The Chronicles of a Happy Life

“Right now you are young… you want the best job… you want to work hard… take over the world… I’m past all of that. After a while, you only work for your family. I’ll live my dreams through my children.”
-          A young woman studying in the best B-school in Asia Pacific

“Everything has a price. You, me, that guy over there… Once you enter this industry, you sell your soul.”
-          Trader explaining market-making and flow-trading to me

“You don’t drink, kya? No wonder, I haven’t met you for so long!”
-          Me! To a classmate.

“If you don’t blog by this weekend, I’m taking you off my blogroll”
-          A friend who I know is going to smile after reading this.

It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to profess a conventional respectability which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and least realistic of men
- John Maynard Keynes

We Spartans have descended from Hercules himself. Taught never to retreat, never to surrender. Taught that death in the battlefield is the greatest glory he could achieve in his life. Spartans: the finest soldiers the world has ever known.
- Spartan King Leonidas in the movie 300

Persian Warrior: A thousand nations of the Persian empire descend upon you. Our arrows will blot out the sun.
Spartan warrior: Then, we shall fight in the shade
- The movie 300

Hope is the quintessential human delusion which is the source of greatest strength and greatest weakness.
- The Architect, in the movie Neo

“I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is precisely why I succeed.”

– Michael Jordan

Arrived at the city of boiled beans early in the morning today. The AC bus ride was much better than I expected. It would’ve been even better if it would have been possible to switch off the speakers. I was forced to listen to Telugu/Kannada garbage at night and the stupid ‘Good Morning Bangalore’ programme in the morning. The RJ, Basanti was practically stammering - apparently, she was trying to speak very fast to be cool but was failing miserably.

Racism in India against Indians
Bhago has written about how Indians were being discriminated against on their own soil! I did some googling and came across this site which had this to say:
“Having moved, we were now situated near the tourist cop, and what ensued really bothered me. He was preventing Indians from moving North past an arbitrary line in the sand. The locals, mostly groups of fully-clothed, pervy looking men, just sat at the line, gazing into the “white” section of the beach. One kid even had a pair of binoculars. I went over to ask the cop about it, and he said that the locals aren’t allowed past that spot because there have been problems with white women getting harrassed, and sometimes even groped, by the locals here. I was left with a funny feeling, after all, is self-imposed racism a tolerable facet of modern society when that racism serves to better improve the lives of those locals through the tourist economy?”

Power of diversity (Another extract from the same site)
“…This may explain why Indians are so mellow: the Muslims slaughter cows in the face of Hindus, then the Christians eat pork, which would ordinarily piss off both the Muslims and Hindus. Of course, the Hindu boys hold hands, which flies in the face of Christian homophobia. And the Jews just sit back and throw their hands in the air!! See, Indians have to be laid-back, otherwise they’d blow each other away in minutes. Its the ultimate testament to the power of diversity…”

Links
On Gandhian self sufficiency
Yet another site relating to startups
The Harvard Business Review List - Breakthrough Ideas for 2006

In 1944, C.S. Lewis delivered a speech titled ‘The Inner Ring’ to the graduating class of Kings College at the University of London. He asserted that the strongest of all drives is the desire to belong to an ‘inner ring’ - an imaginary circle of the important. But, he warned, status is like an onion comprising endless layers. No sooner do you crack one ring than you become obsessed with getting to the even-more-exclusive ring inside that one.
- Source

Links of the day:

Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days
New interest in software products
How to Interview a Programmer
Chapters from latest Tech books for free
The Daily Brad

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

Extract from ‘Airplane’ by Michael Crichton:

Driving in the van, Richman gave a long exhale. “Jeez,” he said. “Are they always so friendly?”
Casey shrugged. “They’re engineers,” she said. She was thinking, What did he expect? He must have dealt with engineers at GM. “Emotionally, they’re all thirteen years old, stuck at the age just before boys stop playing with toys, because they’ve discovered girls. They’re all still playing with toys. They have poor social skills, dress badly-but they’re extremely intelligent and well trained, and they are very arrogant in their way. Outsiders are definitely not allowed to play.”
“Especially lawyers …”
“Anybody. They’re like chess masters. They don’t waste time with amateurs.