“
It’s exceedingly difficult for employees to have the company’s back when they can’t trust the company to have theirs. Actually, it’s impossible.
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Hanna Hasl-Kelchner (Seeking Fairness at Work: Cracking the New Code of Greater Employee Engagement, Retention & Satisfaction)
“
That's the truth about people with obsessively organised plans: we're not trying to control everything in our lives. We're trying to block out the things we can't.
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Holly Smale (Model Misfit (Geek Girl, #2))
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I just can't live an ordinary life, I can't pass the time. I can't organise myself, I don't have ordinary motives any more. I can't even manage my body, when I go to bed I don't know where to put my arms.
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Iris Murdoch (The Green Knight)
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We have to accept that much of reality is ineffable and so to understand it we can't rely on words alone.
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Oli Anderson (Dialogue / Ego - Real Communication)
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In the spiritual path, if you are dependent on any person or organisation, you can’t grow. At some point in time, you need to drop all dependency and walk alone with all humbleness and sincerity. In the silence of mind, eternity arises.
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Amit Ray (Peace Bliss Beauty and Truth: Living with Positivity)
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I've never thought much of strictly organised and methodical study. You can't arrange a library in alphabetical order until you've collected one.
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Walter Moers
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Time is important in our organisation. If you can’t even get to an appointment in your own building on time, they argue, you’re not going to have much luck trying to find the Battle of Hastings. Sussman
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Jodi Taylor (Just One Damned Thing After Another (The Chronicles of St Mary's, #1))
“
The ear favours no particular “point of view.”
We are enveloped by sound.
It forms a seamless web around us.
We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of the air.”We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus.
Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.”
We can‘t shut out sound automatically.
We simply are not equipped with earlids.
Where a visual space is an organised continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.
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Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Massage)
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Connection and teamwork are very much intertwined. If you can't connect with a person be a team player. If a person does not show teamwork connect with them. All engagement is centered around relationships
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Janna Cachola (Lead by choice, not by checks)
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Just like the way a beautiful butterfly can’t come into life without its transformation cycle from egg to larva, caterpillar to pupa and finally to a brilliant creation, to become a successful digitally transformed organisation, similar transformational stages are essential.
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Enamul Haque (Digital Transformation Through Cloud Computing: Developing a sustainable business strategy to eschew extinction)
“
This means that if boys and girls grew up on a deserted island with no organised society or parents to guide them, girls would still cuddle, touch, make friends and play with dolls, while boys would compete mentally and physically with each other and form groups with a clear hierarchy.
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Allan Pease (Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps: How We're Different and What to Do About It)
“
Because that's the truth about people with obsessively organised plans: we're not trying to control everything in our lives. We're trying to block everything we can't.
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Holly Smale (Model Misfit (Geek Girl, #2))
“
I am writing this on a computer that I can’t imagine living without. This is an alarming thought, the extent to which I have organised my life around a metal box full of wires (and, via the Internet, to many other metal boxes full of wires). Someone told me most of the Internet is stored in a warehouse somewhere in North Carolina. I don’t know enough about technology to gauge if this is true, but it made me realise how little I actually understand about the world I inhabit. The world of Dr Wong’s childhood was significantly smaller than mine, but he understood every square inch of it.
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Jeremy Tiang (Durians Are Not the Only Fruit)
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Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it's not supposed to exist! They don't recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That's why they instinctively dislike history, 'nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,' and they explain it all as stupidity! That's why they so dislike the living process of life; they don't want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of india-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won't revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery--it wants life, it hasn't completed its vital process, it's too soon for the graveyard! You can't skip over nature by logic.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky
“
I got some funny reactions, a lot of irate reactions, as if I were somehow taking people's fun away from them. I have nothing against sports. I like to watch a good basketball game and that sort of thing. On the other hand, we have to recognise that the mass hysteria about spectator sports plays a significant role. First of all, spectator sports make people more passive, because you're not doing them; you're watching somebody doing them. Secondly, they engender jingoist and chauvinist attitudes, sometimes to quite an extreme degree. I saw something in the newspapers just a day or two ago about how high-school teams are now so antagonistic and passionately committed to winning at all costs that they had to abandon the standard handshake before or after the game. These kids can't even do civil things like greeting one another because they're ready to kill one another. It's spectator sports that engender those attitudes, particularly when they're designed to organise a community to be hysterically committed to their gladiators. That's very dangerous, and it has lots of deleterious effects.
