Saturday 29 May 2021

Random Thoughts On Random Words

Random Thoughts On Random Words by Rajeev Moothedath is an interesting eBook suitable for readers of all ages. 

It is one of the eBooks launched by the Blogchatter EBook Carnival this year.


Book Title and Cover

The author has chosen an apt title. 

The book cover looks bright, colourful, and attractive, with many images corresponding to the topics covered in the book. The cover design is by Tarun.

The Author

Rajeev Moothedath (M.N.Rajeev) is a writer and poet. Formerly a corporate executive, Rajeev retired from Hyundai Motor India Ltd from the position of AGM (HR). He is involved with corporate training and writing articles and poetry. His three prose and poetry blogs are-

www.hrdian.blogspot.com

www.rajeevianlinesandverses.blogspot.com

www.corporatepoem.blogspot.com

His book in prose- “Straight from the heart –Thoughts and experiences of an HR professional” was published in June 2015 by Cyberwit.net. His book in verse “Corporate Poems- Straight & Simple” has been published on Kindle in December 2019. His interview featured in the publication- "21st Century Critical Thought" - A Dialogue with Post Modern Voices”. Rajeev’s poems have been published in a number of national and international anthologies.



Book Blurb

“Random thoughts on random words” takes readers on an exciting journey of ideas, thoughts and experiences that are seemingly random, yet very connected to day to day living be it ability, boldness or ego .The exotic, exciting, at times roller coaster ride features diverse subjects such as creativity, death, love, motherhood, utopia, ending with a serene ‘Zen state of mind’.

I have been a regular reader of the author’s blog, having discovered it some years on IndiBlogger. Thereafter, I read some of the posts of the author for this year’s Blogchatter A To Z challenge. For his maiden challenge this year, the author wrote “randomly on random words”. His words and expressions and analysis reflect his sincerity, clarity, awareness, empathy, erudition, interest, and goodness. I could connect with his posts and this book.

The book has been divided into 26 chapters corresponding to his A to Z posts-

The Chapters are-

1. Ability

2. Boldness

3. Creativity

4. Death

5. Ego Talk

6. Fast Food

7. Greatness

8. Happiness

9.  India- My Country

10. Jokes- Fun, Laughter

11. Killer Instinct

12. Love

13. Motherhood

14. News

15. Old Age

16. Pet

17. Quarantine

18. Rest and Recreation

19. Social Media

20. Tribute to a Legend

21. Utopia

22. Visualization

23. Wedding

24. X Factor

25. Yes to Life

26. Zen State of Mind

With his rich experience in the field of Human Resources, the author deftly combines his management profession knowledge along with his creativity- writing and poetry skills. The author delves into his expertise and walks down the memory lane as he lucidly shares about people and incidents. I liked the memories shared and the expression skills of the author. The author shares pearls of wisdom from his HR career. This book has many useful tips and points that make us ponder.

“Giving a test to know the ability of Virat Kohli to play the Veena or one to test the cricketing skills of his actor wife may sound stupid. Yet we tend to do just that giving some general tests like IQ across the board. We now know these tests focus on some types of intelligence (Logical mathematical, linguistic) and leave out others like interpersonal, intra-personal, musical, spatial etc.”

“The ones who are not bold, find themselves unable to speak out in a departmental meeting. As one from a corporate background, I would suggest that it is the responsibility of the leader who is chairing the meeting to ensure that all voices are heard. He/she needs to do whatever it takes to achieve this objective whether by prodding, encouraging or preventing unfair criticism by others in the meeting. People also tend to take advantage of a person who is seen as 'weak' and unable to exhibit the minimum boldness in a situation.”

I found my thoughts in resonance with the author’s. I too believe that- “a rejection is not the end of the world. You have umpteen opportunities to showcase your creativity.” Just like the author, even I used to find less availability or access to the resources for publication. Having received multiple rejection letters over the years, things are much better in the digital age where content-creators have multiple opportunities and options for publication of their works.

The author rightly states-

Criticism has been that the quality of writing has gone down considerably with every Tom, Dick and Harry aspiring to write. In fact some speak in a derisive manner about poets/writers publishing their work in literary groups on Facebook.”

The budding poets and writers can be enthused by learning about the author’s personal experiencesThis book has mention about so many varied issues- poets, movies, athletics, books, near death experience (NDE), cricket, independence struggle, laughter club, killer instinct, paparazzi, Covid19 etc.

It was great to find the Odisha connection too-

“A tribal poet like LokKabiRatna, Haldhar Nag from Orissa who writes in the Sambalpuri dialect, would have been lost to the poetic world.”

Requesting the author to update the spelling of Odisha as the said spelling change happened in 2011.

This is an apt book for publication. I would request the author to consider printing this. But, here’s a request before he goes for print publication- to check the punctuation and paragraph justification and ensure that the chapter-6 begins on a new page, and text-colour is updated to black in Chapters-18, 21 and 25, so as to be consistent with the rest of the chapters of the book. In case an eBook version is planned, the author must insert the hyperlink again for ‘Christianoplois’ on Page-53. This reviewer had to face the same for own book as like the author, even I took the content from my Blogger blog. Consequently, the links did not work and I had to manually insert them again. We would not have to face this had we composed our posts first on MS-Word (and then posted on our Blogger blog) and used the same document for conversion to PDF.

The author gives interesting analogy and movie and book references to express his thoughts. There are many inspiring words, lessons, and quotes.

According to American civil rights activist, Dorothy Height "Greatness is not measured by what a man or woman accomplishes but by the opposition he or she has overcome to reach the goals."

The author has interspersed some engaging stories and some of his own poems to express his points. The book, ‘Random Thoughts On Random Words’ is an interesting read on diverse topics and is motivational and spiritual without sounding preachy.

Random Thoughts on Random Words eBook is available for free download here.

8 comments:

  1. Thank you Anita for a very exhaustive review! Thank you also for pointing out the incorrect spelling of Odisha (Now how did this happen?!- A clear oversight). Your suggestions on text colours etc are well taken. Was attempting this space for the first time and I had simply copied most of the lines from my blog:) Once again a big thanks Anita! You have gone into the length and breath of my work thoroughly to come up with such a review.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you so much. Glad you liked it.
      It was great to go through your book.
      Best wishes for the print edition and for all your future works.

      Delete
  2. Hi I checked the text colours mentioned by you. I had deliberately given different colour to the title of poems included so as to not confuse readers between chapter titles and that of the poems.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, it's great that you have given different colour for the poem headings, Rajeev ji. It's nice to see and recognize them in the midst of prose.
      The text colour referred is the colour of the content-body in the given chapters. Some paragraphs are in gray there.

      Delete
    2. Thank you for the feedback. Will take care as and when it is published.

      Delete
  3. This is such a great review Anita. I could truly feel that this book was a fun read for you :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks a lot, Suchita :)
      Great to hear from you.
      Indeed. This book is interesting to read.

      Delete

Your words mean a lot to me.

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