SHARED TALKS

School shooting in Kauhajoki - Eleven dead, many injured; Where are we heading?

2008-09-23T10:55:00.000-07:00

Eleven people, apparently all students, have been killed in a shooting incident and fire at a vocational school in Kauhajoki in Western Finland. Several others have been injured. Details are still sketchy, but apparently a 22-year-old man dressed in black and wearing a ski-mask entered the school carrying a large bag, and opened fire on students at around 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning. An eyewitness spoke of many rounds of automatic fire in a ground-floor classroom containing adult students taking an exam. Police at the scene immediately reported several fatalities, but the true death-toll was only made clear some hours after the incident. The building has been evacuated, and the gunman - thought to have acted alone - shot himself in the head after his killing spree.

The man, named as Matti Juhani Saari, was rushed to hospital in Tampere, but died at around 5 p.m., so becoming the 11th fatality of the incident. It is believed that Saari shot nine people, and that one other fatality may have succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning following a fire that broke out during the shooting. At least one person with gunshot wounds remains in a serious condition in hospital. Most of the injured persons suffered only minor injuries, in many cases while trying to make their escape from the school building. Around 150 students and staff-members were in the building at the time of the shooting. Part of the school caught fire, possibly through the actions of the gunman, but firefighters put the blaze out.

As noted above, the fire may have been the cause for at least one fatality, and police have not completely ruled out the possibility of further casualties coming to light. The tragic incident is bound to re-open wounds from last November's hugely traumatic shooting at Jokela High School, when a deranged youth killed eight before turning his gun on himself. It is also certain to prompt discussion of firearms and their availability - the country has one of the highest levels of gun ownership in the world but has hitherto been spared the sort of firearms mayhem more traditionally associated with the United States. Equally, given the close proximity of the Jokela shootings, and the memory of the similar death and destruction wrought by another troubled young man in 2002 at the Myyrmanni shopping mall bombing, it will almost inevitably provoke analysis of what is wrong with Finnish society in general and its young males in particular, and a search for ways of preventing the kind of marginalisation that can lead to mind-numbing acts such as these.

In a grim reminder of what happened in Jokela in November last year, reports are already surfacing of videos on YouTube allegedly depicting a young man from Kauhajoki firing pistols at a shooting range. As is now all too well known, a similar connection was made with the young man who opened fire at Jokela High School. Members of the Finnish government have met in special session to assess the situation. The Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE reports that Education Minister Sari Sarkomaa, Minister of the Interior Anne Holmlund, and Minister of Health and Social Services Paula Risikko are meeting to discuss the shooting in Kauhajoki. The chairs of the various parliamentary groups as well as police and other officials are also to be present. (Adapted from Helsingin Sanomat News)

Everyone accepts that this news is very tragic and unfortunate, but it is the time to think about why such incidents are recurring all over the world time and again. I was in Finland when last year, a similar incident took place in Jokela, a nearby town of Helsinki. For me, the shooter did not seem like a maniac, but a depressed philosopher. I was stunned when I read that letter by him. I am posting that letter again here, so that you can read it and see how a person with such intellectual insight could turn to be a suicide attacker. It is a question that perhaps we as sane people should start answering.

-----------------------------------

Jokela_High_School_Massacre

Name: Pekka-Eric Auvinen

Age: 18Male from Finland.

I am a cynical existentialist, antihuman humanist, antisocial socialdarwinist, realistic idealist and godlike atheist.

SI VIS PACEM, PARA BELLUM! JUSTITIA SUUM CUIQUE DISTRIBUIT! SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!

I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.

You might ask yourselves, why did I do this and what do I want. Well, most of you are too arrogant and closed-minded to understand... You will proprably say me that I am"insane", "crazy", "psychopath", "criminal" or crap like that. No, the truth is that I am just an animl, a human, an individual, a dissident.

I have had enough. I don't want to be part of this fucked up society. Like some other wise people have said in the past, human race is not worth fighting for or saving... only worth killing. But... When my enemies will run and hide in fear when mentioning my name... When the gangsters of the corrupted governments have been shot in the streets... When the rule of idioracy and the democratic system has been replaced with justice... When intelligent people are finally free and rule the society instead of the idiocratic rule of majority... In that great day of deliverance, you will know what I want.