”
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Noam Chomsky (The Quotable Chomsky)
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I explain that i want time off to write a book. Garry laughs at me and says I can't work part time simply because I want to. He says he can't set that sort of precedent in the organisation. If he lets me work part-time, everybody might want to do it.
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Kasey Edwards (30 Something and Over It: What Happens When You Wake Up And Don't Want to Go To Work Ever Again)
“
To the Jews who wanted a land of their own, where they could organise themselves and live according to their traditions, Stalin had offered a bleak territory in Eastern Siberia: Birobidzhan. Take it or leave it. Anyone who wanted to live as a Jew should go to Siberia; if anyone refused Siberia, that meant he preferred to be Russian. There was no third way. But if a Jew wanted to be Russian, what can, what should he do, if the Russians deny him access to the university, and call him a zhid, and turn the pogromists on him, and form an alliance with Hitler? He can't do anything- especially if he's a woman.
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Primo Levi (If Not Now, When?)
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Mainstream economics takes the particular features of capitalism – a very recent form of economic organisation in human history – as if they were universal, timeless and rational. It treats market exchange as if it’s the essential feature of economic behaviour31 and relegates production or work – a necessity of all provisioning – to an afterthought. It also focuses primarily on the relationship between people and goods (what determines how many oranges we buy?) and pays little attention to the relationships between people that this presupposes.
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Andrew Sayer (Why We Can't Afford the Rich)
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Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it’s not supposed to exist! They don’t recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That’s why they instinctively dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they explain it all as stupidity! That’s why they so dislike the living process of life; they don’t want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won’t obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn’t completed its vital process, it’s too soon for the graveyard! You can’t skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That’s the easiest solution of the problem! It’s seductively clear and you musn’t think about it. That’s the great thing, you mustn’t think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!
”
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)
“
And what, exactly, does this Band of Exiles plan to do? Host events? Organise party-planning committees?'
Lucien's metal eye clicked faintly and narrowed. 'You can be as much of an asshole as that mate of yours, you know that?'
True. I sighed again. 'I'm sorry. I just-'
'I don't have anywhere else to go.' Before I could object, he said. 'You ruined any chance I have of going back to Spring. Not to Tamlin, but to the court beyond his house. Everyone either still believes the lies you spun or they believe me complicit in your deceit. And as for here...' He shook off my grip and headed for the door. 'I can't stand to be in the same room as her for more than two minutes. I can't stand to be in this court and have your mate pay for the very clothes on my back.
”
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Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Frost and Starlight (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3.5))
“
Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it's not supposed to exist! They don't recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That's why they instinctively dislike history, 'nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,' and they explain it all as stupidity! That's why they so dislike the living process of life; they don't want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won't revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn't completed its vital process, it's too soon for the graveyard! You can't skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That's the easiest solution of the problem! It's seductively clear and you musn't think about it. That's the great thing, you mustn't think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
“
A servant came in with punch. Napoleon called for another glass for Rapp, and stood there sipping at his own in silence. "I can't taste anything or smell anything," he said, sniffing at the glass. "I'm fed up with this cold. They go on and on about medicine. What good is medicine when they can't cure a cold? Corvisart gave me these lozenges, but they're not doing me any good. What can they cure? They can't cure anything. Our body is a machine for living. That's the way it's organised, and that's its nature. The life inside should be left alone. Let the life inside defend itself. It will get on better like that, instead of paralysing it and clogging it with remedies. Our body is like a perfect watch with only a fixed time to run. The watchmaker has no power to get inside it, he can only fumble with it blindfold. Our body is a machine for living, and that's all there is to it." And once launched into defining things - Napoleon had a weakness for coming out with definitions - he seemed suddenly impelled to produce a new one. "Do you know, Rapp, what the military art is?" He asked. "It's the art of being stronger than the enemy at a given moment. "That's all it is."
Rapp made no reply.
"Tomorrow we shall have Kutuzov to deal with," said Napoleon. "Let's see what happens! You remember - he was in command at Braunau, and not once in three weeks did he get on a horse and go round his entrenchments! Let's see what happens!"
He looked at his watch. It was still only four o'clock. He didn't feel sleepy, the punch was finished, and there was still nothing to do. He got to his feet, paced up and down, put on a warm overcoat and hat and walked out of his tent. The night was dark and clammy; you could almost feel the dampness seeping down from on high. Near by, the French guards' camp-fires had burned down, but far away you could see the Russian fires burning smokily all down their line. The air was still, but there was a faint stirring and a clear rumble of early-morning movement as the French troops began the business of taking up their positions.
