Oh to be alive

           As the winter Olympics draw to a close, one is once again mesmerized by the beauty of the human body and what it is capable of achieving, especially when coupled with a beautiful mind. More than the sheer aesthetics of the body per se, it is the functionality that comes into play; sheer grit and determination, pure resolve and the urge to be the best of the best, sometimes at a nail biting tie, at the finish line and sometimes just a fraction of a second away, shows who nets a gold. The Olympics were started nearly 3000 years ago, in Olympia, Greece and were called Olympiads. It is popularly believed that it came into being to appease the Gods, particularly Zeus and perhaps it has therefore been a tradition ever since of creating records and benchmarks that are hard to break, striving every now and then for a higher and more perfect score: both as a personal achievement and as a collective triumph.  History has shown that the best p...

    “ In addition to being a profoundly bewildered man, I am an incorrigible introvert. I am awkward, soft-spoken, ineloquent, and intensely shy. I do not enjoy speaking in public, posing for photographs, or asking other people for money. I dream of privacy, I revere silence, and I loathe any action that involves drawing attention to myself ,” extremely eloquent words by Greg Mortenson the author of Stones into Schools and Three cups of tea. The sentiments reflected in these very succinct, yet persuasive words, in more ways than one, reflect the personalities of several people who go through life being grossly misunderstood for they do not fall into the slots that have so divisively and deliberately become a part of human psyche and populist society, pushing to the borders and brinks people every now and then. Some survive to become stable contributors to society, some succumb way too soon: groveling for the rest of their lives in the darkness of despair or merely t...