Confessions of a banned book lover!

The Stage Zero : My Love for books

My love for books dates back to Stone age,i read as many books as possible in school days and gradually developed a habit of reading.When i found out that there are ebook that i can download for free and read on computer ,it was like i was standing before an ocean of free knowledge. All I needed was a method to seive this ocean and filter out the relevant content. Google proved to be the best tool for the purpose and provided me with gazillions of links and titles.

This was the first stage : Discovering Google as a means to satisfy the need for books.

Then one day,I came across Project Gutenberg (If you remember , Gutenberg invented the first printing Press and the first book to be printed was Bible that came to be known as Gutenberg Bible!). This project aims to compile all the world’s literature as a single,searchable archive! But mostly the books were all in free domain means you can find Shakespeare but could not find Paulo Coelho. A book comes into Public(Free) Domain if it has no copyright associated with it or it is an anonymous creation of the author has died 100 (I dont remember exactly..) years ago. But you can not find magazines,comics,computer books ,tutorials and other study material there.

Second Stage : Discovering Project Gutenberg.

Inspired by Project Gutenberg and having studied its shortcomings, I decided to start a collection of my own. Since there was no use re-inventing the wheel, I aimed to collect the books that were not in public domain (means copyright protected!!) and the books that most of us needed (like new authors,thrillers,tutorials,study materials etc etc). So I started my collection . Searched the books on Google ,downloaded them,organised them, If there was some problem with the fonts ,i fixed it . If it was a document, i converted it to pdf. Converted it into other formats like chm,hlp,lit,jar etc etc. I did this for almost two months and had a pretty decent collection when i decided to share it with the rest of the world. This was going to be a big step as i was going to violate some serious copyrights.(I Will get back to it later.)

Third Stage : My Romance with esnips

Having figured that i was going to share the collection, I opened an account on esnips (in 2004) it provided 1 GB free space at that time. The name of the account was “Tarun Reflex” (as usual) . That was the first time i used the handle “Reflex” (‘Reflex’ also has a story behind it that is too personal, will definitely blog on it whenever i’ll feel over-expressive). I started uploading books and books after books.. Soon it grew to be the biggest collection on esnips with more than 10,000 books in 92 organized folder. All of them free to download and share. Most of the major authors were there (As you will find in the list that is given at end of this post).. I had more than 10,00,000 visitors in 6 months. Moe than 3000 comments and hundreds of daily-emails requesting for ebooks. It was also the time when Orkut was just started.

Fourth Stage : Break-Up With esnips.

Efrat Moshkovich. You know him? You better not. You don’t know this guy unless you break thousands of copyright laws.I assume him to be the copyright in-charge of ensips who mailed me about the repeated copyright violations. I was too much in love with esnips to accede this warning by my so-called father-in-law and then one hot morning in July of 2005, I woke on my hostel bed feeling alone & divorced-before-marriage. I was banned from esnips for ever,My all accounts were banned,my email id was banned from future registration,  they even banned the tag ‘Tarun Reflex’!! You can stil find traces of mt esnips account in google’s seacrh result while searching for ‘best ebooks site’.

It was really a bad day! But i still have a new esnips account that is still active and you can find few books here (Besides there is complete collection of Mills and Boon for all those romance lovers.)

Fifth Stage : Heaven behold the faith departed!

By now, I had a personal collection of over 1,00,000 ebooks ranging from fiction to bedas, Comics to whitepapers, science to jokes,biographies to movie scripts, magazines to audio books,study material for IAS,CAT,GATE,GRE,TOEFL,French,AFCEH,EC etc etc.. Books on computers acquired 15 GB alone! As i was interested in troubleshooting and hacking, i had pretty good material on the subject including hacking using Blue Boxes to new tunneling and proxy techniques .. Banned from esnips, i started a new community on Orkut by the name BOOKS AND BOOKS that is still active and growing (Why don’t you join it?). this time i didnt want to take any chances so i decided to send books by email as an attachment. Now there are more than 5000 email ids in my gmail contacts . I have sent 78 ebooks deliveries (containing 8-10 books each in delivery,on average!) Sent 22 Parts of Mills and Boon (approx 15 books in each part.) and thousands of requests. (Check the community for more details).

Sixth Stage : Sharing the Sources.

I have more links to ebooks than i have ebooks. The job of sending books by email is becoming more and more difficult day-by-day. Google changed its way of adding contacts to gmail making it hard to add bulk-contacts.  I get banned for 24 hours after every 500 emails i send , It takes around one week to send single delivery to all. recently i started a new blog for sharing all the links i have collected over the last 4 years.  I gave a seminar on Intelligent Information Retrieval that can be downloaded/viewed here..

However, I am posting my favorite technique here, Its just a single trick for google that will lead you into world of freedom.

This trick is based on simple observation  : Don’t search for books,Search for servers that host the books. In this way you are searching for a wider domain that is specific to the subject of your choice.

