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RSS FeedAugust 5th, 2011
Same Soul, Many Bodies
Currently reading Same Soul, Many Bodies, by Brian Weiss
But after reading a certain portion of the book, I find that while my skepticism has not changed significantly, the book has made my skepticism a bit less relevant.
January 26th, 2011
Tiger on Prague Metro
I am somehow reminded of beautiful Prague, even though it has been almost a couple of years since I was last there. But today, I am thinking not of the city beautiful, but of a tiger on its metro (or more appropriately, a tyger).
Prague metro was built in late 70s (1st line) and early 80s (2nd and 3rd lines). During that time, it was still a different world even if we limit ourselves to the economic structure. Today it is operated by Dopravní podnik hlavního města Prahy, which is a public company, and one can wonder how that affects its decision making.
The decision we are talking about is this: when you are running a metro, do you put a lucrative commercial on the most visible spot, or do you put William Blake, who refuses to pay you a single Czech Koruna (Kč) for highlighting his poem, but might give a moment of peace to the travelers?
I don’t know the answer, I can only comment upon what a beautiful moment I felt in Prague that blissful day.
Here is the poem again, since the picture did not capture it as well as it should have.
Tiger Tiger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye.
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile His work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?Tiger Tiger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?The Tiger
William Blake
January 9th, 2011
“Everyday was there to be lived..” – Alchemist
Another wonderful quote from the Alchemist:
Every day was there to be lived or to mark one’s departure from this world. … He had lived every one of his days intensely since he had left home so long ago. If he died tomorrow, he would already have seen more than other shepherds, and he was proud of that.
Reminds me of Dasvidaniya, even though Dasvidaniya was more about catching up.
December 13th, 2010
3 Selected Quotes from “The Alchemist”
As a book that has sold alzillion copies, has been translated into so many languages, and has been read by so many people, The Alchemist needs no formal review. Instead, here are 3 quotes from the book, that are phenomenal. While no replacement for reading the book, the quotes do convey what I as a reader took away from the book.
Quote 1: Part I, Page 39 of paperback version.
I’m going to become bitter and distrustful of people because one person betrayed me. I’m going to hate those who have found their treasure because I never found mine. And I’m going to hold on to what little I have, because I’m too insignificant to conquer the world.
These are Santiago’s feelings right after being robbed of all his belongings. The three fears that Santiago has are quite distinct: (i) fear of becoming apprehensive of strangers, (ii) fear of hatred of successful people, (iii) fear of becoming petty and miserly.
Readers identify with different aspects of the protagonist, and this fear is the aspect that I identify with the most. I certainly hope that small or big setbacks will not set me back in this sense. Whether this is the ideal or my current self may be irrelevant.
Quote 2: Part II, Page 64.
The hills of Andalusia were only two hours away, but there was an entire desert between him and the Pyramids. Yet the boy felt that there was another way to regard this situation: he was actually two hours closer to his treasure … the fact that the two hours had stretched into an entire year didn’t matter.
What could be more literary way of articulating the economic theory of sunk cost? In the preface, Coelho mentions 4 major obstacles in realizing your destiny: (i) the notion of impossibility, (ii) the shackles of love, (iii) fear of defeats and (iv) the fear of success. By the time we overcome some of these obstacles, we can think – Oh, but we have already lost too much time. Or, we can think: this is where we are, now what?
Quote 3: Part II, Page 68.
But he was able to understand one thing: making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.
Each decision is the starting point of a new journey – a fork in the definition of a new parallel universe – a realization of our potential. Whether we realize our potential positively or negatively is subject to interpr
etation. Similarly, decisions themselves are rarely right or wrong – mostly it is just our interpretation of the result of the decision that was taken, and our estimate of the road not taken. How can we compare a road taken, with all its rewards and its pitfalls that we experienced concretely, with a road that we never took and of which cannot reasonably guess rewards and travails? Yet, we do it all the time.
And how about the indecisive ones amongst us? It is uncommon sense that not making a decision is akin to making a passive decision of maintaining status quo. This is true in a corporate sense as well – decision making is a key distinguishing reason for companies performing average, and companies performing well.
September 19th, 2010
Flava and Albius (and Neruda)
Once upon a time, there was an emperor in Rome. He was an emperor, but he was also a person, and a father of sons and daughters. His youngest daughter Flava got sick one day and (as these stories go) only got sicker and sicker. The young Flava was also very dear to the chief poet Albius, who would often take the child on his walks around the palace.
When it was apparent that her end was near, the emperor made a plea to all his poets to create a poem so sweet and so real that the memory of Flava would live forever. The chief poet Albius was the one who knew her so well and was so in love with the child, that he was able to quickly write a poem in his sorrow. He wrote about how Flava would run around the palace, how Albius would often spot the sunlight in her hair from a distance, and how she would play mischief with her mother and the important visitors and sometimes torment the birds and sometimes hide some important papers belonging to this or that person. That afternoon when Albius first read alound his poem, the clouds appeared suddenly and transformed the sunny afternoon into the darkest cloudy rainless day.
