Working with Emotional Intelligence

This book by author Daniel Goleman  is a classic and a must-read for every employee. The book specifically looks into the emotional competencies required at workplace. As a manager I’ve often seem non technical employees excels in their work where as technical and many of the intelligent employees fail. All of these skills are definitely attributed to emotional intelligence.

I follow the blog ‘http://www.manager-tools.com/’. This blog/podcast refers to the concepts referred to in this book and is an excellent resource for budding managers.

One of the noteworthy subject in this book is about reference to Amyglada. A little gland in your brain controlling emotions such as rage, fear, anxiety. This is a really interesting read, where the author in details talks about the way this organ controls the emotions.

Freedom At Midnight

This is the second book co-written by Dominique Lapierre that I’d read. A remarkable insight into the passing years of British Raj.

Reading this book takes you to your high-school history lessons and giving a varied perspective on what you’ve read in school. The book has detailed account of Mahatma Gandhi,Lord Mountbatten, Nathuram Godse , Muhammad Ali Jinnah  and many others who has contributed to the modern history of India. Reading through the book, reader gets a detailed account of the issue with Kashmir.

Reading the book from the current perspective, Nehru was right in many of the decisions he’d taken during the formative years of the Indian republic. In my view he was right in withholding the amount to be given to P as part of partition settlement. He’d been pressurized into referring the Kashmir dispute to United Nations, and he was right in opposing Gandhi in laying a solid industrial foundation for the country.

Pakistan on the other hand was a state not created from ideology but from the hunger of power.The book details of the horrors of partition inflicted on the common people of India and Pakistan. Quoting several veterans of WWII, the a reference mentioned in several places the book is about is “The horrors of WWII is nothing compared to what I’ve seen in the 2 weeks of partition”.