Long live the revolution... revolution against the system, which enslaves not only the majority of weak-minded masses but also the small minority of strong-minded and intelligent individuals! If we want to live in a different world, we must act. We must rise against the enslaving, corrupted and totalitarian regimes and overthrow the tyrants, gangsters and the rule of idiocracy. I can't alone change much but hopefully my actions will inspire all the intelligent people of the world and start some sort of revolution against the current systems. The system discriminating naturality and justice, is my enemy. The people living in the world of delusion and supporting this system are my enemies.

I am ready to die for a cause I know is right, just and true... even if I would lose or the battle would be only remembered as evil... I will rather fight and die than live a long and unhappy life.

And remember that this is my war, my ideas and my plans. Don't blame anyone else for my actions than myself. Don't blame my parents or my friends. I told nobody about my plans and I always kept them inside my mind only. Don't blame the movies I see, the music I hear, the games I play or the books I read. No, they had nothing to do with this. This is my war: one man war against humanity, governments and weak-minded masses of the world! No mercy for the scum of the earth! HUMANITY IS OVERRATED! It's time to put NATURAL SELECTION & SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST back on tracks!

Justice renders to everyone his due.Country: FinlandOccupation: Unemployed Philosopher, OutcastCompanies: Human Race (evolved one step above though)Interests and Hobbies: Existentialism, Freedom, Truth, Misantrophy, Social / Personality Psychology, Evolution Science, Political Incorrectness, Women, BDSM, Guns (I love you Catherine), Shooting, Computer Games, Sarcasm, Irony, Mass / Serial Killers, Macabre Art, Black Comedy, AbsurdismMovies and Shows: The Matrix, A View To A Kill, Falling Down, Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs, Last Man Standing, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Butcher MD (aka Zombie Holocaust), Saw 1-3, Lord Of War, The Deer Hunter, True Romance, The Untouchables, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Idiocracy, They Live, Apocalypse Now, End Of Days, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Dr. Strangelove, House MD (TV), Monty Python, TV Documentaries Relating To HistoryMusic: KMFDM, Rammstein, Eisbrecher, Nine Inch Nails, Grendel, Impaled Nazarene, Macabre, Deathstars, The Prodigy, Combichrist, Godsmack, Slayer, Children Of Bodom, Alice Cooper, Sturmgeist, Suicide Commando, Hatebreed, Suffocation, Terrorizer

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams: A Video Watched By Millions within a month

2008-09-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

If you want to download his book with transcript of his more than 2 hours long lecture, please visit: http://amazing-books.blogspot.com

I Have A Dream

2008-09-20T07:04:00.000-07:00

"I Have a Dream," Address at March on Washington

Probably the most famous speech of our time.

"I Have A Dream" is the popular name given to the historic public speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., when he spoke of his desire for a future where blacks and whites among others would coexist harmoniously as equals. King's delivery of the speech on August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Delivered to over two hundred thousand civil rights supporters, the speech is often considered to be one of the greatest and most notable speeches in history and was ranked the top American speech of the 20th century by a 1999 poll of scholars of public address. According to U.S. Congressman John Lewis, who also spoke that day as the President of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, "Dr. King had the power, the ability and the capacity to transform those steps on the Lincoln Memorial into a modern day pulpit. By speaking the way he did, he educated, he inspired, he informed not just the people there, but people throughout America and unborn generations." Here is the text as well as video of that poweful speech!

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. [Applause]

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. [Audience:] (My Lord) One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, (My Lord) [Applause] the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we've come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, (Yeah) they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." [Sustained applause]

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. (My Lord) [Applause. Laughter] (Sure enough) We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, (Yes) a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom (Yes) and the security of justice. [Sustained applause]

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time (My Lord) to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. [Applause] Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. (Now) Now is the time (Now) to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time [Applause] to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time [Applause] to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. (Right) Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. [Applause] There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: in the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. [Applause] We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. [Applause] And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" (Never)

We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied [Applause] as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. [Applause] We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "for whites only." [Applause] We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. (Yes) [Applause] No, no, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. [Applause]