”
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Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
“
I think it would be no bad thing if boys like you all grew up with a bit of everything. We might all treat each other a good deal better then. Be less of these wars for one thing. Oh yes. Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won’t be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It’ll be because people have changed. They’ll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It’s healthy.” “But if I did, everything might . . .” I stopped. “Everything might what, Puffin?” “Like that blind there”—I pointed—“if the twine broke. Everything might scatter.” Uncle Philip stared at the blind I had indicated. Then he rose, went to the window and touched it gently. “Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it’s something we can’t easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it’ll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.” He sighed, as though I had just defeated him in an argument.
”
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Kazuo Ishiguro (When We Were Orphans)
“
what about your new way of looking at things? We seem to have wandered rather a long way from that.’ ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Philip, ‘we haven’t. All these camisoles en flanelle and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point. Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes, homme moyen sensuel eyes . . .’ ‘Loving eyes too.’ He smiled at her and stroked her hand. ‘The result . . .’ he hesitated. ‘Yes, what would the result be?’ she asked. ‘Queer,’ he answered. ‘A very queer picture indeed.’ ‘Rather too queer, I should have thought.’ ‘But it can’t be too queer,’ said Philip. ‘However queer the picture is, it can never be half so odd as the original reality. We take it all for granted; but the moment you start thinking, it becomes queer. And the more you think, the queerer it grows. That’s what I want to get in this book—the astonishingness of the most obvious things. Really any plot or situation would do. Because everything’s implicit in anything. The whole book could be written about a walk from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross. Or you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organisation, that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing round obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with energy to live and think—when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.’ ‘All the same,’ said Elinor, after a long silence, ‘I wish one day you’d write a simple straightforward story about a young man and a young woman who fall in love and get married and have difficulties, but get over them, and finally settle down.’ ‘Or
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Aldous Huxley (Point Counter Point)
“
In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.20 As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’
The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other. This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build on it. Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself.
20. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942),
The Sociology of Science: Empirical and Theoretical Investigations
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973): pp. 267–278.
”
”
Stuart Ritchie (Science Fictions)
“
In all these battles the Labour right has enormous reserves of political power. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly hostile to Jeremy Corbyn. Of the 232 Labour MPs no more than 20 can be relied on to back him. Back bench revolts, leaks, and public attacks by MPs opposed to the leadership are likely to be frequent.
Some Labour left wingers hope that the patronage that comes with the leader’s position will appeal to the careerism of the right and centre MPs to provide Jeremy with the support he lacks. No doubt this will have some effect, but it will be limited. For a start it’s a mistake to think that all right wingers are venal. Some are. But some believe in their ideas as sincerely as left wingers believe in theirs.
More importantly, the leading figures of the Labour right should not be seen as simply part of the Labour movement. They are also, and this is where their loyalty lies, embedded in the British political establishment. Commentators often talk as if the sociological dividing line in British politics lies between the establishment (the heads of corporations, military, police, civil service, the media, Tory and Liberal parties, etc, etc) on the one hand, and the Labour Party as a whole, the unions and the left on the other. But this is not the case. The dividing line actually runs through the middle of the Labour Party, between its right wing leaders and the left and the bulk of the working class members.
From Ramsey MacDonald (who started on the left of the party) splitting Labour and joining the Tory government in 1931, to the Labour ‘Gang of Four’ splitting the party to form the SDP in 1981, to Neil Kinnock’s refusal to support the 1984-85 Miners Strike, to Blair and Mandelson’s neo-conservative foreign policy and neoliberal economic policy, the main figures of the Labour right have always put their establishment loyalties first and their Labour Party membership second. They do not need Jeremy Corbyn to prefer Cabinet places on them because they will be rewarded with company directorships and places in the Lords by the establishment.
Corbyn is seen as a threat to the establishment and the Labour right will react, as they have always done, to eliminate this threat. And because the Labour right are part of the establishment they will not be acting alone. Even if they were a minority in the PLP, as the SDP founders were, their power would be enormously amplified by the rest of the establishment. In fact the Labour right today is much more powerful than the SDP, and so the amplified dissonance from the right will be even greater.
This is why the argument that a Corbyn leadership must compromise with the right in the name of unity is so mistaken. The Labour right are only interested in unity on their terms. If they can’t get it they will fight until they win. If they can’t win they would rather split the party than unite with the left on the left’s terms.
