Homo Sapiens

How does one write a book review when one has forgotten the good first half of the book ? I hadn't been reading seriously for all of 2018, and then yesterday, in a desperate attempt to get back to shape intellectually, I downloaded a habit building app, and put in 30 minutes of reading slots everyday. It worked (and it always works for me - these habit building apps, that is), and I blizzarded through the last 150 pages history of mankind in Yuval Harari's "Homo Sapiens".

The book's really popular, has great ratings on Goodreads, and comes recommended from Bill Gates himself. Equally true to that superstar status - is that book is kind of lame and bland. It is my conspiracy theory that Bill Gates, in an effort to nudge us to read more books, adds a lot of dumb and easy to read books in his book recommendations, much like mothers world over discreetly add veggies to children's food. Look, eating vegetable is good for you, even if Nestle tries to tell you that Maggi veg noodles is actually both vegetable and good, just as Bill Gates probably thinks reading is good for less-smarter people like us, even if it's sort of Chetan Bhagat types, it's still a book. Everyone has a paternalistic agenda, these days !

The book is essentially what I call the "summary types" - which would basically is a lot of Wikipedia, made into small capsules of trivia, written well into a a lot of trivia compiled into one smooth flowing book. Though there has been some criticism about how the author actually believed that the agricultural revolution wasn't a good, I honestly don't recall that part of the book. However, I remember Harari mentioning that since there was an entire travel industry, supported by improvement in our public transport system, waiting to flourish, the narrative that travel was a way to enlightenment came about. So let's be clear - no one really said that travel wasn't good, when we didn't have steam engines. While it is true that the entire instagram-facebook jungle promotes a view that staying in a good hotel, and travelling around the globe (while slogging in a boring soul-less job, which life is not shared on social media) is a great noble quality in one, it rarely isn't the kind of travel that leads to an experience, as opposed to a pleasant memory. 

The last chapter of the book culminates into one large question what makes one happy.By then, I had lost it. Almost, when I lost it here, on this article.