Review: No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Hooter: A look into the journey of Instagram as a business till the exit of the original founders.

Having won multiple awards for her "no filter" look into Instagram and its journey and the constant friction of being a company within a company after the acquisition in 2010, Sarah does a brilliant job at presenting a narrative of the evolution of Instagram as it dealt with challenges within and outside the organisation whilst trying to stay close to its guiding principles of curating beautiful perspectives and expressions of the average user. Having used instagram since 2013, I could relate with the evolution of the features and the driving forces around them - both from a data driven Facebook and radical Snap and other smaller players.

The focus of community over technology has served them strong which is now a practice lot of other technology companies have picked up on since then. Trying to marry art and technology in its initial phases played out with the filters being their mainstay but as camera phones improved, the community came to the fore.

Easily adaptable for a movie script, she captures the people behind Instagram being the centre piece of online expression today along with the challenges of revenue making engine without offsetting their user base and dealing with other challenges that the parent firm had faced.

Instagram leadership sat at a unique position to leverage from the mistakes of Facebook and be too successful for its own parent leading to cutting down off resources due to cannibalisation of the parent company's userbase.

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Review: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: How Apple figured its WHY and so should you.

Pretty obvious that Apple is the centre of the piece with multiple callbacks to it and how they figured their WHY and when Steve wasnt around, they didn't. Walmart and Microsoft probably fight for second place at a distance but that is basically the core essence of the book of understanding the WHY.

The author does a great job at simplifying and distilling that message for the average reader to help drive that message home. There are multiple examples where the why is forgotten for the what and the how and a correlation is created to track the downfall of the brand in that scenario. Some of it may be conjecture but this book would have been a brilliant long form article.

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Review: India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution by J. Sai Deepak
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: An academically rigorous Indic view of the notion of Bharat / India

Coming from a non academic research background, this felt like what people write for their thesis with the amount of factual structure and supporting evidence that Sai adds to put his point forth with the rigor of a lawyer. Starting from the history and context of the European notion of nation, civilisation and secularism in line with the power of the Church, he then moves on to explain how those notions were retro fitted into colonies of these European powers and how his research of Indic authors provides another view of Bharat that existed long before the country united as India against the British colonialisation. A lot of us have gotten our English based education based on British based values and systems and hence he tries to clarify the baseline it has created which we need to be cognisant of before we derive any interpretations around it.

He brings forth the premise of decolonialising the mindset but explaining the reason why the template was first set up to allow for cognitive dissonance around such fundamental concepts that we have been brought up with and taken for granted.

There aren't really any narratives that he seems to be closing out on except putting across his perspective backed by a lot of research and rigor. Honestly this is a very heavy read, aimed at those seriously trying to understand the same from an academic pursuit especially in the current climate.

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