If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!
Friday, February 08, 2008
Saturday, December 08, 2007
The Dying Art of Dialogue
The other day I was casually chatting with a friend about something and as we went along, the casual chit-chat changed in tone into a not-so-casual discussion, which soon became bi-polar, with both of us adopting opposite positions, thus evolving into a debate. The debate continued in our next conversation and raged on, starting to sound like an argument. Being mature adults (though, arguably, also 'Argumentative Indians'), we were able to keep it from crossing the boundaries of 'dispute' into the no-holds-barred territory of 'quarrel'. So, instead of saying "Pistols at dawn?", we agreed to disagree and changed the topic, with the tacit understanding on both sides that we would not bring this up again - at least not in the near future.
That set me thinking ... I am not usually like that - I do confront, but without being confrontational. I don't like dispute. I like dialogue, and I want to stick to dialogue in the Platonic tradition. Dialogue is about achieving clarity, and if we're lucky, obtaining resolution. It is not about winning or losing. It requires humility on part of all participants (of which there could be more than 2, contrary to popular belief), and ruthless honesty with oneself. My natural tendency is to enter into dialogue, but am invariably drawn into debates, if not disputes, arguments or worse still, quarrels. My style is to question a proposition. All right, I could be persuaded to say 'challenge' a proposition. Unfortunately though, my questioning or challenging approach is perceived to be confrontational thanks to our zeitgeist - that of apprehending conflict even where there isn't any. And as a lot of people these days say (unwisely) "Perception is Reality" (the currency and popularity of this belief is another characteristic of our zeitgeist - that of believing that if somebody thinks it, it must be true).
Let me quote a paragraph from the Wikipedia page on dialogue, before I elaborate upon my style of questioning:
That set me thinking ... I am not usually like that - I do confront, but without being confrontational. I don't like dispute. I like dialogue, and I want to stick to dialogue in the Platonic tradition. Dialogue is about achieving clarity, and if we're lucky, obtaining resolution. It is not about winning or losing. It requires humility on part of all participants (of which there could be more than 2, contrary to popular belief), and ruthless honesty with oneself. My natural tendency is to enter into dialogue, but am invariably drawn into debates, if not disputes, arguments or worse still, quarrels. My style is to question a proposition. All right, I could be persuaded to say 'challenge' a proposition. Unfortunately though, my questioning or challenging approach is perceived to be confrontational thanks to our zeitgeist - that of apprehending conflict even where there isn't any. And as a lot of people these days say (unwisely) "Perception is Reality" (the currency and popularity of this belief is another characteristic of our zeitgeist - that of believing that if somebody thinks it, it must be true).
Let me quote a paragraph from the Wikipedia page on dialogue, before I elaborate upon my style of questioning:
"The typical way is for Socrates to probe his partner for further beliefs until a contradiction is reached with the disputed belief or hypothesis by implication. In this way the interlocutor is made to see the impossibility of his hypothesis, and then tries some other hypothesis, which is again subject to the same scrutiny."
And now let me paraphrase that - my questioning aims to probe the participant's line of thought, hoping to lead them to a point where either a contradiction emerges with the original position they adopted, OR they present me with irrefutable facts that I cannot deny or with propositions that are consistent with my own, thereby making me accept their thesis. The key fact is that I am open to it going either way, and will not take that as either a victory or a defeat. It will just enrich and refine my own on-going process of pondering and reflecting on life.
Sadly, my type of questioning is almost always misunderstood. Most discussions these days that I have participated in or have observed closely, do not embody the spirit of dialogue - they evolve very quickly from casual conversations to verbal battles which somebody has got to win, and their 'opponent' lose. Again, yet another characteristic of our zeitgeist - that of every interaction or exchange being a zero-sum game which a 'successful' person simply must win. The whole context of such questioning has become one where the person raising the questions (usually, me) is doing so either because they don't know (the 'teaching' paradigm) or because they are "cross-examining the witness" (the 'inquisition' paradigm).
