Life's Strange Ways...!!!

[source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/opinion/03brooks.html?ref=davidbrooks] By DAVID BROOKS Published: August 2, 2010 This is a column about two ways of thinking about your life. The first is what you might call the Well-Planned Life. It was nicely described by Clayton Christensen in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review, in an essay based on a recent commencement talk. Christensen advised the students to invest a lot of time when they are young in finding a clear purpose for their lives. “When I was a Rhodes scholar,” he recalls, “I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. “That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I...

[Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/opinion/24brooks.html?_r=1&ref=davidbrooks] By DAVID BROOKS Published: August 23, 2010 In 1811, the popular novelist Fanny Burney learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy without anesthesia. She lay down on an old mattress, and a piece of thin linen was placed over her face, allowing her to make out the movements of the surgeons above her. “I felt the instrument — describing a curve — cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose & tire the hand of the operator who was forced to change from the right to the left,” she wrote later. “I began a scream that lasted intermittingly during the whole time of the incision — & I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still.” The surgeon removed most of the breast but then had to go in a few more times to complete the work: “I then felt the Knife rackling against the breast bone — scraping it! This performed while ...

Yesterday while coming in the bus, I witnessed an act of selfless help, which made me write blog after a gap of an year :-) This is what happened, I was in the bus, en-route to my office yesterday. I was reading some important document. I had missed bringing a pen with me. So I had no way of marking my notes in the doc, in the absence of a pen. Since, I had couple of notes on the doc contents, I had to note down them, before I forgot. Hence, hesitantly, I turned to person sitting next to me and asked him if he has a pen. The person said, "No". I think, I would have expressed my helplessness at not finding a pen :-). The person whom I asked for pen, asked, "do you need the pen now itself?". I said, "yes". Then he went to his friend who was sitting down the aisle(in the volvo buses of BMTC, we have upper and lower aisles!!!) and got the pen from him and gave it to me. I used the pen after-wards and noted down my notes. This incident, remi...