Malgudi Days by R K Narayan

 This is a collection of short stories from the renowned storyteller, R K Narayan. The stories were taken place in Malgudy, an imaginary town set in south India. Each story is beautifully told and the characters include astrologer, postman, doctor, gateman, dog, set in train travel, sculptor, snake man and many more. There are around 30+ stories and it will be a good idea to read one story each night.

Installing Magzter app on Amazon Fire 10

Step 1: Install google play store - refer https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/03/install-play-store-amazon-fire-tablet/

Step 2: Install Magzter from play store

You are all set to go!!

TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 by Kevin Fall and Richard Stevens

 The book covers layer 2 to layer 4 of networking layer. That is IP, IPv6, ICMP, UDP and TCP. Apart from that, the book also covers ARP, DHCP, DNS, NAT and various security protocols. The main highlight of this work is that it illustrates the protocol using a custom udp/tcp socket program, tcpdump, tcptrace and wire shark.

I skimmed through layer 3 and security protocol sections. UDP and TCP sections are very thorough and gives a good insight into the working of this protocol.

There are 6 chapters dealing with TCP - Preliminaries; Connection Management; time-out and retransmission; data flow and window management; congestion control; and keepalive.

Overall I enjoyed reading this book and would recommend to anyone who want to understand the internals of layer 4 networking protocol!

Civil War 1861-1865

Civil war places an important role in American history and its current politics. For a starter, Unionists are from the states in north, also referred as Yankees. Confederates are from the southern states. Confederate states parted from the union and formed a new country. They feared that with the new presidency of Abraham Lincoln in 1861, he would back Abolitionists and put an end to slavery, and hence departed. Abolitionists supported abolishing slavery and were not a main stream movement up until 1861. Eventhough Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the end of slavery and freedom for African American people, but that was not the main reason to go war with Confederates. The war was started on the pretext of secession and to bring back the confederate state back to the fold of union. But slavery was an issue looming large and without addressing that there won’t be any union. Civil war was a bloody war, costing lot of human lives, due to clash of human ideologies, sheer madness, but may be inevitable and unavoidable.

In the last few days, I watched the de facto documentary on this subject, The Civil War by Ken Burns. Backed that with National Geographic’s special edition Atlas of the Civil War. I rented the BlueRay DVD from County library and bought the latter from a news stand. Both documentary and the magazine had 5 main chapters titled, 1861 to 1865. Rather than a mere account of the events, the documentary shows the human side of the war. There are lot of names and events mentioned in it, one may easily get lost. The magazine helped in reiterating some of the key topics.

Anatomy & physiology

Anatomy & physiology for dummies by Maggie Norris and Donna Rae Siegfried is a good read and very enjoyable along with videos from crash course - https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtOAKed_MxxWBNaPno5h3Zs8.

Our body has many parallel systems. It’s amazing to know that how evolution has fine crafted a being like us, or, one may simply amazed by this creation of God, depending on from which school of thought you are from. Never knew that there is a system called lymph network in our body. Memory is not binary storage. Spine can take local decision - remember you pull hand at the prick of a pin. Your smell sense is resulted by chemical bonding. Hormones play a very vital role in keeping things together. Heart is an amazing pump which brings in oxygen depleted blood and pumps out oxygen rich blood. Urinary system is as amazing as blood circulatory system.

The book deals with skeletal system, muscular system, integumentary system, nervous system, endocrine system, circulatory system, respiratory system, digestive system, urinary system, immune system, reproductive system and change and development over the life span. It’s complicated!

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

Quite impossible story to happen, but author could take you to the 1950s/60s and life in marsh. It’s waterways, lagoons, beaches, estuaries, egrets, herons, gulls, palmettos, oaks, adjoining meadows and in the these context Kya’s shack. It starts with parallel story of death of Chase Andrews and Kya’s childhood at marsh. Beautifully convenes at solving the mystery, but along with take us through the survival and thriving story of Kya in her adverse conditions.

Al-Fathiha

The four Tafsir I am trying to follow.
1. Ibn-kathir, Tafsir ibn Kathir
2. Ibn-Arabi, ഖുർആൻറെറ ഉൾസാര വ്യാഖ്യാനം
3. Maybudi, Kashf al-asrar
4. Seyyed Hossein Nasr(editor), The study Quran

And the Quran
- The Noble Quran, Karya Bestari