Dear Visitor, 

Welcome to ShankarJagansWorld. Thanks for your time. Here you will see my writings- of blogs, articles, reflections, book reviews and my published books. Trust that you find it useful. 

Please share your thoughts in the comments section as you browse my site. Your every word means a lot to me. 

Thank you,
Shankar Jaganathan

“Comparisions is hell, Contentment is heaven”

Latest Post

• Book Review 2024.18: Grit, Why passion and resilience are the secrets to success, Angela Duckworth, Dec 21, 2024December 21, 2024
  Book Review 2024.18: Grit, Why Passion and resilience are the secrets to success, Angela Duckworth, Paperback, 2016 -December 21, 2024 This is a very essential book at the current phase of my life, where in the last two years I have started more projects and given up midway without completing it than in the last four decades of my life combined. The appeal of this book is in its ability to educate the reader in an engaging mode on Grit, while at the same time providing them specific concepts to adopt for practice; the ideal blend for an education cum self-help book, where you have hints for practice of what you have learnt. Debating various contentious issues for the layman like nature vs nurture, or its more practical implication talent vs hard work, authoritative vs permissive parenting, value of extra-curricular activities in development of a person, the author for me at least settles these issues with convincing rationale based on psychological research carried out in the USA in the last century. A key element in these research narratives is the insight the author provides to the reader for drawing their own conclusion by highlighting the underlying concepts that the reader […]
• Book Review 2024.17: What I Learnt About Investing From Darwin, Pulak Prasad, 298 pages, Hardbound, 2023 -December 9, 2024December 9, 2024
  Book Review 2024.17: What I Learnt About Investing From Darwin, Pulak Prasad, 298 pages, Hardbound, 2023 -December 9, 2024 A sublime blend of Animal Planet, National Geography, and the CNBC, this book fuses the distinct expertise required in each one of these fields to make it an extremely insightful, readable, and engaging read on investment. The author’s personal investing experience adds a distinct color to the narration making it a practical lesson for anyone interested in equity markets. The investment model described in this book is what the author has successfully practiced in Nalanda his investment firm for the last one and a half decade. The clarity of his model is seen in its simplicity and validated by not only his personal experience and experiences of other more renowned value investors like Warrant Buffet but deeply ingrained in the evolution of life on our planet, as vividly illustrated through numerous examples from the evolutionary research of the last one hundred and fifty years.    The narrative in this book is intertwined between detailed descriptions of specific evolutionary research studies and examples of individual investments from the author’s portfolio that reinforce the validity of the evolutionary principles in the world of […]
• Book Review 2024.16: Good Strategy Bad Strategy Richard Rumelt, 298 pages, Paperback, 2011 -December 2, 2024December 2, 2024
  Book Review 2024.16: Good Strategy Bad Strategy Richard Rumelt, 298 pages, Paperback, 2011 -December 2, 2024 Strategy as a concept always interested me, for I believe that if we have to accomplish anything ambitious beyond our existing abilities and available resources, we need to do something unique or different that leverages what we have to help us achieve our goals, which is my definition of the word strategy. I picked up this book after seeing very good reviews and to say the least I am not disappointed and completed reading it in less than ten days. For me the highlight of this book is separation of strategy from planning, or goals and targets setting or defining a Vision and Mission for a team or organization that is often mistaken for strategy but is required to execute any strategy. Another insight is that strategy is not essential for every organization, or is required every time as part of the planning process, but to be judiciously used when there is flux in the industry or environment or while chasing an ambitious goal.   A key learning from this book is the identification of filters that separate good strategy from bad strategy. Focusing […]