Category: Life & People


Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) is a song by Baz Luhrmann, an Australian film personality, adapted from an essay by one Mary Schmich which was published in the Chicago Tribune back in 1997. Although this song makes me quite sentimental, I make a point to listen to it once in a while to take stock of my own life. I am attaching the lyrics here and highlighting parts that make a lot of sense to me. Do read through, you’ll love the song too!

Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ’99
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience…I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked….You’re not as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday. View full article »

Dealing with surprises!

My dear one always complained that I am not so fond of surprises. Deep inside, I do appreciate an element of surprise in my life. But sometimes life brings along difficult surprises to you, and they are so surprising that you start doubting the law of gravity. Anyway, $#i+ happens! But one needs to learn to deal with such hostile situations in life. This talk is not authoritative enough due to the uniqueness of each situation, but discusses the human nature that decides how we deal with them.

Like most artificial intelligence engines do, the human mind also runs on a learning model. This model is prepared and maintained by the brain by storing information about situations in the past along with environmental factors around them,  the decisions taken then, and the outcome of the situation. And it is this model that the mind tries to exploit when dealing with new situations. Don’t we always try to relate to the past? We somehow try to force-fit the current situation to something in the past and then apply the known outcome to the situation. But this model needs to be used with caution. Worse enough, we also involve statistics based on other people’s experience of similar situations and impose it on ours. The urban dictionary calls it ‘superstistics’, the use of prior evidence of one event to predict the outcome of another unrelated event – from the words superstitious and statistics. View full article »

The Mayonnaise Jar

“The Real Winners in life are the People who look at every situation with an expectation that they can make it work or make it better” – Barbara Pletcher

I do not intend to use my blog to publish silly chain email. But this one was a real exception! And for a couple of reasons: It was a pleasure reading this although prolix, and that my friend Rohit Patkar sent me this. Rohit has also been in my good books (of etiquette) for his email habits – sheer quality and nothing else. For other things, he is an atheist. Read on… View full article »

prasadgupte | 1999-2012