process of evolution.
Everything around us even the mobile phones or laptops we use, the language we speak or write, the type of food we eat are all products of change of some kind or the other. Even the way we behave and every custom we follow in our society too has undergone this change. They were not like this from the day one of human life (and there was not even a day one). Anything you can see around yourself has a reason for its existence which is rooted in its past. Its only when we understand the past that we will be able to make sense out of our present.
It is not that I have not thought about some of these things before reading these books. But these books have made me think even more deeply about such things. I would recommend these books to anyone who are -as a blurb in Freakonomics says- 'prepared to be dazzled'.
