Review of Shiva trilogy

         
               It is winter in North East. There is this long break of  2 weeks for Superbowl.  It is that time of the year where things are bit slow. I was looking for a book in fantasy genre and found this Shiva trilogy by accident. 

           As per ths book, Ram Rajya is a wet dream of statists.  It gives the impression that Ram's rule is complete Orwelian or Totalitarian in nature. The book also tries to re-inforce same staid statist ideas as golden standard of rule again and again.  The author's scholarship is questionable. There is no suspense or surprise in any of the pages. There is no character development.  I was hoping to have complete picture of  Shiva by the end of the book, but i could get only a vague image (  It is like seeing NTR's face in every god's image in indian calendars).  There is no character development on any of the main roles. How their past shapes present actions etc. All you get is very generalized ( romba over the top characters)  that fit a popular/narrow  bollywood narrative.

             On top of  all these obvious flaws in the book,  it is highly plagiarized.  Most of the  fights or formations are straight cut and paste from Chinese/Japanese  movies of the past. Tortoise formation etc.etc. Another glaring cut and paste job is from a book called Giver. In Giver, a  totalitarian system lets you assign the professions based on your abilities ( obviously decided by the elder council). His Maika system is borrowed from this book verbatim.  It is fine to borrow a concept and expand on it, but the author tries to extol its virtues, where as the concept itself is  totally hated else where. ( I don't  know how he justifies it as a great system, it is not as per the universal value judgement ).

                 It was a torture to read this crap, I will not be reading the rest of the books in this series. I will also not recommend any one to read this.
                

College athletes deserve paycheck

         On the eve of  Superbowl 48,  Joe Theisman opined that College athletes need to be paid a grant or salary apart from their scholarships. I agree with Theismann that colleges rake in billions of  dollars on the backs of these talented players.  This problem is huge in football.  There are only 32 teams in NFL. NFL gets it players from colleges using the draft system. This system is heavily tilted towards NFL. NFL gets talented players ( trained ) for zero investment. Colleges make money and pay their coaches in multi-million dollar contracts. Both NFL and Colleges benefit from this exploitative system.

          

           There are many solutions to this problem. One solution is to bar the colleges from making any money out of the NCAA tournaments.  Handover the college tournaments to a for profit  organization that conducts these tournaments and pays the colleges and the athletes. ( Athletes can decide either to take full scholarship or pay the schools from their earnings, if they decide to take scholarship, then the school gets his/her part of earnings ).  Since NFL gets trained athletes at no cost, make them pay for that athletes school costs. NFL makes so much money without any investment, they should have some skin in the game for taking college athletes from the colleges.

          Another solution is completely bifurcate athletes from students. A college is supposed to impart the real life training for the students, so that they can use them later for productive purposes. An athlete's routine is complete opposite to a student's routine. Athletes need more physical training and they should have  professional trainers for fitness. Students do not need professional trainers, they need lecturers and professors who can teach them.  So make all the college athletics departments as associations with the colleges and pool them in a minor league system. Each coach/athlete gets paid under this system.  These departments are independent of colleges and they are associated in name only, they may share few resources like stadiums , training facilities etc.