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. (My Lord) Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution (Yes) and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, (Yes) go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. (Yes) Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. [Applause]

I say to you today, my friends, [Applause] so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. (Yes) It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day (Yes) this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." (Yes) [Applause]

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, (Well) sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream (Well) [Applause] that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. (My Lord) I have a dream today. [Applause]

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, (Yes) with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification," (Yes) one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. [Applause]

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, (Yes) every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, (Yes) and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. (Yes)

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. (Yes) With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith (Yes) we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. (Talk about it) With this faith (My Lord) we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. [Applause] This will be the day, [Applause continues] this will be the day when all of God’s children (Yes) will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country, ’tis of thee, (Yes) sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, (Yes)From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring (Yes) from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. (Yes. All right)Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. (Well)Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. (Yes) But not only that: Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. (Yes)Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. (Yes) Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. [Applause] From every mountainside, [Applause] let freedom ring.

And when this happens, [Applause continues] when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, (Yes) we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! (Yes) Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! [Applause]

Why we love someone and not the other?

2008-08-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

The Reason Behind Love:)

If you are a normal adult, it is very likely that you have loved someone deeply at least once in your lifetime. You may also have noticed that you loved that person without any specific reason. And you could not love someone else though there could have been reasons. Well, it is wrong to deduce there is reason to love.

Nobody has actually been able to explain why we love? Of course, we love our family, job, nation etc..but very different is the love with someone who has a seat in your heart. Even great scientists, leaders, artists are normally said to have their energy of love transmuted into creation. Why love have so much power?

Why leaves are green and beautiful? 'Because of chlorophyll,' scientists explain. Still we are not satisfied with this answer. In the case of love also such explanations are available, but Helen Fisher not just tells about the Chemistry behind it, she explains the emotional and psychological aspects as well. Here is the speech on the science of love that she deleivered at the TED conference in US. Enjoy!

An Inspirational short Zen Story: Maybe

2008-08-03T07:53:00.000-07:00

There was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.

“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

Our Most Popular Posts

2008-08-03T06:14:00.000-07:00

1. Speech Series

- A Stroke of Insight: Neuroanatomist Jill Taylor's sensational speech about her stroke which made her realise the realities of existence.

- The Fringe Benefits of Failure and Importance of Imagination: Harry Potter Series writer JK Rowling's speech at Harvard University, USA, 5 June 2008.

- Find What You Love: Apple Computer chief and scientist Steve Jobs tells about his life and remembers the days when he used to collect coca cola bottles for five dollars.

- Great Expectations: The Microsoft Cooperation's chief Bill Gates' speech on Harvard University,USA, June 7, 2007

- Banishing the World of war and Coercion: JF Kennedy speech at American University, 10 June 1963

2. Success/ Self-Improvement Series

-The 13 Principles of Success by Nepolean Hill (Post Series)
First Principle: Intense Will or Desire
Second Principle: Faith, visualization of, and belief in attainment of desire
Third Principle: -

3. Inspirational Quotes Series

- 19 Tips for Successful life By Dalai Lama
- Chanakya's Quotes on life, success God and Women

4. Great Personality Series
- Socrates: the philosopher who took poison for truth

5. Short Inspirational Story Series

6. Jokes

Achieve Success with Auto Suggestion

2008-08-03T04:39:00.000-07:00

Have you read the all time classic 'Think and Grow Rich' by Napoleon Hill? Perhaps yes, because this book has been an all time classic since its publication. If not, this is the right time for you to learn the secrets of success that Hill has gathered spending more than 25 years and studying at least 2500 top successful people from around the world. So what are those (13) great principles of success? SharedTalks is going to present a summary of this book regularly for 13 weeks. Wait, read and give feedback.

1. The first principal for succes is an intense will or Desire of Achievement click here to read about it if you have not read it yet.

2. The second principle for success is Faith or visualization and belief in attainment of desire. Click here if you have not read it yet.

Now we are talking about the third principle of success: AUTO SUGGESTION.