What to me starts as dialogue, becomes therefore, either a teaching/learning experience, where the other person/s take it upon themselves to educate this impertinent fool (me) who is asking all these silly questions, or an inquisition, where Mr. Know-It-All (me again) is putting us on a stand and hammering away at our defenses to expose our lack of substance. Sorry folks! I question to probe, to clarify, to fully understand what is being said. And in that process, hopefully, get the other participants (including the proponent) to fully understand the proposition on the table. So that then I could offer my perspective, which may be similar or different or similar-yet-different. There is no 'high' or 'low' position when I enter into dialogue. We're all on the same plane - all equals. There is no teacher and there is no inquisitor - though I am always inquisitive and wanting to learn more!
If you, dear reader, and I, ever have the good fortune to enter into dialogue on any subject under the sun (including this one - 'The Dying Art of Dialogue'), we would do well to keep this simple approach in mind. Even if our ambitious, aggressive, competitive, confrontational zeitgeist enters my spirit somewhere along the way and compels me to stray (as I did in the anecdote I narrated at the beginning of this post), I hope you, being the humbler and more mature of the two of us, would lead me back, kindly!
Monday, October 15, 2007
It's Only Words ...
Back when I was a kid we used to play a lot of Scrabble. Those were the days when we had exactly one telephone for the family - a big black heavy instrument with a thick brown cable attached to it. There was no Internet, no mobile telephony, no cable TV (only one Govt. controlled channel that aired in the evenings, with content that mostly focused on the appropriate use of fertilizers). Computers were big expensive things with tapes twitching and turning every few moments in a restricted area with glass walls where it was freezing. And long-distance telecommunications really sucked.
It used to rain (not too heavily, and hardly any flooding except in really low-lying areas) and Mom used to make tea and pakodas in the afternoons. And we used to pull out the Scrabble board and play. No dictionaries were allowed in the regular course of the game - you were supposed to play words whose meaning you already knew. You could be challenged by any other player, and you had to be able to provide the meaning, and if they chose to, they could look up the dictionary to verify it (and they could look up only that word - they could not sneakily look up something else they might have been toying with). My father used to excel at making 7 letter words and sometimes he'd make as many as 3 of them in a single game. I learned a lot; my vocabulary improved and I knew the meaning of each word I played. There were times when I knew a word existed but wasn't sure what it meant, and I would refrain from playing it, for fear of being challenged.
End of flashback. Cut to circa 2007. Between my wife and I we have 4 mobiles and 3 land-lines. I am on-line most of the time - my line of work involves using mail, IM, mobile telephony and teleconferencing extensively. Recently, when I was casually surfing, using a laptop immensely more powerful than most mainframes in those years, sitting in my room in some crummy hotel somewhere in North America with really high-speed broadband access, I discovered Scrabulous - the online version of Scrabble. Since then I've played a few games and won some, lost some. I was horrifed initially, to learn that you could freely reference the dictionary. And the fact that you could make two-letter words like CH, UG, MM and ZA which, in my humble opinion, are abbreviations, not words. This game requires a killer instinct. It appears that most players spend hours (sometimes days) trying out all kinds of combinations with their tiles, for a given board configuration. There probably are tools out there to help you maximize your score for each play - I don't know. Players are happy making words sticking to other words and not opening out the board (they leave this to me I guess). Nobody cares if you make a word whose meaning nobody knows - the 'TWL' or 'SOWPODS' dictionary must allow it. Period.
My style is very different. I like to play interesting words that result in a reasonably decent score, and I don't like to spend too much time computing scores of each available option ad infinitum. If a word seems nice and I can notch up a good score, I play it. Usually this is within a few minutes after my opponent has played. And then my opponent will respond after several hours. Or a few days.