When Leon Trotsky analysed the defeat of the 1926 General Strike it was the operation of this kind of ‘unity’ which he saw as critical in giving the right the ability to disorganise the left. The collapse of the strike came, argued Trotsky, when the government put pressure on the right wing of the Labour movement, who put pressure on the left wing of the movement, who put pressure on the Minority Movement (an alliance of the Labour left and the Communist Party). And the Minority Movement put pressure on the CP…and thus the whole movement collapsed.
To this day this is the way in which the establishment transmits pressure through the labour movement. The only effective antidote is political and organisational independence on the far left so that it is capable of mobilising beyond the ranks of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy. This then provides a counter-power pushing in the opposite direction that can be more powerful than the pressure from the right.
”
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John Rees
“
For those seeking an alternative to Jordan Peterson’s dark vision of the world, questionable approach to truth and knowledge, and retreat to religion, they will find the answer in Bertrand Russell, whose essays on religion seem to, at times, be speaking directly to Peterson himself.
Here’s the final paragraph from Russell’s essay Why I Am Not a Christian:
"WHAT WE MUST DO
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world—its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
Russell wishes to replace fear, religion, and dogma with free-thinking, intelligence, courage, knowledge, and kindness. To believe something because it is seen to be useful, rather than true, is intellectually dishonest to the highest degree. And, as Russell points out elsewhere, he can’t recall a single verse in the Bible that praises intelligence.
Here’s Russell in another essay, titled Can Religion Cure Our Troubles:
Mankind is in mortal peril, and fear now, as in the past, is inclining men to seek refuge in God. Throughout the West there is a very general revival of religion. Nazis and Communists dismissed Christianity and did things which we deplore. It is easy to conclude that the repudiation of Christianity by Hitler and the Soviet Government is at least in part the cause of our troubles and that if the world returned to Christianity, our international problems would be solved. I believe this to be a complete delusion born of terror. And I think it is a dangerous delusion because it misleads men whose thinking might otherwise be fruitful and thus stands in the way of a valid solution.
The question involved is not concerned only with the present state of the world. It is a much more general question, and one which has been debated for many centuries. It is the question whether societies can practise a sufficient modicum of morality if they are not helped by dogmatic religion. I do not myself think that the dependence of morals upon religion is nearly as close as religious people believe it to be. I even think that some very important virtues are more likely to be found among those who reject religious dogmas than among those who accept them. I think this applies especially to the virtue of truthfulness or intellectual integrity. I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organised beliefs.
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Bernard Russell
“
Today, you can't excuse yourself from helping on the grounds that helping is impossible. International aid organisations are more effective and more accountable than ever. And even if some of them are bad, you only need one good one to be on the hook.
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Joshua D. Greene (Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them)
“
but if you don’t have an external system to think in and organise your thoughts, ideas and collected facts, or have no idea how to embed it in your overarching daily routines, the disadvantage is so enormous that it just can’t be compensated by a high IQ.
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Sönke Ahrens (How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking)
“
A report in the peer-reviewed journal Public Health Nutrition showed that the organisation accepted more than $4 million from food companies and industry associations, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Hershey, Kellogg’s and Conagra.39 And this was just between 2011 and 2017. In addition, they had significant equity in UPF companies including more than a million dollars of stocks in PepsiCo, Nestlé and J.M. Smucker.40 Meanwhile, back across the Atlantic, Diabetes UK lists Boots, Tesco and Abbott as corporate partners.41 Cancer Research UK is funded by Compass, Roadchef, Slimming World, Tesco and Warburtons.42 The British Heart Foundation takes money from Tesco.43 The British Dietetic Association has Abbott, Danone and Quorn as its current strategic partners, with other food companies as supporters.44 The
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Chris van Tulleken (Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can't Stop Eating Food That Isn't Food)
“
An artist, can't understand organisation, or would have passed.
”
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Gavin W. Semple (Zos-Kia: An Introductory Essay on the Art and Sorcery of Austin Osman Spare)
“
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, [Thomas Hylland Eriksen] said, our economies have been built around a new and radical idea - economic growth. This is the belief that every year, the economy - and each individual company in it - should get bigger and bigger. That's how we now define success. If a country's economy grows, its politicians are likely to get reelected. ...If a country or a company's share price shrinks, politicians or CEOs face a greater risk of being booted out. Economic growth is the central organising principle of our society. It is at the heart of how we see the world.
