Life Is A Prism My Journey To Becoming A Banker

"Life Is A Prism: My Journey to Becoming a Banker" narrates my life's story from the innocence of childhood to the pivotal moment I secured a job at the bank. This memoir captures the struggles, joys, and lessons learned along the way. From overcoming personal challenges to celebrating small victories, each chapter reveals the experiences that shaped me. Through perseverance and determination, I navigated life's twists and turns, ultimately achieving my dream of a banking career. Join me on this reflective journey, and discover how every step, no matter how small, contributed to the person I am today.

An impassioned, funny, probing, fiercely inconclusive, nearly-to-the-death debate about life and art—beers included. Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life (he’s a stay-at-home dad to three young girls), whereas his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he overcommitted to art (he has five books coming out in the next year and a half). Shields and Powell spend four days together at a cabin in the Cascade Mountains, playing chess, shooting hoops, hiking to lakes and an abandoned mine; they rewatch My Dinner with André and The Trip, relax in a hot tub, and talk about everything they can think of in the name of exploring and debating their central question (life and/or art?): marriage, family, sports, sex, happiness, drugs, death, betrayal—and, of course, writers and writing. The relationship—the balance of power—between Shields and Powell is in constant flux, as two egos try to undermine each other, two personalities overlap and collapse. This book seeks to deconstruct the Q&A format, which has roots as deep as Plato and Socrates and as wide as Laurel and Hardy, Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, and Car Talk’s Magliozzi brothers. I Think You’re Totally Wrong also seeks to confound, as much as possible, the divisions between “reality” and “fiction,” between “life” and “art.” There are no teachers or students here, no interviewers or interviewees, no masters in the universe—only a chasm of uncertainty, in a dialogue that remains dazzlingly provocative and entertaining from start to finish. James Franco's adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong into a film, with Shields and Powell striving mightily to play themselves and Franco in a supporting role, will be released later this year.

"VILLAGE DIARY OF A HERETIC BANKER is more a diary than an instructive guide. The diary provides the flavour of the author’s personal experiences as a rural banker and his engagement with the poor in the remote crannies of India. The seed around which the book crystallises is the intrinsic tenacity and grit of poor rural women that can be harnessed into energetic powerhouses to drive our rural society onto the road to prosperity. The book carries in its pages the poignant nostalgia of the author for villages but it is also tinged at places with rage and despair. The message in this book is that there is no grand, universal formula for poverty reduction. The battle has to be fought on several fronts and what works in one place does not necessarily work everywhere. The way forward lies in grassroots field experiments for understanding the causal relationships in poor people’s behaviour and in learning by doing. The author’s faith in poor people’s ability to climb out of the rut is unshakeable and his core belief is gradualism. The author believes that lasting social change most often—and perhaps always—comes slowly rather than in a burst of revolutionary fervour. It is this belief that has shaped his work. He also believes that lasting change can be effected only when women are given equal opportunities for financial empowerment The author firmly believes that it is possible to eliminate poverty in our country—provided we re-examine the received wisdom of our assumptions. The poor are poor not because they are unskilled or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labour. They neither own capital, nor does anyone give them access to credit, except on the most unreasonable terms. They live on the edge, in constant fear of a catastrophe or tragedy, but they have no insurance because insurance companies consider them a losing proposition. And the State’s social safety nets are not only grossly inadequate but mired in corruption and bureaucratic red tape. During his efforts in development finance and rural development work for over three decades, the author has seen projects and strategies succeed as well as fail. He has seen misguided project designs, poor implementation and squandering of large sums of money. But he also witnessed incredible achievements. When development works well, he argues, it can transform lives by providing the underprivileged the capital and knowledge that can open up opportunities for them and reduce their poverty. "

Equating life to a dream, Jason infers that the universe is his creation—and that he alone is its recipient. Enjoy the unscientific and humorous use of DNA in this entertaining read.

In March 2001, the website Tehelka broke Operation West End, the biggest undercover news story in Indian journalism. Using spycams and masquerading as arms dealers, Tehelka's reporters infiltrated the Indian government, bribed army officers, gave money to the president of the ruling party and the defence minister's close colleague right in the defence minister's residence. This eventually forced both the ministers'resignations. In a rigorously researched and searing authentic account of the Tehelka expose and its aftermath, Madhu Trehan does a forensic study of the imperatives at the root of it, the characters and heroes and villains of the story, and of how the system got back: by obfuscating, by attempting to destroy the investors without leaving any footprints. In the style of Rashomon, the story is related by numerous participants of the same incidents and, of course, none of the stories tally. With exhaustive personal interviews, this is a must-read for anybody who wants to understand modern India - or even better, modern international journalism.

Fans of Bird by Bird, The Artist's Way, and Writing Down the Bones will find inspiration in multi-award winning novelist Barbara Samuel's Girls in the Basement series. The Celebration Book is a collection of upbeat essays designed to celebrate the writing life, from the body to the work to mentors.