J.K. Rowling’s terrific commencement address at Harvard is available as a video, MP3, or text. Thanks BoingBoing, for making me read it. We all love rags-to-riches stories, but this one talks potently about the power of desperation.

The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure….

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ,…Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way….Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned….

Link

Honest to blog?

:) best jargon spew in a long time. Source: Juno

Bono, well known as the lead singer of U2 and as an activist. For the first time, I have seen someone explain, very lucidly, how Africa is not about charity. And how one can make a difference.

Forceful, eloquent, well thought of, well researched, and the best fucking 10 minutes I have ever heard from a rock star.

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Books, Books. Just finished Haunted. Re-reading Asimov’s Foundation. Finished The Kite Runner week before last. Half-way through The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (for the nth time) and Malgudi Days.

Fight Club

There are some movies which are beautiful because they are romantic, simple, natural, whatever. Ever heard of a movie that was beautiful because it was gory and too direct?

Thats Fight Club for you. A brilliant script (not at all for the weak hearted..) commensurated by brilliant performances by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton helped David Fincher create a movie that remains unparalleled in terms of technique, embedding the story in the psyche of the viewer and creating a thought chain that only great movies or experiences create.

IMDb Top 250: #32!

I give you some of the very memorable quotes from the movie:

Tyler Durden: [pointing at an emergency instruction manual on a plane] You know why they put oxygen masks on planes?
Narrator: So you can breath.
Tyler Durden: Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you’re taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It’s all right here. Emergency water landing - 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.
Narrator: That’s, um… That’s an interesting theory

Tyler Durden: Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

Narrator: Everywhere I travel, tiny life. Single-serving sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of butter. The microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit. Shampoo-conditioner combos, sample-packaged mouthwash, tiny bars of soap. The people I meet on each flight? They’re single-serving friends.

Narrator: With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels.

Marla Singer: A condom is the glass slipper for our generation. You slip one on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, and then you throw it away. The condom, I mean, not the stranger.
Narrator: What?

Go watch the movie… and be amazed at what creativity can do with 140 minutes of your attention.

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