This game has killed Scrabble, according to me. The skill being tested here is your ability to quickly look up as many tile combinations as you can in the dictionary. Not your word-power. I thought I should keep up with the times and adopted the style that this game requires. I looked up the dictionary. I made those meaningless 2 letter words. I won a few games but it gave me no joy at all.
Give me a rainy afternoon with a real board, real tiles, real people, real cups of tea. And a real dictionary, to be used only when one player wants to challenge another. Some day real Scrabble lovers will beg to go back to that. Till then, let the fast and the furious megaflop generation knock themselves out with this on-line apology for a word game. Playing all the words that TWL / SOWPODS has, that don't take your heart away.
It used to rain (not too heavily, and hardly any flooding except in really low-lying areas) and Mom used to make tea and pakodas in the afternoons. And we used to pull out the Scrabble board and play. No dictionaries were allowed in the regular course of the game - you were supposed to play words whose meaning you already knew. You could be challenged by any other player, and you had to be able to provide the meaning, and if they chose to, they could look up the dictionary to verify it (and they could look up only that word - they could not sneakily look up something else they might have been toying with). My father used to excel at making 7 letter words and sometimes he'd make as many as 3 of them in a single game. I learned a lot; my vocabulary improved and I knew the meaning of each word I played. There were times when I knew a word existed but wasn't sure what it meant, and I would refrain from playing it, for fear of being challenged.
End of flashback. Cut to circa 2007. Between my wife and I we have 4 mobiles and 3 land-lines. I am on-line most of the time - my line of work involves using mail, IM, mobile telephony and teleconferencing extensively. Recently, when I was casually surfing, using a laptop immensely more powerful than most mainframes in those years, sitting in my room in some crummy hotel somewhere in North America with really high-speed broadband access, I discovered Scrabulous - the online version of Scrabble. Since then I've played a few games and won some, lost some. I was horrifed initially, to learn that you could freely reference the dictionary. And the fact that you could make two-letter words like CH, UG, MM and ZA which, in my humble opinion, are abbreviations, not words. This game requires a killer instinct. It appears that most players spend hours (sometimes days) trying out all kinds of combinations with their tiles, for a given board configuration. There probably are tools out there to help you maximize your score for each play - I don't know. Players are happy making words sticking to other words and not opening out the board (they leave this to me I guess). Nobody cares if you make a word whose meaning nobody knows - the 'TWL' or 'SOWPODS' dictionary must allow it. Period.
My style is very different. I like to play interesting words that result in a reasonably decent score, and I don't like to spend too much time computing scores of each available option ad infinitum. If a word seems nice and I can notch up a good score, I play it. Usually this is within a few minutes after my opponent has played. And then my opponent will respond after several hours. Or a few days.
This game has killed Scrabble, according to me. The skill being tested here is your ability to quickly look up as many tile combinations as you can in the dictionary. Not your word-power. I thought I should keep up with the times and adopted the style that this game requires. I looked up the dictionary. I made those meaningless 2 letter words. I won a few games but it gave me no joy at all.
Give me a rainy afternoon with a real board, real tiles, real people, real cups of tea. And a real dictionary, to be used only when one player wants to challenge another. Some day real Scrabble lovers will beg to go back to that. Till then, let the fast and the furious megaflop generation knock themselves out with this on-line apology for a word game. Playing all the words that TWL / SOWPODS has, that don't take your heart away.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Prayer for the Man from Modena
Ave Maria
Gratia plena
Dominus tecum
Benedicta tu in mulieribus
Et benedictus fructus ventris
Tui, Jesus
Sancta Maria
Mater Dei
Ora pro nobis peccatoribus
Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae
Amen.
R.I.P. Luciano Pavarotti
Gratia plena
Dominus tecum
Benedicta tu in mulieribus
Et benedictus fructus ventris
Tui, Jesus
Sancta Maria
Mater Dei
Ora pro nobis peccatoribus
Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae
Amen.
