an enjoyable book

Among the various things I enjoy, one of the foremost of them is reading books ... or better, it was reading books. Until recently this habit had almost become extinct owing to a lethal combination of superhuman study pressure, and lack of time, so the day my ISC exams got over I made a dash from my school for the Elgin Road Crossword store, and to my delight found a couple of books that seemed ... just right for me. One was Vikas Swarup's 'Q & A', the novel on which the Oscar winning 'Slumdog Millionaire' is based, and the other was 'Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!' a collection of stories taken from the life of one of the greatest theoretical physicists, Richard P Feynman of the 20th century. Now, whatever my ISC marks may say, I'm honestly good at physics, and I love that subject owing to its complicated simplicity (After all, which other subject can explain why other subjects exist?), and hence am rather inclined towards books that deal in the same.

And if you are still wondering which of the two books this post points at, its the latter.

Now 'Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman' is not a book on science. What I mean is, its not full of pages fraught with high sounding scientific jargon, and particle accelerators, or anti-matter, or string theory or ... the stuff you find in Stephen Hawkin's books, nor is it made intimidating by the inclusion of weird symbols, or incomprehensible equations like Roger Penrose's stuff. Rather this is a book on the action-packed life of one of the most interesting persons of the previous century, how he grew up tinkering with radios ... "fixing radios by thinking" , getting into all sorts of mischief in college, removing doors from dormitories, graduation form MIT, and then Princeton. If you are wondering that this is just boring autobiographical stuff, then let me tell you, that you are eating the rotten end of the papaya (HEY, that's an idiom I created right now!!!).

The book makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read, but yup, there's no simple way to prove it. All you have is my word, that money spent in this book won't be mis-spent. It had me in stitches in every chapter, and I'm sure that you, whether you like science or not, will find this to be one of the most hilarious reads ever. It gives, not only an alternative insight into one of the greatest minds of the last century, but also shows how this great man, had his quota of fun, be it in the form of bashing up goons in a toilet in a bar, or being drunk to the last cell of his body and trying to impress the damsels around him. 

to wrap it up, one heck of a read.