Thomas explained that growth can happen in one of two ways. The first is that a corporation can find new markets - by inventing something new, or exporting something to a part of the world that doesn't have it yet. The second is that a corporation can persuade existing consumers to consume more. If you can get people to eat more, or to sleep less, then you have found a source of economic growth. Mostly, he believes, we achieve growth today primarily through this second option. Corporations are constantly finding ways to cram more stuff into the same amount of time. To give one example: they want you to watch TV and follow the show on social media. Then you see twice as many ads. This inevitably speeds up life. If the economy has to grow every year, in the absence of new markets it has to get you and me to do more in the same amount of time.
As I read Thomas' work more deeply, I realised this is one of the crucial reasons why life has accelerated every decade since the 1880s: we are living in an economic machine that requires greater speed to keep going - and that inevitably degrades our attention over time. If fact, when I reflected on it, this need for economic growth seemed to be the underlying force that was driving so many of the causes of poor attention that I had learned about - our increasing stress, our swelling work hours, our more invasive technologies, our lack of sleep, our bad diets.
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Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again)
“
Anyone who has worked in a hierarchical organisation must have noticed that bravery is rarely on display when a superior enters the room.
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Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)
“
fundamental flaw of modern capitalism is that businesses promote bombastic people. As Cameron Anderson and Sébastien Brion of the University of California, Berkeley, showed experimentally, ‘In conditions where there is any ambiguity in competence and performance (which is common in organisations), overconfident individuals will be perceived as more competent by others, and attain higher levels of status, compared to individuals with more accurate self-perceptions of competence.
”
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Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)
“
He was the ideal undercover agent for Western intelligence, Rafsanjani announced – ‘a person who seemingly comes from India and who apparently is separate from the Western world and who has a misleading name’. Rushdie was a white colonialist, hiding beneath a brown skin; a traitor hiding behind a Muslim name. The British secret service had paid him to betray the faithful, the Iranian theocracy explained as it added corruption to the list of charges against him. It gave him bribes, disguised as book advances, as it organised the assault on Islam by the cunning if curious means of a magical realist novel.
”
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Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)
“
Gita Sahgal, who organised the Asian feminists who protested in defence of Salman Rushdie in Parliament Square in 1989. After her employer, the human-rights group Amnesty International, required her to leave for complaining to the press about its alliances with Islamists, her lawyers secured compensation for her.
”
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Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)
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Working-class parents, who have less spare capacity, are more likely to demand that their kids simply obey them. In the short run this saves time; in the long run it prevents the kids from learning to organise their own lives or think for themselves. Poor parenting is thus a barrier to social mobility, and is becoming more so as the world grows more complex and the rewards for superior cognitive skills increase. Mr Putnam’s research team interviewed dozens of families to illustrate his thesis. Some of their stories are heart-rending. Stephanie, a mother whose husband left her, is asked if her own parents were warm. She is “astonished at our naïveté”. “No, we don’t do all that kissing and hugging,” she says. “You can’t be mushy in Detroit...You gotta be hard, really hard, because if you soft, people will bully you.” Just as her
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Anonymous
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Loach told the Workers Revolutionary Party’s newspaper, and ‘What is amazing is the strength and organisation and power of their lobby.’ The ‘Zionists’, he claimed, ‘want to leave intact … the generalised sense of guilt that everyone has about the Jews so that it remains an area that you can’t discuss’.
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Dave Rich (The Left's Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism)
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You sound quite a fan of archaeology, Harry.' Nelson grunted. ' Lots of its bollocks, of course, but you can't deny they know their stuff. And I like the way they do things. It's organised. I like organisation.
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Elly Griffiths (The Crossing Places (Ruth Galloway, #1))
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Where do you write? Arthur Miller wrote in a log cabin he built for himself…
I just... I have a room in my house. I mean I like writing in hotels. Occasionally I’m... I just go somewhere. I need to smoke and I need room service essentially, and that’s all I need. As a matter of fact it’s much pleasanter to be at home with wife, family and so on. But… clearly… one ought to have a little more discipline than I have. Because I don’t actually shut myself away. When times are in crisis and I am up against it with a deadline, then I do. But I’m pretty slipshod about the way I organise my life.
So you don’t write every day, it’s not…
No. No, I don’t. I don’t write every day. And I had a friend staying with us for the weekend and he said, Yes, he writes every day. And I just think ‘Really? What happens to your in tray?’ I can’t cope with mine.
You’ve commented on how much you cherish your solitude. Do you have solitude?
