the love between a father and a daughter

i came across this quote in the novel 'chowringhee' by sankar (translated by arunava sinha) about the love of a father for his daughter. it is stirringly true and something i will not ever forget. the novel itself is a work of art and is a must-read!

some great man has said that of all the loves in the world, the one of a father for his daughter is almost divine. i remember the exact words: 'He beholds her with and without regard to sex.' Behind our love for our wives lies lust, behind our love for our sons lies ambition, but our love for our daughters is free of all selfish motives.

this book is full of little gems like this. i have another one that i have stored for future use.

 the first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl it is boldness. the two sexes have a tendency to approach and each assumes the quality of the other.

chowringhee can be purchased here. 

the man in the arena

we should keep this famous quote from theodore roosevelt close to our hearts as we usher in the New Year. we should be men of action, not talk. we should always remember that glory and honour come to those who expend their efforts in a noble and worthy cause. 2010 was not without its ups and downs but, all in all, it was a great year. here's to hoping 2011 will be the same if not better.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

'Nation of Wusses'

I have to quote PA Gov. Rendall, absolutely hilarious!


Rendell viewed the NFL's decision as a referendum on the toughness, or lack thereof, of the United States. "My biggest beef is that this is part of what's happened in this country," Rendell said. "I think we've become wussies."

"We've become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything," Rendell added. "If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."

You can find the link to the article here.

Some of Us- Starsailor

I LOVE this song. It only feels right that I should share it because Starsailor is British and are not the most well-known act. The lyrics are powerful- it teaches us how everyone copes with their lives differently, and that they should not be judged for merely trying to survive in their way.

Heard you today, that isn't my name, you were fast asleep, 

Forget what he did, can I be the kid for your soul to keep.

Some of us laugh, some of us cry, 

Some of us smoke, some of us lie, 

But it's all just the way that we cope with our lives.

I've grown to see the philosophy of my own mistrust, 

We all have our faults, mine come in waves that you turn to rust,

Some of us laugh, some of us cry, 

Some of us smoke, some of us lie, 

But it's all just the way that we cope with our lives.

I've been hanging onto something, 

You keep laughing awe-inspiring.

Some of us laugh, some of us cry, 

Some of us smoke, some of us lie, 

But it's all just the way that we cope with our lives.

Some of us laugh, some of us cry, 

Some of us smoke, some of us lie, 

But it's all just the way that we cope with our lives.

My wandering soul found solace at last, 

I wanted to know how long it would last.

She's losing control, she's coming down fast, 

The heart that I stole, I'm not giving back, never giving back.

Pay-What-You-Want Business Model- Does it work?

Does the pay-what-you-want business model work? I remember frequenting Annalakshmi, an Indian vegetarian restaurant in Singapore where the food is delectable and where you pay as you wish. It is listed as a non-profit and run wholly by dedicated 'full-time' volunteers. Now this may sound like a very low-end, hole-in-the-wall type of place but you'll be mighty surprised when you step inside. It is very posh and intricately decorated, and the food is of the highest quality. It has been so successful that it has now expanded into a global chain of restaurants with locations in Malaysia, India, and Australia. How does this work? Do people really pay enough for it to be considered a sustainable business venture?

Today, I came across another entrepreneurial venture based on Pay-What-You-Want. The Seattle Times featured Terra Bite, a cafe in Kirkland that lets you pay if and when you like. So I did a little more research and found that Radiohead actually released an album, 'In Rainbows', with this same price model. More recently, Championship Manager 2010 is using this price model (I HAD to download it!). The very existence of these ventures suggests that the business model is indeed a sturdy one, and I have a few thoughts as to why.

1. Price Discrimination (Maximizing Willingness-to-Pay)
This model allows for a very explicit form of price discrimination to take place. Those who are well-off will pay more and cover for those who are not able to pay as much. Simple as that. As the Seattle Times puts it, you can finesse the largesse of the well-off to cover the tabs of the less fortunate. Business always try to price discriminate but this is the best way to do it! By letting the customer decide how much he or she wants to pay!

