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Book Review- To Die For
Author: Linda Howard
Series: Blair Mallory Series
Genre: Fiction, Romance, Suspense
I stumbled across this book at a bookstore in Jaipur and was immediately hooked when I saw that it’s a Linda Howard novel. To Die For, like many other Linda Howard novels, though hard to find, is every bit worth the trouble when you do get a chance to read it. Needless to say, it was an amazing and enjoyable to read.
To Die For is the first book in the Blair Mallory series, published on December 28, 2004 by Random House Publishing and made the New York Times Bestseller list. To Die For was followed by Drop Dead Gorgeous- another hilariously intriguing trip into Blair’s ‘high-maintenance’ world.
It follows the life of Blair Mallory, an ex-cheerleader, all-American girl, owner of a fitness centre called Great Bods, over a couple of weeks when certain interesting and dangerous incidents occur one after the other. Written in first person, narrated by Blair herself, the story begins with Blair witnessing a murder in the parking lot of her fitness centre and duck-walking back into the building to inform the police. While the detectives are busy questioning her about the details of the incident and scouting out the area around the building for the killer, enter Lieutenant Wyatt Bloodsworth- a handsome super-intelligent alpha-male- who broke Blair’s heart two years ago, when he walked out on her without any explanation or giving her a chance to work on their relationship.
Wyatt is back, what with the scare of her death making him realize that he can’t live without her, but Blair is not willing to make it easy on him at all. Amidst the pressures of solving the case as soon as possible and the near-death incidents causing Blair to be scared and mouthy, Wyatt has his work cut out for him. He has a lot of things, yet to learn and he does so on his own terms. An unexpected twist of events towards the end leaves the reader thrilled with the ending.
Here’s a small glimpse into this awesome novel:
| ‘…I should have known he’d show up. He was, after all, a lieutenant with the police department and in a fairly small town like ours- sixty-odd thousand people- murders weren’t an everyday occurrence. Probably, most of the cops on duty were there and a good many who weren’t.
I heard his voice before I saw him and even after two years I recognized the deep timbre, the slight briskness that said he hadn’t spent his entire life in the south. It had been two years since I’d last seen the back of his head as he walked away from me without so much as a “Have a nice life,” and still I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach as if I were riding a Ferris wheel and just beginning the downward arc. Two damn years and still my heartbeat speeded up.
At least I was still in my office when I heard his voice. He was just outside the door talking to a knot of cops, so I had a moment to prepare myself before he saw me.
Yes, we had a history, Lieutenant J. W. Bloodsworth and I. Two years ago, we had dated-three times, to be exact. His promotion to lieutenant was fairly recent, no more than a year ago, so then he’d been Sergeant Bloodsworth.
I wasn’t happy to see him. I wanted to kick his shins, and I might have if I hadn’t been pretty sure he’d arrest me for assaulting a police officer, so I did the only thing any self-respecting woman would do- I pretended not to recognize him.
“Blair,” he said, coming over to stand way too close, “Are you all right?”
What did he care? I gave him a startled, faintly alarmed look, like the one, women get when some strange man is getting too close and too familiar, and discreetly hitched my chair just an inch away from him. “Uh . . . yes, I’m fine,” I said warily, then subtly changed my expression to one of puzzlement as I stared at him, as if I half-recognized his face but couldn’t pull a name out of my memory banks to match it…’ |
In this beautiful 378-page novel, Linda Howard has portrayed each and every character to such depths that it is not hard to imagine similar characters in our real life. If you’re a girl, you will definitely laugh your heart out, as you follow their struggle for the upper hand in the relationship, Blair’s mind-blowing and entertaining arguments, and Wyatt’s frustrated and adorable pleas for strength to handle what he’s got himself into. If you’re a guy, do pick up this book to gain an insight into girls’ minds accompanied by an action-packed fun-filled ride. Either way, you won’t be disappointed.
Linda Howard is the award-winning author of many New York Times Bestsellers including but not limited to Cry No More, Dying to Please, Open Season and my all-time favorite, Mr. Perfect. She lives in Alabama with her husband and two golden retrievers.
Reviewed by Tanvi Rastogi
Consumerism in China
China, it’s all about being big! It’s about trust! It’s all about luxury brands!
Consumer market is robust in China. One walks down the lanes of China, one can see rows of buildings, huge brands and different lifestyles. China’s economy is booming and it plans to overtake the world. People in China have started opening up to learn English and increase their reach.
Images of China have turned into a brand conscious crowd, huge disposable incomes and per capita income of around 5000 dollars. People have upgraded themselves and have become extremely quality-conscious. China is growing at the rate of 9% at an average per year. China’s rapid economic development has resulted in the striking cross-generational disparities. Changing demographics in China has raised a generation, below 30 years of age, that is less prudent in consuming, as compared to their predecessors who were brought up to embrace the virtues of saving, under the influences of the Cultural Revolution. Due to the country’s one-child policy, the new generation of Chinese consumers was raised by several adults, thereby enjoying a larger margin for spending. This group of new Chinese consumers is constantly exploring the market for global trends, influenced by internet and foreign media.