The main idea of auto suggestion is that you should be success concious and at the time of hardships you shouldn't dismantle your bolts. If you want to become, for example, a writer, but you are a waiter now, don't suggest yourself that you are just a waiter and can never become a writer. Instead, think this way, 'Well I am a waiter now and it is a transit period for me. One day, I will definitely become a writer. To be a writer, I have to pass through all odds. All great writers have come through very low positions..well.' The meaning is not to say that a waiter is a low profile job. It is just an example. If you are a student and want to be a waiter in a five star hotel, then you should suggest yourself exactly that way.

Hill believes Skepticism, in connection with ALL new ideas, is characteristic of all human beings. But if you follow the instructions outlined, your skepticism will soon be replaced by belief, and this, in turn, will soon become crystallized into ABSOLUTE FAITH.

Our inner power is immense,but we have made so many walls and reasons to not to use it. We often think, 'who the hell I am to do this?' That is why combating the inner critic is much more important than defeating the outer critics.

Our next post will focus on Sucess and the importance of specialised knowledge.

Chanakya Quotes about Life, Success, God and women!

2008-07-19T02:52:00.000-07:00

Chanakya was an Indian Saint as well as a philosopher. He was born 350 BC and died 275 BC. His words of wisdom are widely cherished in India and other south asian countires including Nepal and Srilanka. In the west also, Chanakya has been studied a lot. Here are a few quotes by Chanakya which are really inspiration and touch your heart!

1. One should save his money against hard times, save his wife at the sacrifice of his riches, but invariably one should save his soul even at the sacrifice of his wife and riches.

2.Do not inhabit a country where you are not respected, cannot earn your livelihood, have no friends, or cannot acquire knowledge.

3. Test a servant while in the discharge of his duty, a relative in difficulty, a friend in adversity, and a wife in misfortune.

4. Women have hunger two-fold, shyness four-fold, daring six-fold, and lust eight-fold as compared to men.

5. Separation from the wife, disgrace from one's own people, an enemy saved in battle, service to a wicked king, poverty, and a mismanaged assembly: these six kinds of evils, if afflicting a person, burn him even without fire.

6. They are fearless who remain always alert.

7.These five: the life-span, the type of work, wealth, learning and the time of one's death are determined while one is in the womb.

8. When one is consumed by the sorrows of life, three things give him relief: offspring, a wife, and the company of the Lord's devotees.

9. A young wife is poison to an aged man.

10. There is no disease (so destructive) as lust; no enemy like infatuation; no fire
like wrath; and no happiness like spiritual knowledge.

11.Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.

12.He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.

13.Once you start a working on something, don't be afraid of failure and don't abandon it. People who work sincerely are the happiest.

14.The biggest guru-mantra is: never share your secrets with anybody. It will destroy you.

15.The world's biggest power is the youth and beauty of a woman.

Do you agree with these?

Related article: 19 Tips for Successful Life by HH Dalai Lama

The Link Between Faith And Success

2008-07-19T02:16:00.000-07:00

VISUALIZATION OF, AND BELIEF IN ATTAINMENT OF DESIRE

Have you read the all time classic 'Think and Grow Rich' by Napoleon Hill? Perhaps yes, because it is the Bible to those who want success in their lives. If not, this is the right time for you to learn the secrets of success that Hill has gathered spending more than 25 years and studying at least 2500 top successful people from around the world. So what are those (13) great principles of success? SharedTalks is going to present a summary of this book regularly for 13 weeks. Wait, read and give feedback. Two weeks ago SharedTalks presented the first principal for succes which is Desire. If you missed that click here

Amongst his 13 proved principles of success, Hill presents that faith in what one desires is the second key. Emotions are really important for achieving success. According to him, the emotions of FAITH, LOVE, and SEX are the most powerful of all the major positive emotions.

How To Develop Faith?

Developing faith here is not identical or related with generally understood terms of religious faith. Here, the faith is for the thing what you desire or its attainment. Hill describes that repetition of affirmation of orders to our subconscious mind is the only known method of voluntary development of the emotion of faith.

A mind dominated by positive emotions, becomes a favorable abode for the state of mind known as faith. A mind so dominated may, at will, give the subconscious mind instructions, which it will accept and act upon immediately. FAITH IS A STATE OF MIND WHICH MAY BE INDUCED BY AUTO-SUGGESTION

Hill believes that the FAITH is the “eternal elixir” which gives life, power, and action to the impulse of thought!

