Friday, May 15, 2009

Men of Steel - Book Review !!!


I have been reading these kind of books recently, not for any particular reason, but due to a natural human fact that we are always interested to read stories about others, and believe it or not, its a human trait to actually take interest in other people's life. Until and unless it all remains under a healthy cause, such an interest is surely bound to give us all some positive inputs, teach us all some much needed lessons and more importantly these kind of readings surely broaden and increase your thinking ability and the dimension that you can cover and expand.

Men of Steel, a book from Vir Sanghvi, speaks about, not many, but just 11 prominent figures of India. These are not stories about how they made it big (just like personalities covered in another book which I reviewed - Stay Hungry Stay Foolish), but these are more towards a conversational style manuscripts which Vir has no doubtedly produced in his own unique style of writing. If you are a true Indian by heart, you are surely to love this book, which offers nothing special or great in terms of the history but does give a unique perspective in each of these men, who now are responsible for not creating and being successful with their own brand, but more importantly leading the brand "INDIA" and placing it on the world map amongst different sectors.

Personalities that Vir has interviewed are :
Ratan Tata
Uday Kotak
Nusli Wadia
Sunil Bharati Mittal
Subhash Chandra
Rajeev Chandrasekhar
Kumar Mangalam Birla
Bikki Oberoi
Azim Premji
Vijay Mallya
Nandan Nilekani

Some of these are household names which even a common man knows of through their products and businesses, while some are dominant business men with their own successful brand names.
Note: Please note that these interviews have been taken in the year 2005 and lot of things have changed since then.


Overall a nice book to read a little bit more about these people and add to your already existing knowledge about their success stories.
You can follow Vir Sanghvi here and the details about his own book from his perspective are here.


My personal rating: 8.5/10

Cheers
Samy

(PS: If you wish to read these stories, you can do so by clicking each of the above names, and these are the exact same stories as produced in the book published by Vir Sanghvi)