Key To My Life

The most interesting book I have ever read till date. The book is a beautiful journey of understanding how life might have originated and how life is the way we know it. You get to read and know about a variety of things like social behavior, game theory, psychology and of course biology, with a touch of philosophy if you will. It explains the chemistry and race between prey and predator, male and female, sexual selection, altruistic behavior among individuals and groups, replicators for cultural transmission as in fashion, music and other evolving trends. Considering the entire community of social insects as a single organism with the sterile workers as the support cells and the queen as the reproductive cells- that was a beautiful way of explaining the theory of altruism. The writing style is very elegant, interesting, witty just here and there. I would love him as my teacher because of the way in which he builds up my understanding from nothingness to the level of being able

Every relationship has a reacher and a settler. Says Ted Mosby in "How I met your Mother". Interesting theory. Marshall and Lily start fighting about who among them is the settler and who, the reacher. Interestingly, both of them want to be the settler. At first, it looked understandable, natural. But on a deeper level of thought, I was deep in dilemma. Which one of them am I? Which one of them do I want to be? The reacher or the settler? You would want to be the settler which would mean you are more desirable than your spouse . On the other hand, you should not like to be the loser who had to settle for less. The very fact that someone decided to settle for less removes the superiority/desirability from that person and (s)he cannot be the settler anymore. Similarly, the very fact that the reacher had it in him to reach for his dreams makes him desirable.. The minute you decide that you are a settler, you are reduced to a less desirable person who may not have much

"The quality of your life can be measured by the number of things you do because you want to as opposed to the number of things you do because you have to."

As we zoom out into the universe, there unfolds a picture of planetary bodies revolving around a centre in fixed distant orbits. The picture is the same when we zoom in to see the structure of an atom. The electrons revolving around the nucleus in orbits. If I make a sketch of me and my relationships, I get a similar picture. I am the nucleus. The people in my life are the electrons in the different orbits. Every once in a while these electrons can shift orbits and be closer or farther away from me. The people closest to me are the ones in the first orbit. I have a comfort zone with them. The bond is strongest here and it is mutual. And I know they'll stand by me always. They do not jump out with their excess energy to go out of my system. If at all such a thing happens, that is something which will change the very constitution of my existence. The valence electrons could jump out any time. They may be the very interesting category, of people due to their high and unsta

Back in my engineering college days, I was labelled as the person with the ability to make things come true (unfortunately, only bad things) by saying them. It has happenned more than once that I would make a thoughtless comment and it would just come true. Once a friend(Sankar) was going back home from college and I asked him to drive carefully. He met with an accident on the way. Another time, I asked a friend (Smitha) if she was scared of getting a shock from the various current sources in the electrical machines lab. We were preparing for the exam when I asked her this and she said that she was not scared at all. She really wasn't but she did get an electric shock on the day of the exam. ( Nothing bad happenned but she was convinced that I had the power to make terrible things come true by saying them :D ) There are more, but I'll limit the examples to two. Whenever I think about these incidents, I get stuck in a loop of cause and effect. Could they have been rel

. While reading the book and after, I could not quite decide if I liked it. I've always liked the "elephants in the cloud" thought ( that human beings are wired to find a purpose and meaning to everything, to find patterns in the chaos that surrounds us) and the author has explained the idea very well in his field of risk analysis and has been able to extrapolate them it to life in general, in his random thoughts. I learnt a lot of new things from the book and I liked the book for that. However, I believe that it could have been written a little better than this. It was more like a compilation of scattered thoughts and examples which I could not quite classify as a writing style. I really didn't see any reason why the things in a particular chapter were consolidated to be in that chapter. They might as well have been in another section. I am not sure if there was something huge in the book which I totally missed due to which I missed that connection and order. T