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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People WE admire most!

RAGHU RAI

Raghu Rai was born in the small village of Jhhang, now part of Pakistan. He took up photography in 1965, and the following year joined “The Statesman” newspaper as its chief photographer. Impressed by an exhibit of his work in Paris in 1971, Henri Cartier-Bresson nominated Rai to join Magnum Photos in 1977.

Rai left “The Statesman” in 1976 to work as picture editor for “Sunday,” a weekly news magazine published in Calcutta. He left in 1980 and worked as Picture Editor/Visualizer/Photographer of “India Today”, India’s leading news magazine, during its formative years. From 1982 to 1991, he worked on special issues and designs, contributing trailblazing picture essays on social, political and cultural themes, many of which became the talking point of the magazine.

In the last 18 years, Rai has specialized in extensive coverage of India. He has produced more than 18 books, including Raghu Rai’s Delhi, The Sikhs, Calcutta, Khajuraho, Taj Mahal, Tibet in Exile, India, and Mother Teresa.

For Greenpeace, he has completed an in-depth documentary project on the chemical disaster at Bhopal in 1984, and on its ongoing effects on the lives of gas victims. This work resulted in a book and three exhibitions that have been touring Europe, America, India and southeast Asia since 2004, the 20th anniversary of the disaster. Rai hopes that the exhibition can support the many survivors through creating greater awareness, both about the tragedy, and about the victims – many who are still uncompensated – who continue to live in the contaminated environment around Bhopal.

Rai was awarded the ‘Padmashree’ in 1971, one of India’s highest civilian awards ever given to a photographer. In 1992, his National Geographic cover story “Human Management of Wildlife in India” won him widespread critical acclaim for the piece. Besides winning many national and international awards, Rai has exhibited his works in London, Paris, New York, Hamburg, Prague, Tokyo, Zurich and Sydney. His photo essays have appeared in many of the world’s leading magazines and newspapers including “Time”, “Life”, “GEO”, “The New York Times”, “Sunday Times”, “Newsweek”, “The Independent,” and the “New Yorker”.

He has served three times on the jury of the World Press Photo and twice on the jury of UNESCO’s International Photo Contest.

Raghu Rai lives in Delhi with his family and continues to be an associate of Magnum Photos.

PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is an Indian political scientist, constitutional expert and commentator. He is currently the President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. He was previously Visiting Professor of Government at Harvard University and Associate Professor of Government and of Social Studies at Harvard. He was also Professor of Philosophy and Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He has published widely in reputed national and international journals in a variety of fields including, political philosophy, intellectual history, constitutional law, international politics, society and politics in India. His most recent book are The Burden of Democracy and Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design. He has been a prolific contributor to public debates and his columns have regularly appeared in The New Republic, Foreign Policy, The Hindu, Indian Express, Telegraph, Yale Global, and numerous other papers. He has served as Editorial Consultant to the Indian Express. He is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Politics in India (forthcoming), and serves on the editorial board of numerous journals. He has lectured widely in universities in the United States, Britain, New Zealand, Europe and Japan.

Dr. Mehta obtained a B.A. from St. John’s College, Oxford where he read PPE and a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

He has been a columnist for, among others, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, The Hindu, and the Calcutta Telegraph and has served as an editorial consultant for the Indian Express.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, resigned as  the members of the Knowledge Commission .His resignation letter is a case study in clear, and coherent expression of thought, a highly-recommended piece for aspiring essayists… what am I saying? Read the letter yourself and tell me if you won’t come away feeling as defeated as I am.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (Brand Ambassador Of India)

Thomas L. Friedman, a world-renowned author and journalist, joined The New York Times in 1981 as a financial reporter specializing in OPEC- and oil-related news and later served as the chief diplomatic, chief White House, and international economics correspondents. A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles reporting the Middle East conflict, the end of the cold war, U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy, international economics, and the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat. His foreign affairs column, which appears twice a week in the Times, is syndicated to seven hundred other newspapers worldwide.

Friedman is the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem (FSG, 1989), which won both the National Book Award and the Overseas Press Club Award in 1989 and was on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly twelve months. From Beirut to Jerusalem has been published in more than twenty-seven languages, including Chinese and Japanese, and is now used as a basic textbook on the Middle East in many high schools and universities. Friedman also wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree (FSG, 1999), one of the best selling business books in 1999, and the winner of the 2000 Overseas Press Club Award for best nonfiction book on foreign policy. It is now available in twenty languages. His last book, Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11, issued by FSG in 2002, consists of columns Friedman published about September 11 as well as a diary of his private experiences and reflections during his reporting on the post-September world as he traveled from Afghanistan to Israel to Europe to Indonesia to Saudi Arabia. In 2005, The World Is Flat was given the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and Friedman was named one of America’s Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report.

Friedman graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University with a degree in Mediterranean studies and received a master’s degree in modern Middle East studies from Oxford. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University and has been awarded honorary degrees from several U.S. universities. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Ann, and their two daughters.

I have mentioned just three for a start the list is never ending! Feel free to comment and even recommend People you believe have the will to change things and whose perspective gives realm of thoughts to many. I will be happy to include them.

For more visit my new Blog 1000 Awesome Things About India (Still under construction)

The Motorcycle Diaries

Today afternoon I saw this great movie about adventures in earlier life of famous Cuban Revolutionary Che Guevara . The following song (that i happen to stumble upon) truly marks the spirit of the movie and the man himself ..The song is STAR by Bryan Adams.

The lyrics of the song are as :

What cha wanna be – when you grow up

What cha gonna do – when your time is up
What cha gonna say – when things go wrong
What cha wanna do – when you’re on your own

There’s a road – long and winding
The lights are blindin’ – but it gets there
Don’t give up – don’t look back
There’s a silver linin’ – it’s out there somewhere
Everybody wants an answer – everybody needs a friend
We all need a shinin’ star on which we can depend
N’ so tonight we’re gonna wish upon a star
We never wished upon before – (to find what you’re looking for)
There’ll be times – in your life
Ya when you’ be dancin’ n’ shit – but you ain’t gettin it
But don’t get disillusioned – no, don’t expect too much
Cuz if what you have is all you can get – just keep on
tryin’ – it just ain’t happened yet
Everybody wants ta be winner – everybody has a dream
We all need a shinin’ star when things ain’t what they seem
So tonight we’re gonna wish upon a star
We never wished upon before – (gotta get where you’re
headed for)

Everybody wants some kindness – everybody needs a break
We all need a shinin’ star when things get hard to take
So tonight we’re gonna wish upon a star
We never wished upon before.