Geek Sublime – Virkam Chandra

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This book is hard to pin down, and because of that it suffers a bit. It would seem that not a lot of readers possess the unique qualities and experiences that form the foundation of the theories touched upon in this book. Authors (of Novels), authors (of code) a.k.a. programmers, and people with a deep historical knowledge of indian culture and mythology.

The author possesses all three in spades, he is an indian novelist who coded on the side to make ends meet. He is very smart and seems a good novelist and probably coder too. His writing is eloquent enough to cover all three of the seemingly disparate topics, he makes a case that perhaps they are not so disparate after all — but it still seems despite the authors best efforts that there isn’t an audience for this all encompassing thesis.

Still I applaud the effort – there are some gems in there – even if for me it didn’t quite come together, and it seemed to be in need of some editing (by an outside editor, is this self-published?) in the middle to rein it all in a bit. I hope the author found some peace in putting his thoughts and theories to paper, and I appreciate him letting us in on the workings of the mind which can get messy with flashes of brilliance.

P.S. I also suspect as it did me that the title can mislead, even though the book is non-fiction the title is applied more like a work of fiction – meaning the poetic lyricism is more important than the literal meaning and I suspect geek is such a loaded/coded word right now that readers might be doubly surprised by the literary tone on the inside.