Hill says, "Taking inventory of mental assets and liabilities, you will discover that your greatest weakness is lack of self-confidence. This handicap can be surmounted, and timidity translated into courage, through the aid of the principle of autosuggestion.

Normally beople do not get success because they do not believe in it. They just think that the goal is too high for them and so that is unattainable. Which is a real misery.

The law of auto-suggestion, through which any person may rise to altitudes of achievement which stagger the imagination, is well described in the following verse:

“If you think you are beaten, you are,
If you think you dare not, you don’t
If you like to win, but you think you can’t,
It is almost certain you won’t.
“If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost
For out of the world we find,
Success begins with a fellow’s will—
It’s all in the state of mind.

The power of love is also very immense. Hill gives an example of successful author Charles Dickens. Dickens' began by pasting labels on blacking pots. The tragedy of his first love penetrated the depths of his soul, and converted him into one of the world’s truly great authors. That “experience” was mixed with the emotions of sorrow and LOVE. For Abraham lincoln's success also there was a lady behind it- Anne Rutledge, the only woman whom he ever truly loved, but could not marry her.

Next week's post will focus on auto suggestion. Check it out!!

19 Tips for Successful life By Dalai Lama

2008-07-12T13:20:00.000-07:00

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

3. Follow the three Rs:
Respect for self
Respect for others and
Responsibility for all your actions.

4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

7. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

8. Spend some time alone every day.

9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values.

10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to
enjoy it a second time.

12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up
the past.

14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.

15. Be gentle with the earth.

16. Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.

17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds
your need for each other.

18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Socrates: the philosopher who took poison for the truth

2008-07-12T13:10:00.000-07:00

‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing’

Socrates lived through times of great political upheaval in his birthplace of Athens, a city which would eventually make him a scapegoat for its troubles and ultimately demand his life. Much of what is known about Socrates comes through the works of his one time pupil Plato, for Socrates himself was an itinerant philosopher who taught solely by means of public discussion and oratory and never wrote any philosophical works of his own.

Unlike the Greek philosophers before him, Socrates was less concerned with abstract metaphysical ponderings than with practical questions of how we ought to live, and what the good life for man might be. Consequently, he is often hailed as the inventor of that branch of philosophy known as ethics. It is precisely his concern with ethical matters that often led him into conflict with the city elders, who accused him of corrupting the minds of the sons of the wealthy with revolutionary and unorthodox ideas.

Socrates was certainly a maverick, often claiming to the consternation of his interlocutors that the only thing he was sure of was his own ignorance. Indeed much of his teaching consisted in asking his audience to define various common ideas and notions, such as ‘beauty’, or ‘the good’, or ‘piety’, only to show through reasoned argument that all of the proposed definitions and common conceptions lead to paradox or absurdity. Some of his contemporaries thought this technique disingenuous, and that Socrates knew more than he let on.

However, Socrates’ method was meant to provide salutary lessons in the dangers of uncritical acceptance of orthodoxy. He often railed against, and made dialectic victims of, those who claimed to have certain knowledge of some particular subject. It is chiefly through the influence of Socrates that philosophy developed into the modern discipline of continuous critical reflection.

The greatest danger to both society and the individual, we learn from Socrates, is the suspension of critical thought. Loved by the city’s aristocratic youth, Socrates inevitably developed many enemies throughout his lifetime.

In his seventieth year, or thereabouts, after Athens had gone through several changes of leadership and a period of failing fortunes, Socrates was brought to trial on charges of ‘corrupting the youth’ and ‘not believing in the city gods’. It would seem that the charges were brought principally to persuade Socrates to renounce his provocative public speaking and convince the citizens of Athens that the new leadership had a tight rein on law and order. With a plea of guilty he might perhaps have walked away from the trial and lived out the rest of his life as a private citizen.

However, in characteristic style, he robustly defended himself, haranguing his accusers and claiming that god himself had sent him on his mission to practice and teach philosophy. When asked, upon being found guilty, what penalty he thought he should receive; Socrates mocked the court by suggesting a trifling fine of only 30 minae.

Outraged, a greater majority voted for Socrates to be put to death by the drinking of hemlock than had originally voted him guilty.

