iBlog: Nishit Shah

I guess this is the first book related to medical issues that I have picked up. I had seen this book for a while at Crosswords but never bothered to buy it. On Friday I was looking for bestsellers online and came across this book again. What prompted me to buy this was its complete title Survival of The Sickest : A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease After checking the reviews at Amazon, I was sure that I wanted this on my shelf. So, I bought this book and completed the whole of this weekend in one sitting. This book is a genuine page turner.

Survival of the Sickest is a book by Dr. Sharon Moalem in which he explains why we have deadly genetic diseases. He argues that some of those “bad genes” which cause diabetes for example, helped our ancestors survive at some point in our evolutionary history. Knowing the environment where those genes were beneficial to our survival, may help to deal with the disease.This is one of those books that is a delightful read, educating, interesting, and entertaining. The author puts forth his theories that many modern diseases are variations of evolutionary traits that were held by our ancestors that enabled them to survive the ice age and bubonic plague. He goes on to describe how viruses cause certain behavior in their carriers to help the viruses survival. The common cold leaves you well enough to stay moving and go to work so you can spread the virus to others, while the parasitic malaria wants you immobile and in bed because mosquitos can continue to carry it even better with you immobile.
This book added that layer of understanding to my knowledge. Had never thought about anything like this.

Wanna read something new. Try this .. worth reading !

Mumbai Marathon is back celebrating its 5th instance on 20th Jan 2007. Registrations for same have already started. I had missed the last year’s race as my application was rejected for being too late and I ended up being a mere spectator of this magnificent event! So, this time around have registered myself for the 6 km dream run way before and have started training for the same
Its fun to get up very early in the morning when its still dark and I hop / skip / jump / jog / speed walk to complete around 5 km everyday. Right now its seems I have stamina to jog for only 1.5 KM continuous. With under 2 months to go for race, I have challenged myself to run the complete race 6km at one go !

Its been 2 weeks since I am getting up everyday at 05:15 (doesn’t matter what time I go to sleep) and leave by 05:30 and am back after a 45 minute workout at 06:15. Will try and increase the time and the distance covered gradually.
So, if you haven’t signed up for the race do it ASAP and hey don’t forget to run for a cause. It makes one feel good that we are making a difference in someone else’s life who is not as fortunate as we are.

Also, I have signed up as a volunteer too. I dunno how I am gonna race and volunteer on the race day but hope to do both. I hope that the organizers accept my application.

See u there !

After living in central suburbs of Bombay for more than 2 decades, we (my family) has decided to move to western suburbs. So, for the past 2 weeks, every Sunday is spent meeting the Estate agents and checking out the new houses. I usually get in touch with 2-3 agents during the weekdays and give them our requirements and fix an appointment with one in the morning and other in the evening and go hopping from one place to another. This helps me cover atleast 7-10 houses in a day. Jargons like carpet area, built up , super built up, FSI , etc are now so clear to me! Never done house hunting before, so this is a unique experience.

I have been reading a lot of books these days but have hardly blogged about them lately, either because I was too busy to update my blog or its just too lazy to do that. I have a habit of reading atleast a book a week since my school days and this is one habit that I am proud of ! I have earlier written about my bookshelf and my online bookshelf.

So, from now on I will make sure that I blog about the books that I read every week. This post is just to create some pressure so that I blog about it.

Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the gotta have it scale.

Zig Ziglar