I Came Upon A Lighthouse

An endearing portrait of an Indian legend I told him that when I write a book, I would write about another side of him and not just historic events or business milestones. I would write about us and our adventures together, and how I saw him, colours and shades of him unknown to the world. Life beyond the great steel wall of 'industry doyen'. He agreed. 'There cannot be one book that captures everything ... So you do your thing, give your perspective.' It was their shared empathy for homeless dogs that sparked an unlikely friendship. In 2014, Shantanu Naidu, an automobile design engineer in his early twenties, developed an innovation to save the local strays from being run over by speeding cars. Ratan Tata, himself known for his compassion for stray dogs, took note. Impressed, he not only decided to invest in the venture, but over the years became a mentor, boss and an unexpectedly dear friend to Shantanu. I Came Upon a Lighthouse is an honest, light-hearted telling of this uncommon bond between a millennial and an octogenarian that gives glimpses of a beloved Indian icon in a warm light.

| WINNER OF THE GAJA CAPITAL BUSINESS BOOK PRIZE 2019 | The nineteenth century was an exciting time of initiative and enterprise around the world. If John D. Rockefeller was creating unimagined wealth in the United States that he would put to the service of the nation, a Parsi family with humble roots was doing the same in India. In 1822, a boy was born in a priestly household in Gujarat's Navsari village. Young Nusserwanji knew early on that his destiny lay beyond his village and decided to head for Bombay to start a business - the first in his family to do so. He had neither higher education nor knowledge of business matters, just a burning passion to carve a path of his own. What Nusserwanji started as a cotton trading venture, his son Jamsetji, born in the same year as Rockefeller, grew into a multifaceted business, turning around sick textile mills, setting up an iron and steel company, envisioning a cutting-edge institute of higher learning, building a world-class hotel, and earning himself the title of the 'Bhishma Pitamah of Indian Industry'. Stewarded ably over the decades by Jamsetji's sons Dorabji and Ratanji, the charismatic and larger-than-life JRD, and thereafter the more business-like Ratan, the Tata group today is a 110-billion-dollar empire. The Tatas is their story. But it is more than just a history of the industrial house; it is an inspiring account of India in the making. It chronicles how each generation of the family invested not only in the expansion of its own business interests but also in nation building. Few know, for instance, that the first hydel power project in the world was conceived of and built by the Tatas. Nor that some radical labour concepts such as eight-hour work shifts were born in India, at the Tata mill in Nagpur. The Tata Cancer Research Centre, the Indian Institute of Science, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, as also the national carrier Air India - the family has a long, rich and unrivalled legacy. The Tatas is a tribute to a line of visionaries who have a special place in the hearts and minds of ordinary Indians. Written by seasoned journalist Girish Kuber, this is also the only book that tells the complete Tata story spanning almost two hundred years.

In times of adversity, you have two choices — you can either steal yourself away from the situation or steel yourself up towards it. For Ratan Tata, the choice was made early on. To be given the reins to India’s largest business conglomerate can be extremely daunting. But Ratan Tata’s takeover as the chairman of the Tata group proved that what is already great can be made even better. His legacy has the innate power to inspire great leadership. His success can motivate any beyond words. But, if how the world sees you is a result of how well you communicate, Ratan Tata’s wisdom is unmatchable. This book contains his simplicity, his determination, his defining moments, his generosity, his learning curve, his humility and his intellectual curiosity. From a man who has lived his days redefining success, his experiences and learnings can brighten the light at the end of any entrepreneurial tunnel. If ever, on your journey of life, you need a little nudge, a push or a spark, this book will never fail to deliver. Not even for a nano second.

Virginia Woolf’s classic modernist novel, To the Lighthouse, draws from her own life and experiences. Hailed as one of the greatest works of modernist fiction, Virginia Woolf’s semi-autobiographical novel about the Ramsay family explores the themes of perspective, interpersonal relationships, and the complexity of human experience. Woolf’s use of shifting points of view in the narrative highlights how each person sees and experiences events in their own way. As conflict and grief impact the Ramsays throughout their time on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, the reader is pulled into Woolf’s own life.

Learning to build distributed systems is hard, especially if they are large scale. It's not that there is a lack of information out there. You can find academic papers, engineering blogs, and even books on the subject. The problem is that the available information is spread out all over the place, and if you were to put it on a spectrum from theory to practice, you would find a lot of material at the two ends but not much in the middle. That is why I decided to write a book that brings together the core theoretical and practical concepts of distributed systems so that you don't have to spend hours connecting the dots. This book will guide you through the fundamentals of large-scale distributed systems, with just enough details and external references to dive deeper. This is the guide I wished existed when I first started out, based on my experience building large distributed systems that scale to millions of requests per second and billions of devices. If you are a developer working on the backend of web or mobile applications (or would like to be!), this book is for you. When building distributed applications, you need to be familiar with the network stack, data consistency models, scalability and reliability patterns, observability best practices, and much more. Although you can build applications without knowing much of that, you will end up spending hours debugging and re-architecting them, learning hard lessons that you could have acquired in a much faster and less painful way. However, if you have several years of experience designing and building highly available and fault-tolerant applications that scale to millions of users, this book might not be for you. As an expert, you are likely looking for depth rather than breadth, and this book focuses more on the latter since it would be impossible to cover the field otherwise. The second edition is a complete rewrite of the previous edition. Every page of the first edition has been reviewed and where appropriate reworked, with new topics covered for the first time.

A novel set on a remote Australian island, where a childless couple live quietly running a lighthouse, until a boat carrying a baby washes ashore.

Don’t miss the brand-new chilling gothic thriller from the bestselling author . . .

A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own lives—and see clearly the people we love most. “Transcendent.”—The Washington Post • “You’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.”—The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TOWN & COUNTRY Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death—a calamity that claimed her favorite person—she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Smyth’s story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf’s Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss, and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel—and crafts an elegant reminder of literature’s ability to clarify and console. Braiding memoir, literary criticism, and biography, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author. Praise for All the Lives We Ever Lived “This searching memoir pays homage to To the Lighthouse, while recounting the author’s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer. . . . Smyth’s writing is evocative and incisive.”—The New Yorker “Like H Is for Hawk, Smyth’s book is a memoir that’s not quite a memoir, using Woolf, and her obsession with Woolf, as a springboard to tell the story of her father’s vivid life and sad demise due to alcoholism and cancer. . . . An experiment in twenty-first century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh.”—Vogue “Deeply moving – part memoir, part literary criticism, part outpouring of longing and grief… This is a beautiful book about the wildness of mortal life, and the tenuous consolations of art.”—The Times Literary Supplement “Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story... gently entwining observations from Woolf's classic with her own layered experience. Smyth tells us of her love for her father, his profound alcoholism and the unpredictable course of the cancer that ultimately claimed his life.”—Time