Unperturbed, Socrates readily agreed to abide by the laws of his city and forbade his family and friends from asking for a stay of execution. Socrates’ trial, death and final speeches are wonderfully captured by Plato in his dialogues Apology, Crito and Phaedo.

(Adapted from Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers)

Banishing the World of War and Coercion

2008-07-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

John F. Kennedy
Commencement Address at American UniversityWashington, D.C.June 10, 1963

"President Anderson,
members of the faculty, board of trustees, distinguished guests, my old colleague, Senator Bob Byrd, who has earned his degree through many years of attending night law school, while I am earning mine in the next 30 minutes, ladies and gentlemen:
"It is with great pride that I participate in this ceremony of the American University, sponsored by the Methodist Church, founded by Bishop John Fletcher Hurst, and first opened by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. This is a young and growing university, but it has already fulfilled Bishop Hurst's enlightened hope for the study of history and public affairs in a city devoted to the making of history and the conduct of the public's business. By sponsoring this institution of higher learning for all who wish to learn, whatever their color or their creed, the Methodists of this area and the Nation deserve the Nations thanks, and I commend all those who are today graduating.

"Professor Woodrow Wilson once said that every man sent out from a university should be a man of this nation as well as a man of his time, and I am confident that the men and women who carry the honor.
"'There are few earthly things more beautiful than a university,' wrote John Masefield in his tribute to English universities - and his words are equally true today. He did not refer to spires and towers, to campus greens and ivied walls. He admired the splendid beauty of the university, he said, because it was 'a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see.'
"I have therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived - yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.

"What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

"I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generation yet unborn.

"Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles - which can only destroy and never create - is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
"I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war - and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.

"Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament - and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude - as individuals and as a Nation - for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward - by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.

"First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable - that mankind is doomed - that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.

"We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade - therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be a big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable - and we believe they can do it again.
"I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream . I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal.

"Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace - based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions - on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace - no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process - a way of solving problems.

"With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are within families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor - it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors.

"So let us persevere. Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable. By defining our goal more clearly, by making it seem more manageable and less remote, we can help all peoples to see it, to draw hope from it, and to move irresistibly toward it.

"Second: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims - such as the allegation that 'American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars...that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union...[and that] the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries...[and]to achieve world domination...by means of aggressive wars.'

"Truly, as it was written long ago: 'The wicked flee when no man pursueth.' Yet it is sad to read these Soviet statements - to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning - a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.

"No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements - in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.

"Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other. And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least 20 million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation's territory, including nearly two thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland - a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.

"Today, should total war ever break out again - no matter how - our two countries would become the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours. And even in the cold war, which brings burdens and dangers to so many nations, including this Nation's closest allies - our two countries bear the heaviest burdens. For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counter weapons.
"In short, both the United Sates and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. Agreements to this end are in the interests of the Soviet Union as well as ours - and even the most hostile nations can be relied upon to accept and keep those treaty obligations, and only those treaty obligations, which are in their own interest.

"So, let us not be blind to our differences - But let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
"Third: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the cold war, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had the history of the last 18 years been different.
"We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists' interest to agree on a genuine peace. Above all, while defending our own vital interest, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy - or of a collective death-wish for the world.

"To secure these ends, America's weapons are non provocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.

"For we can seek a relaxation of tension without relaxing our guard. And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove that we are resolute. We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded. We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people - but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.

"Meanwhile, we seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system - a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating conditions under which arms can finally be abolished.

"At the same time we seek to keep peace inside the non-Communist world, where many nations, all of them our friends, are divided over issues which weaken Western unity, which invite Communist intervention or which threaten to erupt into war. Our efforts in West New Guinea, in the Congo, in the Middle East, and in the Indian subcontinent, have been persistent and patient despite criticism from both sides. We have also tried to set an example for others - by seeking to adjust small but significant differences with our own closest neighbors in Mexico and in Canada.

"Speaking of other nations, I wish to make one point clear. We are bound to many nations by alliances. Those alliances exist because our concern and theirs substantially overlap. Our commitment to defend Western Europe and West Berlin, for example, stands undiminished because of the identity of our vital interests. The United States will make no deal with the Soviet Union at the expense of other nations and other peoples, not merely because they are our partners, but also because their interests and ours converge.