Find Apache’s (default) Index page (Apache is a web server)
Try this query:

+(“index of”) +(“/ebooks”|”/book”) +(chm|pdf|zip|rar) +apache

Find a particular eBook file
Try this query:

allinurl: +(rar|chm|zip|pdf|tgz) TheTitle

My Collection Of Books

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The Strangest Sights in Google Earth

Ever since Google first let people scour the planet from the comfort of their computers through the Google Earth software program, fans have been on a virtual scavenger hunt from the North Pole to the South Pole looking for anything interesting, unusual, or unexplained. From shipwrecks to crop circles, from ads big enough to be read from space to a giant pink bunny nearly the size of a football field, we’ve collected just a few of the odd and spectacular sights. You can see the same images in Google Maps by clicking the links we provide–but you’ll get a better view by copying the coordinates in parentheses after each link and pasting them into Google Earth’s ‘Fly To’ box. We’ve also created a file of Placemarks that includes all of these sights and more; you can download it and open it with Google Earth.

Enjoy the trip!

A Beautiful Mind ! !

This book draws very sharp divisions between movies that are about a life, based on a life, or in this case, inspired by a life. Whether you have scene the movie or even the trailer, once you read this book it become immediately apparent Dr. Nash’s life would not fit into any single film. To a degree this is simply an instance of practicality, for the work this man and his peers did, is intelligible to a small handful of people. Even while reading the book, unless your math skills are somewhat extraordinary, the lexicon of pure math will be completely new, and the concepts these men and women developed are fascinating, however they are almost unimaginably complex.

To those who have read material that may have touched on Game Theory, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, and The Mobius Band, the book will allow for moments when the inquisitive can participate. In most cases the concepts are mind bending, and in some cases they could not even be verbalized by some of the brilliant minds that Dr. Nash worked amongst. Ms. Sylvia Nasar does an excellent job of explaining why Dr. Nash was so different from his peers, and how he approached complex issues in fundamentally different manners than others.

The remarkable story is of this brilliant man who was considered one of the greatest thinkers of his time who fell gradually, though fairly quickly, into a mental state that caused his family to commit him more than once. The decades he spent living under the most bizarre and destructive delusions, his moments of clarity, and then his highly unusual recovery makes for an incredible tale. This is one of those stories that had it been written as fiction, it would not have been taken seriously.

The other parts of the book were very revealing as they pertained to Dr. Nash and his peers at Princeton, MIT, and elsewhere. The fields they work in are intensely competitive, however when he began his decline, and then continued to have false starts at normality, for the most part he was not abandoned. The author touches on why his peers may have felt the need to help a man who routinely demonstrated the most hurtful personal behavior to anyone he came in contact with. There were exceptions, but they are very few in number, and not for the people you might suppose. All of these great minds share at least one commonality, and that is their ability to think at extremely high levels that few can even imagine. Many of these people seem to constantly fear the loss of whatever unique gifts they have. They also tend to be people that have been marginalized until they find their place in the academic world, for what they think of, and the eccentricities they often have, single them out for ridicule not praise.

A very readable biography, a profession that is understood by few.

“A Beautiful Mind ” is one my favorite book and movie.. Its very inspiring and real pleasure to mind. (Sir)Dr. John Nash (the protagonist ) is a Nobel Prize Winner for Economics in 1995 and a great mathematician .The book is an account of his life,his struggle with Schizophrenia for 37 years and recovery. The author Sylvia Nasar has writing style tht u will feel like experiencing the book rather than just reading.
One thing more ,I have a thing for Nobel Prize winners, I have read Gitanjali , Surely you are Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman , Argumentatice Indian by Amartya Sen, The Double By Jose Saramago so no surprise i like this book so much.

Four Weddings and A Funeral ! ! !

 

Just few hours ago i saw this movie and liked these lines … The context is a very good friend of Matthew has died and he is speaking on his funeral.

Matthew: Gareth used to prefer funerals to weddings. He said it was easier to get enthusiastic about a ceremony one had an outside chance of eventually being involved in. In order to prepare this speech, I rang a few people, to get a general picture of how Gareth was regarded by those who met him. Fat seems to be a word people most connected with him. Terribly rude also rang a lot of bells. So very fat and very rude seems to have been a stranger’s viewpoint. On the other hand, some of you have been kind enough to ring me to tell me that you loved him, which I know he’d be thrilled to hear. You remember his fabulous hospitality… his strange experimental cooking. The recipe for “Duck à la Banana” fortunately goes with him to his grave. Most of all, you tell me of his enormous capacity for joy. When joyful, when joyful for highly vocal drunkenness. But joyful is how I hope you’ll remember him. Not stuck in a box in a church. Pick your favorite of his waistcoats and remember him that way. The most splendid, replete, big-hearted, weak-hearted as it turned out, and jolly bugger most of us ever met. As for me, you may ask how I’ll remember him, what I thought of him. Unfortunately there I run out of words. Perhaps you will forgive me if I turn from my own feelings to the words of another splendid bugger:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let the aero-planes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message: He Is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West.
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: Put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

This has become one of the most touching poem i ever read!!