I’ve had a lot of times on my own and I’ve never been… never felt lonely, ever. I like, I like solitude. As a writer I think a certain amount is necessary. I’m always been… bookish rather than active. So, you know, I make few demands upon the world as a writer. And I don’t really… even if I’m writing about something factual and I need to see places and do things and find out what I’m writing about, I’m fairly casual about that as well. Very often I end up looking at places, rooms, monuments which I’ve been writing about but didn’t really get to see until the play was finished. I think that’s the attraction, actually… there’s a sort of self-sufficiency about creating a play and, I guess, a film. A certain self-sufficiency… in other words it caters to ones own distaste for making sudden movements.
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Tom Stoppard
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You can't change mental models until you change mental models.
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Aidan McCullen (Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life)
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Understanding Financial Risks and Companies Mitigate them?
Financial risks are the possible threats, losses and debts corporations face during setting up policies and seeking new business opportunities. Financial risks lead to negative implications for the corporations that can lead to loss of financial assets, liabilities and capital.
Mitigation of risks and their avoidance in the early stages of product deployment, strategy-planning and other vital phases is top-priority for financial advisors and managers.
Here's how to mitigate risks in financial corporates:-
● Keeping track of Business Operations
Evaluating existing business operations in the corporations will provide a holistic view of the movement of cash-flows, utilisation of financial assets, and avoiding debts and losses.
● Stocking up Emergency Funds
Just as families maintain an emergency fund for dealing with uncertainties, the same goes for large corporates. Coping with uncertainty such as the ongoing pandemic is a valuable lesson that has taught businesses to maintain emergency funds to avoid economic lapses.
● Taking Data-Backed Decisions
Senior financial advisors and managers must take well-reformed decisions backed by data insights. Data-based technologies such as data analytics, science, and others provide resourceful insights about various economic activities and help single out the anomalies and avoid risks.
Enrolling for a course in finance through a reputed university can help young aspiring financial risk advisors understand different ways of mitigating risks and threats. The IIM risk management course provides meaningful insights into the other risks involved in corporations.
What are the Financial Risks Involved in Corporations?
Amongst the several roles and responsibilities undertaken by the financial management sector, identifying and analysing the volatile financial risks.
Financial risk management is the pinnacle of the financial world and incorporates the following risks:-
● Market Risk
Market risk refers to the threats that emerge due to corporational work-flows, operational setup and work-systems. Various financial risks include- an economic recession, interest rate fluctuations, natural calamities and others.
Market risks are also known as "systematic risk" and need to be dealt with appropriately. When there are significant changes in market rates, these risks emerge and lead to economic losses.
● Credit Risk
Credit risk is amongst the common threats that organisations face in the current financial scenarios. This risk emerges when a corporation provides credit to its borrower, and there are lapses while receiving owned principal and interest.
Credit risk arises when a borrower falters to make the payment owed to them.
● Liquidity Risk
Liquidity risk crops up when investors, business ventures and large organisations cannot meet their debt compulsions in the short run.
Liquidity risk emerges when a particular financial asset, security or economic proposition can't be traded in the market.
● Operational Risk
Operational risk arises due to financial losses resulting from employee's mistakes, failures in implementing policies, reforms and other procedures.
Key Takeaway
The various financial risks discussed above help professionals learn the different risks, threats and losses. Enrolling for a course in finance assists learners understand the different risks. Moreover, pursuing the IIM risk management course can expose professionals to the scope of international financial management in India and other key concepts.
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Talentedge
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We can’t force anyone to give out to charity or predict how much we can gain from a charitable organisation.
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Mwanandeke Kindembo (Destiny of Liberty)
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We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can choose the lens we look through. This is the basic choice we have in creating our own experience—which aspects to nourish or starve, using only the magnifying power of our attention.
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Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)
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I can no longer deny that bad things happened to me. I can’t be absolutely sure what happened to me, or who did them to me: I can’t ‘prove’ that 100%. But I have enough evidence to be able to state unequivocally that a lot of bad things happened to me from a very young age for a very long time.
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Carolyn Spring
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Inspiration is one of the most rare and precious experiences in life. It is the essential fuel for doing your best work, yet it’s impossible to call up inspiration on demand. You can Google the answer to a question, but you can’t Google a feeling.
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Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)
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One of the most challenging (yet also rewarding) aspects of knowledge work is that it requires our creativity. And creativity can’t really be sustained without a sense of motivation. You can’t keep doing your best thinking and contributing your best ideas if you’re burned out and demoralized. What does our motivation depend on? Mostly, on making consistent progress. We can endure quite a bit of stress and frustration in the short term if we know it’s leading somewhere.