Chinese consumers display a strong consideration and loyalty to local brands; they are also as keen in exploring foreign brands, if the products are readily accessible within their purchasing channels. As such, foreign companies have to allocate resources into establishing distribution channels or form alliances with local companies, to ensure that the products are within close proximity to consumers. Instead of creating product differentiation through pricing, companies have to focus on long-term technical and emotional benefits.
Changes in economic profiles have been and will continue to be the most important trend in shaping the consumer landscape. Chinese are certainly getting richer speedily: per capita disposable income7 of urban consumers will be doubled by 2020, from about $4,000 to about $8,000. A number of consumers have started to prefer foreign brands over the local brands. However, the trend of luxury brands ha also given rise to the trend of counterfeiting. There are a number of people who are making foreign brands locally and selling in different shops called pearl market. The brands are imitated so well that the difference between real and artificial is wiped out. Chinese consumers have captured not only the luxury brands but also other sectors like technology. Nowadays, food is not limited to noodles and chopsticks, but a huge variety of food is served; Chinese women spend 60 % of their income on cosmetics and surgery. Thus, Chinese consumers have upgraded themselves to another level.
The new trends are the signs of China’s positive growth in future. Chinese consumers are likely to capture most of the markets and overtake US. The growth pace of China is very fast. The trends in China change faster than the number of stores opening. The females of China are also becoming interested in higher education, which will allow them to have a stable income. No longer China will remain a male dominant country, but as it is trying to establish equality in both the sexes. Thus, in many ways, Chinese market would continue to be robust and reach further heights leaving the other countries behind.
Alika Koshy
NU-MBA 2011-13
Research & Designing Projects
The 3rd year B. Tech. students completed their Research & Development projects this semester. Students formed groups of two or three and worked on the following projects:
1. Experimental Wi-Fi Deployment: Under the guidance of Dr. Rajeev Shorey (CSE, Area Director), the team (Aman Arora, Dhananjai Kalyanraman and Yajur Mahendru) investigated the challenges of setting up a Wi-Fi network within and around the AC-2 building (the University’s soon-to-be-operational second Academic Block). The team successfully demonstrated the network’s capabilities, its resistance to unauthorized intrusions and its reach.
2. Affiliate System for a Travel Website: S. Swami (CSE, Visiting Faculty) operates an adventure-travel business and was interested in creating a system of affiliates who would advertise these trips on their own websites. The team (Prateek Suri and Shagun Daral) developed an intuitive interface that allows the affiliates to create their own accounts, select specific types of adventure trips (kayaking only), integrate selected advertisements with their own website and (most challenging of all) earn revenue when these advertisements lead to genuine enquiries from prospective travellers.
3. Handwritten Digit Recognition: Prof. Nirmal Sancheti (CSE Visiting Faculty) defined a software project that aimed to recognize a single hand-written decimal digit and accurately classify it as 0, 1, … or 9. The team (Pongsakorn Sukjunnimit, Rishal Agarwal and Ritesh Rajput) leveraged their knowledge of Artificial Intelligence from an online course offered by Stanford University, the previous semester and implemented a successful cocktail of strategies for pattern-recognition.
4. Plagiarism Detection in LaTeX: Existing plagiarism-detection tools for electronic assignments (such as MOSS) do not work with a particular type-setting language called LaTeX. Under the guidance of Prof. Viraj Kumar (CSE Assistant Professor), the team (Akash Sharma and Rahul Majethia) developed a tool to identify suspicious similarities in a pool of assignments. The similarity metrics were tailored to detect specific strategies that students commonly employ while attempting to pass someone else’s work as their own.
5. A MOSS-Plug-in for Moodle: MOSS is a general-purpose plagiarism-detection tool for electronic submissions, but it does not integrate well with NIIT University’s Learning Management System (Moodle). The team (Ankit Dubey, Arpita Agarwal and Aseem Gupta) worked with Prof. Viraj Kumar (CSE Assistant Professor) to develop a simple one-click tool within Moodle that allows faculty to invoke MOSS on a particular electronic assignment.
6. Bluetooth-based GPS Data-collection and Mapping: This project dealt with the linking of Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones with a GPS device for accurate location-sensing and developing a mobile application that tracks the location of the mobile phone. Prof. Debopam Acharya (CSE Assistant Professor) and the team (Abhinav Kumar, Chirag Sharma and Priyansh Khurana) successfully tracked the location of one team-member (equipped with the GPS device and mobile phone) while the others sat in a remote location.
7. Earth-Air-Tunnel Sensor Network: In order to track parameters such as temperature, humidity, etc. at remote locations, Dr. Rajeev Shorey (CSE Area Director) devised a project to install a sensor-network with the Earth-Air Tunnel (EAT) system at NIIT University. The team (Nishant Saini and Anshul Agrawal) developed bespoke code that allowed each sensor to transmit its data to either the base-station or a neighbouring sensor. Thus, a relay of such sensors was successfully able to gather live data from remote corners of the EAT system and display it on a central console.