Thich Quang Duc : The Monk who burnt himself ! !

Thích Quảng Ðức was protesting against the way the administration of the President Ngô Đình Diệm was oppressing the Buddhist religion.His monastery was just outside of Huế in central Vietnam. The light blue Austin in which he drove to Saigon to commit his act can still be seen there (along with a picture showing his self-immolation, with his car in the background). After his death, his body was cremated. During the cremation, his shrunken heart still remained intact. It was henceforth considered holy and placed in the care of the Reserve Bank of Vietnam.Madame Nhu, the first lady of Vietnam at the time, commented with regard to this that she would “clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show”. This supposedly resulted in her receiving the alias of “Dragon Lady”.Before Thay Thích Quảng Ðức self immolated himself, someone told me that he said to his followers that if his body falls forward, they should keep on protesting, and if his body falls backward, then they should stop protesting, his body fell forward after he died , so his followers still protesting, and Phat Giao VN Thong Nhat — Thay Thich Huyen Quang, Thay Thich Quang Do — still protesting for rights today from VN’s government VC today. His facial expressions looked calm and peaceful, not many people have the guts to self-immolate themselves like that and keeping themselves calm, and his heart is special, a Buddhism relic. I want to see his heart someday. I had no respect for President Ngo Dinh Diem or anyone that go with this oppression, eventhough some Vietnam people still commemorated his death, in fact he was assassinated because some people didn’t like his presidential actions, especially this oppression, he was a Catholic, I heard that his brother was a priest or something high in the Catholic church, but he was also assassinated ; his wife had no respect for Buddhism, she should have some respect, does she have the guts to righteous sacrifice to what she believes in, what an ignorant person, if she didn’t like Buddhism so what but have some respect. She was a Catholic, too. At this time because of a Catholic president, other religions — Buddhism PGVNTN, Phat Giao Hoa Hao, Cao Dai, were oppressed, Buddhism PGVNTN was the strongest, I guess that why this president and his followers wanted VN to have only one religion — Catholic, but too bad, Buddhism PGVNTN still remain strong and have a big influence today……see how Buddhism is not poison, as someone that mentioned in War of Words, but have moved to Culture Shock, in fact an Indian king, Asoka, followed Buddhism after he had acknowledged of what he had done, research on him for more information , Buddhists in this oppression protested in a peaceful way…..this is one of VN’s shameful piece of history, I hope there will be no repetition like this again, if one don’t like what others believe, then fine, but don’t do evil like what happened in this opppression, or he/her had sinned………

   It is so amazing that some monks in Buddhism have special relics after they were cremated, they must have reach to the some high level. This is true, more information, click here http://www.maitreyaproject.com/en/relic.html. There are many things in this world that remained unsolved, undiscovered, unpredictable, etc…..

The last words of Thich Quang Duc before his self-immolation were documented in a letter he had left::

“

Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngo Dinh Diem to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally. I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organise in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.

”

I just found out that Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu was First Lady of South Vietnam from 1955-1963 eventhough President Ngo Dinh Diem was the president and also her brother in law. She was born as Tran Le Xuan; she converted from Mahayana Buddhism to Roman Catholicism; her parents disowned her because of her role in the persecution of Buddhists (her parents must have thought what have we done to have one disobedient and disrespectful daugther, converting to another religion, but also mocking her born religion, Buddhism). Her husband was assassinated with President Ngo Dinh Diem, during this assassination she was in California with her daugther Ngo Le Thuy…after this assassination, it was a downfall for the Dinh families….she was not allowed to return back to South Vietnam, her daughter died in a car accident in France, she was robbed of more than $132,000 worth of jewelry in Italy, her brother Tran Van Khiem was charged in the strangling deaths of their parents (if this was true, empathy to her parents for having impious children). She clearly doesn’t understand Buddhism, what she had said about the self-immolation of Buddhist monks were from plain ignorance…..again does she has the bravery to self-immolate herself for what she believes or if her belief was oppressed. Self-immolating yourself isn’t a laughable matter, very painful in which one must have the guts, audacity, etc. This self-immolation was the reponse back from Buddhishts in the oppression in a peaceful way not in a violent way to let others know how serious this oppression was, how Buddhism in Vietnam was oppressed, like if one entitled rights were oppressed, one will not be subdued to any authority, one would rather die in honor like how the samurai, they would rather kill themselves before their enemies have the chance to do so……about Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu…..it is probably what she had done that lead to her misfortune (KARMA).

Regards, 

“Tarun.Reflex”