An online commonplace book
This is the first line/verse from Beowulf that captured me:
I have never seen so impressive or large
an assembly of strangers. Stoutness of heart,
bravery not banishment, must have brought you to
Hrothgar.”
Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. London: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc
“Stoutness of heart” depicts strength, resilience. Something to aspire to.
If you’re looking to read more classics this year, Seamus Heaney‘s translation of Beowulf is an approachable entry point.
There are many reasons to learn about India. India is the world’s second most populous country and has a rich and diverse culture. It has a long and fascinating history, and has made significant contributions to science, mathematics, literature, and the arts. Understanding India and its people can give you a greater appreciation for the diversity of the world and can broaden your perspective. Additionally, India is an emerging economic and political power, so learning about the country can help you to understand the global landscape.
OpenAI. ChatGPT. Accessed on January 15, 2023. Available at https://chat.openai.com
Certainly not a response with the level of detail and nuance as Shruti Rajagopalan’s conversation with Dallas Floer. But still an important tool to experiment with.
Also, GTP stands for Generative Text Prediction.
From Ishiguro’s Top 10 movies of all time entry on the Criterion Channel site. Ishiguro wrote the screenplay for the modern version of Ikiru – Living, which released in select American theaters this weekend.
Read his list in full here.
I first saw Ikiru when I was a child growing up in England, and it had a profound influence on me. That’s not just because it was one of the very few Japanese movies I was able to see at that time, but because it said something really encouraging to me, something I held with me all through my student years and as I was becoming an adult. It told me you don’t have to be a superstar. You don’t have to do something magnificent that the world applauds you for. Chances are that life is going to be relatively ordinary—at least that’s what I had imagined for myself. For most of us, life is very circumscribed and humble and frustrating; it’s a daily grind. But with some supreme effort, even a small life can turn into something satisfying and magnificent.
Kazuo Ishiguro, January 6, 2023. https://www.criterion.com/current/top-10-lists/518-kazuo-ishiguros-top-10
Can we muster a supreme effort today? And build on that tomorrow, if granted?
Ideas of India became one of my favorite podcasts in 2022.
In the 2022 in Review episode producer Dallas Floer’s posed the question to Shruti Rajagopalan.
Why should we talk about India more?
Three summaries from their conversation:
Read the full section of Shruti Rajagopalan and Dallas Floer‘s conversation below:
Why Learn About India?
FLOER: I have a general question—and I think this rounds out this first part of the discussion nicely—but why should we talk about India more? Why should more people be listening to, not just your expertise, but anyone who spends their time doing research and talking about India?
RAJAGOPALAN: The world demographics are changing, and I think we are not good at looking at the 30-, 40-year horizon, because of Twitter and all the other things we talked about. We’re so in the moment of what’s happening now. If you look at global demographics—and I recently started a Substack, it’s called “Get Down and Shruti,” and the first post was on this topic—the developed world is depopulating, or at least, the fertility rates are dropping quite rapidly. In fact, China will start depopulating next year, and it’s so far the largest country in terms of population.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: India will not depopulate until 2065. India’s population, which is right now 1.4 billion, will continue to grow and then start to go down only in 2065 when it peaks. Over the next 40 years, China will lose a quarter of a billion people and India will gain a quarter of a billion people. That’s like the size of Brazil and three-quarters the size of the United States, so that’s big numbers. What this means is India is very young; it’s only going to get younger as the world gets older.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: One in five young people in the world actually live in India, and half the Indian population is below 25. Even for very self-serving reasons, if people have nothing to do with India, the global talent pool, the workforce is going to come from India. And as India starts peaking, then it’s going to come from Africa. That’s where we need to pay more attention. The world just doesn’t pay enough attention to India or Africa, so that’s the big picture.
The other part of it is, India is also a subcontinent. It’s 1.4 billion people. It’s stitched together as a collection of people with different—it’s actually, religiously, the most diverse place in the world. It’s linguistically the most diverse place in the world. There’s, of course, caste heterogeneity. For these reasons, it’s difficult to understand India. Thinking that India is your buddy from accounting or IT in your office, that’s like one type of India and one type of Indian that you may meet in your social circle or in the neighborhood or in the office place.
India is actually very diverse and requires a lot of context to actually understand. If the future is India, and you’re going to have more people coming to universities, and there’s a good chance that some of the older listeners in this episode, their children end up marrying an Indian they met in college.
FLOER: Sure.
RAJAGOPALAN: Even if the base reason is you don’t want to make a cultural boo-boo in front of your future in-laws, you’ve got to know some cultural context. You’ve got to know a little bit more about India. I think, for various reasons, of course, if you’re a university or if you’re hiring, if you work in the AI or tech space, all the talent there is coming from India. So for different groups, India might be more or less relevant. If you work in the climate space, you should really focus on India. It’s going to be one of the largest-growing spaces, which means we need to worry about technology and how to control carbon emissions. It’s different for different people, but I think everyone should pay more attention to India.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: More generally, the baseline has to increase. And then, depending on what you do, you may want to zero in on certain kinds of books and podcasts and experts. Most Indians now have access to electricity. About 800 million-plus Indians have access to a smartphone, so now they’re on the internet. We are slowly getting to a point where the internet will also get dominated by Indians. In terms of natural language processing, more people sound like me than sound like you, Dallas. More people will spell like me than spell like you and so on.