The emperor didn’t like the poem at all and immediately instructed Albius to remove all the unfavorable mentions of Flava (playing mischief!) and focus more on the sunshine in the hair of her princess. But Albius’ poem was written and his sorrow had seen the outlet and it wasn’t going back. Emperors are usually just, but more so, they are just decisive, and in this particular case, he decided that Albius would hang for the transgressions against his dying child, and die before Flava. So Albius died, and all the poets were asked to keep the good portions and remove the bad references to Flava in Albius’ poem. The congress of the poets worked together for four days, breaking only for small durations until they all decided that there was no way to improve on Albius’ poem since no one could agree on what part was flattering and what part was a transgression.
So, as these stories go, they buried Albius’ poem with Flava and no one remembered her after a few years.
*******
In reality though, Pablo Neruda is not Albius and there is no emperor, and he can write anything he wants.
[Original in Spanish]:
Tú estás de pie sobre la tierra, llena
de dientes y relámpagos.
Tú propagas los besos y matas las hormigas.
Tú lloras de salud, de cebolla, de abeja,
de abecedario ardiendo.
Tú eres como una espada azul y verde
y ondulas al tocarte, como un río.[English Translation:]
You stand your ground, chock full
of teeth and lightening.
You propagate kisses and clobber the ants.
You cry from vitality, from an onion, a bee,
from your burning abecedary.
[From"Oda Con un Lamento" in "Essential Neruda"]
You can read the full poem in Spanish here, and in English here.
September 10th, 2010
Book (non) Review – The Alchemist
That anything remains to be said about “The Alchemist” is highly debatable. That anything remains to be said by me is touching upon ridiculous, since I am pretty much the last person to read the book that has sold over 300 million copies. I am sure there are people who have not read this book yet, but let us not talk about the 3 year olds, people who only communicate using whistling language, beautiful spice girls married to football stars and US vice presidential candidates right now.
Suppose all your friends went to the National Museum of Natural History, and saw this beautiful Hope Diamond and came back and told you all about it. But for years you didn’t go there, until more of your friends went and saw it and told you about it. And then your aunts and uncles and everyone else saw it and told you about it. And then finally your FedEx delivery guy told you about it. And then you went and saw the Hope Diamond. Who would you write the review for?
 “The Hope Diamond” – Click here to buy now [Picture courtesy Ken Lund] |
September 6th, 2010
Romanov Bride (Robert Alexander): A review
Just finished “The Romanov Bride“, which I really liked. The book is written from two voices that alternate by chapters: the female voice of Ella, the eponymous princess and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna; and the male voice of Pavel, a peasant who moves from the countryside to St. Petersburg and becomes a revolutionary.
Ella was born a princess, grand daughter of Queen Victoria and while the chapter opens by saying that she was not raised in a life of luxury as the duchy was not a rich one, that appears to be just a simple relativism at play. But when diphtheria struck her family, killing her younger sister and her mother, then her words of not living a life of luxury have more impact. When she is twenty years old, Ella is married to the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia and becomes Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia. As the strikes and demands for political reforms grew stronger in Russia, the Grand Duke Sergei, who is the Governor General of Moscow, became very unpopular, and is ultimately killed by a terrorist bomb inside Kremlin at the hands of revolutionary Kalyayev. At the time of this tragedy, Ella chooses to start her hospital and ultimately becomes a nun at a convent that is established by the Tsar in an imperial decree. She sells off all her personal riches and jewels to support her mission and the chosen path of religion and spirituality. As the country deteriorates into mayhem and revolution, she rises in her spiritual endeavors, and is able to love everyone and everything, and is able to serve those in need.
Pavel’s story generally flows in quite a different direction. After her wife and unborn child are killed in a bloody Sunday when the peasants wanted to give a petition to the Tsar, Pavel is consumed with the fire of revenge, and this fire slowly corrodes his conscience until he finally becomes a shell of a man who no longer recognizes himself or his purpose in the revolution.
One of the fascinating elements of this story is to discern what is fact and what is fiction. The princess’ background, the grand duke and the politics is of course all factual, so is Sergei’s murder by Kalyayev. Even the episode in which Grand Duke escapes when a revolutionary hesitates upon seeing him in company of his wife and two children is factual. All that said, the very existence of the narrator Pavel may be fictional, as a human face of the peasants. His persona is an exaggerated version of the well accepted premise that the peasants rose in arms to the revolution, without realizing that the violent revolution and communism was very unlikely to improve their lives. The exaggeration in case of Pavel of course is that he himself is killed by communists for speaking out against his superior, an act very similar to the one that killed his beloved wife Shoura.
The book begins and ends in a Russian gulag near the white sea, where Pavel is awaiting his death sentence and in a way joins the lives of the two narrators in terms of the finality of death and the judgment that awaits them. From Pavel’s own perspective, he has lived a life of sin, while the grand duchess has lived a saintly life. He owes her a confession, but while she is gone, a priest “Father Vladimir” listens to his confession.
Overall, excellent book, and especially for people such as myself who were not so familiar with the Russian history during the 1905-1917 years, this book is very interesting. Highly recommended.
May 2nd, 2010
“Now, being prepared for almost anything,
he was not by any means prepared for nothing.” – Scrooge in A Christmas Carol
This line is sheer genius. 
As I am going through reading the book just one more time, I have read this line a few dozen times.
April 24th, 2010
“You may be an undigested bit of beef…” – A Christmas Carol
Every book has its tag line, and for A Christmas Carol
Awesome book – highly recommended for kids and adults who have not read it recently.