Bangalore Book Festival 2007

The annual Bangalore Book Festival is on all this week, at the Palace grounds. The Book festival this year has been organised to co-incide with the Dasara festivities – and will last the entire duration of Dasara, which is the NadaHabba or State Festival of Karnataka.

Added attractions of the festival, apart from over a million books on show, are the cultural programmes that happen everyday – ranging from children’s dance programmes to carnatic jugalbandis.

The added sweetener for Book lover is the hefty discounts offered on all titles – including the latest releases – I bought Dev Anand’s autobiography at a neat 140 Rupee Discount!

There over 300 stalls in the book fair – with a sizeable representation of all classes and languages of books. I had gone there with my family – and there was something for everyone. My parents were rather delighted to find the range of Kannada books and magazines on display – and they bought quite a few, with discounts ranging from 10 to 20%.

Freakonomics

Authors : Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
ISBN : 006073132X
Publish Date : April 2005
Publisher : HarperCollins Publishers

The introduction says “The hidden side of everything“, which actually captures the whole theme of this book. The hidden economic reasons in different aspects of life.

Let me briefly describe the best case study in the book, involving an analysis of the hidden reasoning for drop in crime in the US in the early 1990s.

The authors writes “it was not the innovative policying strategies, tough gun control laws or strong economy that led to this drop. Steven argues for and against every such factor and concludes that none could cause such a major drop“.