2. Social Monitoring
Everyone is inherently good. And when people see good, they want to do good. As Erik Okada says, social monitoring- the feeling that people are watching what you do- can enforce payment. When the firm is clear in displaying that its intentions are good, and that it is not putting consumers on the spot by indirectly forcing them to pay higher than they would, patrons will actually pay more than they normally would for a similar fixed price product. This is because the transaction leaves them wondering if they paid too little or too much (there is no price to compare it to!), and most people who can afford it would rather err on the side of too much simply because their conscience may not allow them to 'cheat the system' by paying too little. When an open and transparent transaction process is used, consumers do not want to be viewed as being cheap and miserly!

3. Personal Touch
If there is a personal touch in the service being delivered, people are almost always guaranteed to pay more. This is because they become emotionally invested in whatever is being provided/offered and the sense of attachment to the provider leaves them wanting to not under-pay.

4. Low Markup, High Mass
In the case of Championship Manager and the Radiohead album, it is very easy to see why the model can be so successful. Both are available for download over the internet after purchase, meaning that the marginal cost of each additional download is practically zilch. People may pay less but the low markup over marginal cost can easily be compensated for by developing a large mass.


5. Marketing the Novelty of the Idea
That leads us to the question- How do you get mass? All you need to do is market the novelty of the idea. Word will spread like wildfire, and each consumer will pay it forward. When do you ever get to pay as you like for anything?! Never! So you will want to try it out just to experience the transaction. As long as the model remains a novelty and not in common existence, it can definitely be a successful one.

"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."

George Santayana

Relationships

An excellent quote on relationships! I can safely say that I have experienced each and every kind, but there is no relationship more important than the one with yourself. After all, we will always be alone in our thoughts, words, and deeds. Nurture this relationship and cherish it, for it is what will bring true happiness above all others.

“Later that day I got to thinking about relationships. There are those that open you up to something new and exotic, those that are old and familiar, those that bring up lots of questions, those that bring you somewhere unexpected, those that bring you far from where you started, and those that bring you back. But the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you can find someone to love the you you love, well, that's just fabulous.”

Our Life is a Miracle- Explained

Richard Dawkins wrote a letter titled "To be read at my funeral". In it, he talks about how life is such a wondrous and miraculous occurrence. The chances of us being on Earth are so minuscule given the vastness of the Universe, the length of time, and the seemingly limitless permutations of DNA sequences that could have led to someone else being born in our place. Read this and celebrate life!


To be read at my funeral by Richard Dawkins
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Here is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than 100 million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, 'the present century.' The present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century's being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest-festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of Earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random will have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation will put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn't it what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder."

If by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling's explanation of what constitutes a Man is unmatched. He describes the many attributes of manliness so beautifully. I particularly love how he emphasises that being a Man should mean so much more than having the whole world. It is a pity that those days have passed us by-- the pursuit of the world is now considered the pinnacle of all achievement, more so than being a individual of integrity and character, and it is very rare that they go hand in hand anymore.

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 imposters 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 wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings 

And risk it 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!

4K for Cancer.

I have enlisted in the fight against cancer. This summer, I will be biking 4000 miles across America to unite and inspire cancer communities all over the country. Being a pre-medical and now a medical student, I have an intimate understanding of this devastating disease. My peers and I have spent countless hours in the lab doing cancer research, and I am even harboring plans to be an oncologist.

Why 4K for cancer then?
I want to use this summer to fight cancer from a different vantage point—I want to give inspiration to those who battle cancer every day. I cannot even begin to comprehend the pain and suffering that is inflicted by cancer but I want to bring recognition to the immense strength and courage of these fighters. When I first heard about the 4K, I could not imagine spending my summer any other way—I am able to fight for a cause I passionately believe in by pursuing a sport I absolutely love.

4000 miles will not be easy but I shall strive to derive strength and grit from that same source as cancer patients. I will ride knowing that this is about something much bigger than myself; I will ride to celebrate their lives and honor their memories. These 60 days and 4000 miles will also give me ample time to reflect on how best to forge my own career in Medicine and lead the fight against cancer.

I am fortunate not to have any of loved ones affected by cancer but I am very well aware of the misery and heartbreak it brings to patients and their families. That is why, as a future physician, I would like to see a cure for cancer in my lifetime. With our unified effort, it might just happen. Please support me in this endeavor! By donating, you will be changing not only my life but the lives of millions who have been affected by cancer. You can donate as little or as much as you would like. Every dollar will take me one mile closer to my goal! I sincerely appreciate your genuine concern and support. Godspeed.