R.I.P. Luciano Pavarotti
Thursday, August 16, 2007
The Idyllic Idealism Of An Idle Mind
On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Indian Independence, a few thoughts and observations (all my own work) ...
Like the papers said we're sexy at sixty (by the way - the media also said that about Big B some time back), but chose to ignore the smut around the sexiness. And this is not about censorship of so-called vulgar content on cable TV (ref. my post dealing with the time they shut down most English movie channels). Then what's it about did you say? Go figure! There's way too much to be said about this and if you're not with me already then there's no point in my going into it here and now.
Like we're forever talking about our potential as a global superpower but doing precious little to become one. I guess it's a nice thing to have as a dream but hey - reality's better, for a lot of us. There are abundant opportunities in today's India, for a lot of us to get rich and powerful quickly. But once such people get there, they do nothing other than continue to enhance their own wealth and power. Those who have a vision but not the means don't count (they're not Page 3 gliteratti), and those who can actually make a difference are doing sweet F.A.
Like I can't get over the fact that there's a gutter that overflows every monsoon outside my house and I am told there isn't much that can be done about it. Considering that I live in an upscale part of a tony suburb, I find that hard to digest. Guess I'll have to drop all my other pressing affairs and devote my attention to this and that will be the only way it will get fixed. If ever.
Like how I started out wanting to put back more than I got, to the land that gave me and to its people. I argued several years ago that if good people left this land in favor of a better life, then life in this land will never get better. I stayed back because I wanted to change our world. Still do. But today I'll consider myself lucky if I can get that wretched gutter fixed.
Like how I'd love to participate in a good strong movement with a robust foundation backed by people with vision, resources and integrity to clean up our act and hit the path to progress. If I find one.
And like how much I miss Busybee and his gentle way of making poignant points. Mr. Contractor I salute you and I hope you will excuse the liberties I have taken in imitating your style here though I know I've not got the tone right. And I salute all my other great compatriots - past, present and future, who've dedicated their lives trying to make a difference. I just wish there were more of you and less of the parasites who live off the fruit of your labour.
Vande Mataram!
Like the papers said we're sexy at sixty (by the way - the media also said that about Big B some time back), but chose to ignore the smut around the sexiness. And this is not about censorship of so-called vulgar content on cable TV (ref. my post dealing with the time they shut down most English movie channels). Then what's it about did you say? Go figure! There's way too much to be said about this and if you're not with me already then there's no point in my going into it here and now.
Like we're forever talking about our potential as a global superpower but doing precious little to become one. I guess it's a nice thing to have as a dream but hey - reality's better, for a lot of us. There are abundant opportunities in today's India, for a lot of us to get rich and powerful quickly. But once such people get there, they do nothing other than continue to enhance their own wealth and power. Those who have a vision but not the means don't count (they're not Page 3 gliteratti), and those who can actually make a difference are doing sweet F.A.
Like I can't get over the fact that there's a gutter that overflows every monsoon outside my house and I am told there isn't much that can be done about it. Considering that I live in an upscale part of a tony suburb, I find that hard to digest. Guess I'll have to drop all my other pressing affairs and devote my attention to this and that will be the only way it will get fixed. If ever.
Like how I started out wanting to put back more than I got, to the land that gave me and to its people. I argued several years ago that if good people left this land in favor of a better life, then life in this land will never get better. I stayed back because I wanted to change our world. Still do. But today I'll consider myself lucky if I can get that wretched gutter fixed.
Like how I'd love to participate in a good strong movement with a robust foundation backed by people with vision, resources and integrity to clean up our act and hit the path to progress. If I find one.
And like how much I miss Busybee and his gentle way of making poignant points. Mr. Contractor I salute you and I hope you will excuse the liberties I have taken in imitating your style here though I know I've not got the tone right. And I salute all my other great compatriots - past, present and future, who've dedicated their lives trying to make a difference. I just wish there were more of you and less of the parasites who live off the fruit of your labour.
Vande Mataram!
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