I think, with an overwhelming number of Indians on the internet, people will also see that landscape change faster than immigration or them visiting India. Their Netflix front page will change quite dramatically and so on.
Floer, Dallas. (2022, December 22). Ideas of India Podcast, episode 69: 2022 in Review [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://ideasofindia.libsyn.com/eoy-2022
Read the full transcript in full here
Listen to the podcast episode in full here:
A sad day for football. A sad day for the world.
By all measures, Gianluca was a gentleman. He lived out the lesson Don Angelo taught him at 10 years old. A lesson we could all embrace.
At the oratorio, Don Angelo, a football-loving priest, supervised our games. He wasn’t a coach, just a man who loved the game, with the special gift of knowing how to relate to kids and sort out the squabbles. Come to think of it, he was the only adult I worked with as a boy to whom teaching values was more important than teaching football.
I remember one day when he was refereeing a game and a player on the opposing team passed the ball back to the goalkeeper, who slipped and fell over. All he could do was lie on the ground and watch the ball roll past him into the back of the net. I was ten and I suppose I had an undeveloped sense of right and wrong, but it seemed unfair that the goal should stand. The next time the ball was in our area, I handled it blatantly, trying intentionally to give away a penalty. It was my way of leveling things.
Don Angelo saw it rather differently. He rushed over, picked up the ball and began to lecture me. ‘No! We don’t do things like that! he said. ‘I know why you did it. You didn’t think the previous goal should stand and you wanted to even things up. You think this is sportsmanship? This isn’t sportsmanship. Sportsmanship is accepting what happens on the pitch, whether it’s to your advantage or disadvantage…‘
To this day, it’s probably the only ‘life lesson’ I was explicitly taught on a football pitch (apart from the ones I picked up indirectly). Don Angelo illustrated how, in life, when things happen that are beyond your control, you have to accept them and move on. You can’t right a wrong by committing another wrong. It’s not the most profound message, but it stuck with me all these years because such moments were rare.
Vialli, Gianluca, Marcotti, Gabriele The Italian Job: A Journey to the Heart of Two Great Footballing Cultures. London: Bantam Press, 2007. (see page 70,71)
First appearing in his Essay “On Living in an Atomic Age“. Lewis answers the question – how to live in a time of uncertainty?
Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plagued visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat at night….The first action to take is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb come when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
Baxter M. Jason, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022. (see page 14)
Whatever 2023 brings, let’s heed these words.
Do human things. Live.
Happy New Year!
I think reading and annotating books is thing I do best – it’s my most sharply honed skill. But that in itself has no market value, even though it has great value to me personally. And I find that difference interesting.
Jacobs, Alan. Homebound Symphony, my skillz. December 13, 2022.
I’d argue reading and annotating books does have market value. It’s the soil that allows all the other “market value” skills to grow from.
To be a professor, writer, and observer, one must read and capture thoughts in the margins well. Honing this skill must lead to new, important insights, no?
Hogsmeade looked like a Christmas card; the little thatched cottages and shops were all covered in a layer of crisp snow; there were holly wreaths on the doors and strings of enchanted candles hanging in the trees.
Rowling, J.K.. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Merry Christmas everyone. Thanks for reading.
Now learn about velocity; learn how the air makes things twist. Look it up! Learn it! Learn as much as you can, for learning is the very opposite of death! Wonderful!” Grandpa was the only person Vita knew who seemed to spark electricity when he talked, as if he struck against the world like flint against steel.
– Vita’s Grandpa
Rundell, Katherine. The Good Thieves. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2019 (see page 13)
Each Katherine Rundell book contains hidden bits of advice. As the new year approaches, remember, so much of learning is found in looking things up.
He would argue that he simply demands high standards from everybody, from nobody more than himself, his commitment to self-improvement having made him the fifth-most prolific striker in Argentinian history, scoring 200 goals in 260 appearances for San Lorenzo and 21 in 29 for the national side. “I invented the Sanfigo,” he said, “a big cage with a wall the size of a goal that I’d use for practicing, divided into squares of eighty centimeters [30 inches] by eighty centimeters. The most important corners were the lower ones, la ratonera, the mouse’s nest. Practicing everyday was fundamental. Hitting the lower corners is safer than the upper corners, but you need to hone your precision because you’re giving twenty-one feet to the goalkeeper. So I’d need to know how to aim and hit those lower corners, from every position.”
Wilson, Jonathan. Angels With Dirty Faces: How Argentinian Football Defined a Nation and Changed the Game Forever. New York: Nation Books, 2016 (see page 108)
The World Cup ticks on.
José Sanfilippo is an Argentine striker you also probably never heard of. His training methods were ahead of their time. Long before Eddie Lewis‘s TOCA touch trainer, José Sanfilippo created the Sanfigo to hone his ball striking technique.
I wonder what Gonçalo Ramos’s training methods are?
Floodlights and Goalposts 