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Tiago Forte (The PARA Method: Simplify, Organise and Master Your Digital Life)
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Waiting until you have everything ready before getting started is like sitting in your car and waiting to leave your driveway until all the traffic lights across town are green at the same time. You can’t wait until everything is perfect. There will always be something missing, or something else you think you need. Dialing Down the Scope recognizes that not all the parts of a given project are equally important. By dropping or reducing or postponing the least important parts, we can unblock ourselves and move forward even when time is scarce.
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Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)
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If I was religious, I'd say it was God. And as God is probably someone we can't see or comprehend then He - or She - or whichever pronoun God is - becomes an image of someone good we have known in our lives. And if I wasn't religious - which I'm not - I would think that the human brain can't handle the complexity of an open quantum wave function and so it organises or translates complexity into something it understands. A librarian in a library. A friendly uncle in a video game store. Et cetera.
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Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)
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The chamber was a cool, chill black- as if we'd stepped inside the mind of some sleeping beast. And within its round space gleamed glittering islands of light. Of jewels.
Ten thousand years' worth of treasure.
It was neatly organised, in podiums and open drawers and busts and racks.
'The family jewels,' Rhys said with a devious grin. ...
...carved into the rock was an entire wall of crowns. They each had their own resting place, lined with black velvet, each illuminated by-
'Glowworms,' Rhys told me as the tiny, bluish globs crusted in the arches of each nook seemed to glitter like the entire night sky. In fact... What I'd taken for small faelights in the ceiling high above... It was all glowworms. Pale blue and turquoise, their light as silken as moonlight, illumining the jewels with ancient, silent fire.
'Pick one,' Rhys whispered in my ear.
'A glowworm?'
He nipped at my earlobe. 'Smartass.' He steered me back toward the wall of crowns, each wholly different- as individual as skulls. 'Pick whichever crown you like.'
'I can't just- take one.'
'You must certainly can. They belong to you.
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Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3))
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You can’t fail, because failure is just more information, to be captured and used as fuel for your journey.
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Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organise Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)
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We have been deprived of everything that made us human, but we organised ourselves, I suppose in order to survive, or because, when you’re human, you can’t help it.
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Jacqueline Harpman (I Who Have Never Known Men)
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time. Up in the air, above the situation, he asks if it is really the end of the world if he doesn’t get the job. The answer is ‘No, it isn’t’ and although it is very disappointing, he can deal with the disappointment and consequences because he is an adult Human and not a Chimp or child. He also knows logically that he may still be able to do something about the situation and must not allow the Chimp to think catastrophically. Step 5: He now goes into Human mode and asks himself, ‘What can I do about the situation?’ He answers: ‘I can choose the emotions I want and I can choose to act like an adult. Being emotional isn’t going to help anything, least of all me. I can’t think of anything practical to do at this point in time – this I must accept. I can choose to accept the situation rather than keep on saying “what if” or “this shouldn’t have happened” or even worse, “life should be fair”.’ Step 6: Eddie decides to put his Human in charge and decides to actively change his emotional approach to the situation. On a practical point he considers his options to either wait in the hope that another bus appears or to go home and phone the interview organiser. Step 7: Despite his disappointment he might manage a smile and be thankful that the sun will still rise tomorrow. He remains focused on the solution and not the problem. Of course, you may want to react differently or deal with the situation differently if you were in his position. It is just an example of how it might go. Clearly there are endless possibilities. The main point is that he has decided to act as a Human and not as a Chimp and to choose positive emotions despite the setback. Choice despite seriousness The scenario above was not so serious but what happens if a real crisis occurs? Imagine a young man who has had an accident on a motorbike and has been left paralysed from the waist down. Sadly this is not an uncommon event. How does he deal with this type of crisis? This time when he gets up into the helicopter and tries to gain perspective the answer is not so good. His whole life has just changed and not for the better. It would be totally unreasonable for anyone to say to him get a perspective and smile. He will need to go through a grieving process. All of us respond differently to the same situation, so there are no rights or wrongs when responding to a severe crisis. It is about understanding your response and making choices about how you want to manage it. The simple steps described are helpful for minor crises and immediate and transient stress but they need modifying
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Steve Peters (The Chimp Paradox: The Acclaimed Mind Management Programme to Help You Achieve Success, Confidence and Happiness)
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The fact that the question is even asked, the fact that black excellence in a
particular field needs ‘explaining’, tells its own story. I can’t recall any
documentaries trying to discover an organisational gene left over from fascism
that explains why Germany and Italy have consistently been Europe’s best
performing football teams. Spain’s brief spell as the best team in the world, with
a generation of players born in the years immediately after Franco’s death,
would seem to confirm my fascism-meets-football thesis, right? Clearly this
would be a ridiculous investigation - or who knows maybe I am on to something
- but the question would never be asked because German, Italian and Spanish
brilliance don’t really need explaining, or at least not in such negative ways.