Each of the above projects required significant self-directed learning on the part of student-teams. The role of the faculty advisors was primarily to set the overall direction and scope of the project, and then the students were left to solve technical challenges on their own. The students took these challenges with great enthusiasm and determination, and with the exception of a few- particularly thorny technical hurdles, they were able to solve these problems successfully. Very few of these solutions were from scratch- most of them required a careful search for solutions to similar problems on the web, followed by brainstorming, to determine which of the proposed solutions was most likely to succeed. Our students were, therefore, able to demonstrate their ability to reduce the unfamiliar details of new problem-domains into fundamentals they understood well as a part of their curriculum. Our senior-most B. Tech. batch is well on its way to joining the highly-skilled group of professionals, our country and the world will need tomorrow.
B. Tech., Semester VI
Indian Immersion Program – A Journey of New Experiences and Learning
On 6 May, 2012, as we were heading towards New Delhi Railway Station to board our train to Jamshedpur aka Tata Nagar Junction, we were all excited, as this was a long awaited trip for us. As the train halted at the station, we scrambled with our luggage to get on board. As train gathered speed, we were all zealous to make the most out of this trip as this was those rarest of rare journeys, where we all happen to be with friends, away from the worries of daily life. The journey was quite comfortable, except for the food, which was miserable, as can be expected from Indian Railways. We de-boarded the train at Tata Nagar Junction at around 20:00 hours, the next day. The hotel, where we stayed, was quite decent. The food was delicious and we kept stuffing our bellies till they were bulging out.
On 8 May, 2012, we left for Barbil, Orissa, where we were to visit iron ore mines and plants that extract sponge iron from the ores brought in from the mines. After checking-in and having lunch at the hotel, we visited the N.K. Bhojani Sponge Iron Plant, where we learnt how sponge iron is extracted. The trip was very well organized and the staff of the plant was enthusiastic in quenching our queries. The next morning, we got a call on our intercom asking us to have our breakfast in the dining area. When we realized that the breakfast was complementary, we were so delighted that we immediately left our cozy beds and rushed to have our breakfast. Later, we left for the iron ore mines, where we came face to face with the mammoth of the machines used in the mining industry. There we learnt that the mines are leased to local contractors for carrying out the mining and the ore thus extracted- lumps or fine- is either used to fulfill domestic demand or to export. Since in India we do not have the expertise to process fine ore, which is powdery in texture, it is mostly exported. On the other hand, lumps are used to extract sponge iron.
Next stop was Kolkata, where we were to visit the jute-mills in North 24 Parganas and interact with the labourers there. As we started comfortably with the cab to drive to our hotel, we were enthralled by the gigantic and famous Howrah Bridge. It was nothing like watching it on the television. Next morning, we woke up to head to our destination- the jute mills. There, we first met the local counselor, Mr. Kalam, who told us about the hardships the labourers face and how the people there are trying to run an NGO K-SEWA, which plays a big role in providing primary education to the children of jute-mills’ labourers. We next moved on to the labourers’ colony, where we witnessed the plight of the labourers and the pathetic conditions they are forced to live in. The houses in the colony were not more than one-to-two roomed shanty structures, which usually houses a family of 4-8. Afterwards, we visited the jute mills where we were left aghast seeing the conditions in which these labouurers work. Even the basic Personal Protective Equipments (PPE), like masks were missing, given the condition that these laborers have to work in an environment laden with jute fibers almost the entire day.
Getting face-to-face with the harsh reality of life, we headed towards Belur Math, Head Quarter of Ramkrishna Mission and Ramkrishna Math, which was just the place we needed for an introspection of how cruel life can be and how humans still endure a lot to earn a pittance for livelihood.
On 14 May, 2012, we left for Mumbai, which was the last leg of our journey. There, we had a meeting with Indiabull’s Real Estate Ltd. and HDIL, both real estate developers. We shared their insights as to how they manage to work out all the modalities, beginning from how the project gets passed to how the labour is arranged till the project is completed and handed over to its rightful owner. As this was our first visit to Mumbai, we made it a point to go to Juhu Beach to enjoy our evening there and had ‘paav-bhaji’ which was not as delicious as we were hoping it to be, considering the price we were made to dish out for it! Next day after our visit to HDIL’s Whispering Tower, we went to the Marine Drive and had lots of fun. It is a nice place to hang out with friends and to top it, we had a sumptuous South Indian meal at a Gujarati restaurant!
On 17 May, 2012, we left for Delhi and on the afternoon of 19 May, 2012 we visited the construction site of Ashadeep’s Green Acres township, which is coming up in Neemrana. The trip ended with a lot of learning and the most important of which was that though one must have an academic inclination, the real world demands and offers much more than the textbooks can ever offer. And thus, one must also hone their reasoning and observational skills to be able to succeed in life.
shared by Pratik Gupta, Varun Bhatia & Veeraj
Vashishtha, & recollected by Ankit Mohan
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