Book Worm

At the beginning of the First World War, 27-year-old British soldier Henry Tandey was serving with the 5th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. On September 28, 1914 a weary German soldier wandered into Tandey’s line of fire. The German soldier was wounded and did not even attempt to raise his own rifle. Tandey chose not to shoot. The German soldier saw him lower his rifle and nodded his thanks before wandering off.

The German soldier was Adolf Hitler.

Historical research throws serious doubts on whether the incident actually ever occurred. Question is how do you even prove or disprove it? And that’s the dilemma every historian faces — what to accept as historical facts and what to discard as apocryphal account.
[Read more…] about 📚 The Lessons of History

None of the history classes in my school answered what is thought to be one of the biggest and most important questions about human civilization —

Why do some societies advance so much faster and further than others? In other words —

…why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

Jared Diamond, in his book, argues that societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion. These were the people who developed potent weapons of war and adventured on sea and land to conquer other cultures.

And this early advantage in food production was conferred to these societies because of their geographical milieu. Which means the sequence of events that eventually shaped the modern world, can all be tied back to environmental factors.
[Read more…] about 📚 Guns, Germs, and Steel

What’s your favourite book?

I found one of the best ways to answer this question is to recall which book you have gifted the most.

I always have three copies of Summerhill sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be gifted. The book came as a recommendation from Naval Ravikant — a silicon valley entrepreneur.

The methods suggested in the book will make you uncomfortable because few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children’s happiness than for their success.
[Read more…] about 📚 Summerhill

Who is considered the greatest writer in the English Language?

William Shakespeare.

His work Antony and Cleopatra contains some of the finest poetry. It was inspired by Thomas North’s 1579 English translation of Plutarch’s Lives. To say that Shakespeare took inspiration from North’s work would be an understatement.
[Read more…] about 📚 The Elements of Eloquence

In recent months, as the world’s second-best healthcare system (Italy) got crushed with the corona pandemic, the doctors faced an unprecedented dilemma that they were never trained for — triaging the Covid patients, i.e., deciding who gets a bed in the hospital and who’s left to die.

A news article reported in March —

The most devastating medical crisis in Italy since World War Two is forcing doctors, patients, and their families to make decisions that Marco Resta, a former military doctor, said he has not experienced even in the Kosovo war.

How do you decide who gets the ventilator and who doesn’t? How does one measure the value of human life? I have no clue how even to begin answering this question. But as Daniel Kahneman observed that humans, while thinking about a tough problem, often replace the original question with an easier one.

Bill Bryson, in his book Body: A Guide for Occupants, starts the text by exploring the easier question – what is the value of a human body?
[Read more…] about 📚 The Body : A Guide for Occupants