When I was young, I vividly remember watching a BBC doc called Dreaming
of Ajax which investigated why one Dutch club, Ajax Amsterdam, was able to
produce better football players than the whole of England. It was a fantastic
documentary that looked with great admiration at the obviously superior
coaching systems of Ajax, which became so visible in their home-grown players’
performances. But it did not look for some mystery Dutch gene left over from
some horrendous episode in European history. Nor did white dominance in
tennis or golf - until Tiger and the Williams sisters, anyway - need to be
explained by their ancestors having so much practice whipping people for so
long, and ending up with strong shoulders and great technique as a result!
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Akala (Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire)
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Time is important in our organisation. If you can’t even get to an appointment in your own building on time, they argue, you’re not going to have much luck trying to find the Battle of Hastings. Sussman
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Jodi Taylor (Just One Damned Thing After Another (The Chronicles of St Mary's, #1))
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You look – at least, I do, or I did – at the emperor and the nobility, lording it over the people while they starve and suffer, and you say to yourself, something’s got to be done about all this. This can’t be right. The lions of the earth must not destroy the worms any more. And then you do something about it, and what do you discover? The people turn out to be – well, people; a collective noun for all those individual men and women, none of them perfect, some of them downright vicious, most of them monumentally stupid. As stupid as the emperor, the great hereditary lords, the priestly hierarchs, the General Staff and the Lords of the Admiralty, the merchant princes and the organised crime barons. When push comes to shove, thick as bricks, the lot of them. You wouldn’t trust any of them with the helm of a ship, or the regimental welfare fund, or your dog if you were going away for a few days, or anything sharp.
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K.J. Parker (Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (The Siege #1))
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If I was religious, I'd say it was God. And as God is probably someone we can't see or comprehend then He — or She — or whichever pronoun God is — becomes an image of someone good we have known in our lives. And if I wasn't religious — which I'm not — I would think that the human brain can't handle the complexity of an open quantum wave function and so it organises or translates this complexity into something it understands. A librarian in a library. A friendly uncle in a video store. Et cetera.
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Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)
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Although Tata was a very liberal father in some ways, he could also be stubbornly conservative. These attitudes were obvious when I was in Mysore. I wanted to join the extracurricular student paramilitary organisation, the National Cadet Corps (NCC), which had just been introduced. All my college friends had volunteered to participate. However, Tata flatly refused me permission with the diktat: ‘No! I don’t like the idea of girls wearing pants.’ I was very envious of my friends wearing pants in the NCC.
After completing my bachelor’s degree in psychology, Tata encouraged me to pursue my passion by enrolling in the master’s degree programme at the Manasa Gangothri campus of the University of Mysore. We were only two girls among eight students in that class. The famous Professor Kuppuswamy was my teacher. We had to conduct practical experiments on human subjects, forming smaller groups. Because we were only two girls, these groups were necessarily mixed.
A couple of months later, a professor of philosophy who was a friend of my uncle, K.R. Karanth, wrote to Tata that I was overly friendly with the boys in my class. Tata, with his usual penchant for sending cryptic telegrams, sent one that just said, ‘Come home immediately.’ I took the overnight bus from Mysore and reached Balavana in the morning. Tata confronted me with the offending letter, saying, ‘A professor has complained that you are talking to the boys in your class!’
I was furious. I retorted, saying, ‘We are two girls. We must conduct experiments in teams that include boys. I can’t participate in experiments without talking to the boys. Either you let me go back and study or stop my education. You cannot tell me that I can go back and study psychology without talking to boys in my class.’ My strong ultimatum made him realise how foolish he had been. He sheepishly said, ‘Go back, go back. Do whatever you want to do.’
There was a very strong, caring, trusting relationship between us. I had fought back with facts, and Tata respected that. He never brought up the subject of boys again.
In contrast, Amma had total faith in me. I could not do anything wrong. ‘Let Malu do what she wants,’ was her clear opinion. Tata’s judgement of people was much poorer than Amma’s. Even if a stranger wrote something nonsensical to him, he had this tendency to believe the worst first and ask questions later.
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Malavika Kapur (Growing Up Karanth)