DesiPundit

Running has taught me that life is a marathon and not a sprint. It’s that 42 km run, that kills you, that pushes you,gives you the runner’s high and yet makes you smile and cringe at the years that pass by. Some people are determined to run fast, be first and some people are content making it to the finish line.

Niara shares the lessons she learned from her training for a marathon [hat tip: Shub]. She went from merely completing a full marathon in 2006 to coming in as the first runner-up in the Bangalore Ultra 2007. For me, completing a marathon is itself a noteworthy achievement.

The day after we had sold IndiaWorld for $115 million in November 1999, my wife, Bhavana, told me: “We are custodians of God’s money. If God has given us money at such an early age, there must be something He has in mind for us. We have to utilize this wealth for the greater good.” These are words which have formed the bedrock of my life since then.

Rajesh Jain, one of India’s foremost entrepreneurs, shares his mini-autobiography on turning 40. It is amazing to see the extent of his achievements and the breadth of his vision for the future at such a young age.

Shiju enacts his own death in a quest to understand what is most important.

When you are sitting on your bed, making your peace with the world, at the end of your life – what are you going to regret?

The chances you didn’t take, or the silly risks you did?

The book you didn’t write or the time you spend chasing big bucks and promotions at work?

Not a suicidal thought; quite the contrary. Finding an answer might actually be like reincarnation.

Pragni has an epiphany about education and knowledge.

You know how we always curse those extra classes we take in college? Economics in Computer Engineering college, Accounts in Advertising college, Feminism in Urban Planning college, Hindi in Science college, E-Commerce in Mechanical Engineering, Great Social Thinkers in Civil Engineering, Sociology in Aerospace Engineering. The list goes on.

I could really relate to her post since I often find myself unexpectedly picking out stray memories of lessons that I thought I’d never use and suddenly…I do.

Traveli on his first visit to India, learns a lesson about fate and fatalism.

India has a tough lesson to teach about fate: It is often not up to us to change it.

India has numbed my repulsion of poverty (in much the way as my repulsion to illness, like the way I look away when a bloated African child appears on TV, remains unchanged).

It is the belief that one has no responsibility for another’s lot that enables one to get out of the entanglement of unnecessary guilt and attachment. Of course, if one is naturally disposed towards not giving, perhaps you should run the experiment in the reverse.

The most interesting thing about this post and the others was seeing the impressions that India forms on a newcomer and how it impacts their personal philosophy.

Jawahara visits Pompeii and wonders about the people who once lived there, and the transience of our lives.

Here today! Gone tomorrow! In a flash! The tormented faces of the plaster casts of its ancient victims scream at me, frozen with fear, but yet so animated that I could reach out and touch them.

Shreyasi shares her apprehensions and the soul-searching brought on by a surgery, in a touching letter about feminity to her girlfriends.

There is also a great promise in the fact that I will be gifted with a unique experience and once I have lived it, I might as well be gifted with lovely feelings, new possibilities and valuable thoughts.

Like Coelho I hope that the Universe will conspire in my favour to make me more creative through new channels once it has taken away one, from me. I also hope that the scared, little girl within me is comforted, loved and encouraged.

Perspective Inc. misses the complexity of reminiscining in the commercialization of the past:

Come today and Nostalgia has too cheap a price on its head. The complexity is gone. The touts sell anything from a quick glimpse of a bygone time, or a whiff of forgotten scent. Even snatches of tunes are fair game. Come tomorrow, nostalgia would have an even cheaper price on its head.

Yesterday sells today.

Bits, on the other hand, are close to priceless, because they are the building blocks of information. Negroponte calls a bit “a state of being”. It’s either on or off, true or false, 0 or 1, black or white. All kinds of information, from numbers to journal articles to a Bhimsen Joshi performance, can be encoded as streams of bits. And then it’s the information that’s really valuable, not the atoms

How much is your laptop or iPod really worth? Dilip looks at the real value of your digital possessions.

I realize that I had missed the point about Didion’s book. Grief following death is intensely personal. It does not matter if you are living in the suburbs of New York or the slums of Mumbai - the vacuum created by the death of a loved one is no different.

A strange exercise by Parmanu’s dad of counting the dead when shown an old photograph reminds him of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.