"Our interests converge, however, not only in defending the frontiers of freedom, but in pursuing the paths of peace. It is our hope - and the purpose of allied policies - to convince the Soviet Union that she, too, should let each nation choose its own future, so long as that choice does not interfere with the choices of others. The communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.

"This will require a new effort to achieve world law - a new context for world discussions. It will require increased understanding between the Soviets and ourselves. And increased understanding will require increased contact and communication. One step in this direction is the proposed arrangement for a direct line between Moscow and Washington, to avoid on each side the dangerous delays, misunderstandings, and misreadings of the other's actions which might occur at a time of crisis.

"We have also been talking in Geneva about he other first-step measures of arms control designed to limit the intensity of the arms race and to reduce the risks of accidental war. Our primary long range interest in Geneva, however, is general and complete disarmament - designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms. The pursuit of

disarmament has been an effort of this Government since the 1920's. It has been urgently sought by the past three administrations. And however dim the prospects may be today, we intend to continue this effort - to continue it in order that all countries, including our own, can better grasp what the problems and possibilities of disarmament are.
"The one major area of these negotiations where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is in a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests. The conclusion of such a treaty, so near and yet so far, would check the spiraling arms race in one of its most dangerous areas. it would place the nuclear powers in a position to deal more effectively with one of the greatest hazards which man faces in 1963, the further spread of nuclear arms. It would increase our security - it would decrease the prospects of war. Surely this goal is sufficiently important to require our steady pursuit, yielding neither to the temptation to give up the whole effort or the temptation to give up our insistence on vital and responsible safeguards.

"I am taking this opportunity, therefore, to announce two important decisions in this regard.
"First: Chairman Khrushchev, Prime Minister Macmillan, and I have agreed that high-level discussions will shortly begin in Moscow looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty. Our hopes must be tempered with the caution of history - but with our hopes go the hopes of all mankind.

"Second: To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve it.

"Finally, my fellow Americans let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our won society must justify and support our efforts abroad. We must show it in the dedication of our own lives - as many of you who are graduating today will have a unique opportunity to do, by serving without pay in the Peace Corps abroad or in the proposed National Service Corps here at home.

"But wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because the freedom is incomplete.
"It is the responsibility of the executive branch at all levels of government - local, state, and national - to provide and protect that freedom for all of our citizens by all means within their authority. It is the responsibility of the legislative branch at all levels, wherever that authority is not now adequate, to make it adequate. And it is the responsibility of all citizens in all sections of this country to respect the right of all others and to respect the law of the land.

"All this is not unrelated to world peace. 'When a man's ways please the Lord,' the Scriptures tell us, 'he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.' And is not peace, the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights - the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation - the right to breathe air as nature provided it - the right of future generation to a healthy existence.

"While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both. No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can - if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and if it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers - offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.

"The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough - more than enough - of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on - not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace."

The 13 Principles of Success : Think and Grow Rich By Napoleon Hill

2008-07-01T13:55:00.000-07:00

Have you read the all time classic 'Think and Grow Rich' by Napoleon Hill? Perhaps yes, because it is the Bible to those who want success in their lives. If not, this is the right time for you to learn the secrets of success that Hill has gathered spending more than 25 years and studying at least 2500 top successful people from around the world. So what are those (13) great principles of success? I am going to present a summary of this book regularly for 13 weeks. Wait, read and give feedback.
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DESIRE

The first principle of success that Hill found is desire. We do not get success in life so much because we do not really desire something. It means we don't have any fixed and certain goal and an intense desire to achieve. Hill writes, 'Desire is the first principle of success I had learned, from years of experience with men, that when a man really DESIRES a thing so deeply that he is
willing to stake his entire future on a single turn of the wheel in order to get it, he is sure to win.''

Hill offers an example of the business associate of Thomas Edison, the genius scientist who invented more than 1000 scientific tools, Barnes and how his intense desire made him to reach his goal which would be mere a daydream for many people. When Barnes first met Edison, he did not have even a penny. He had no money to begin with. He had but little education. He had no influence. But he did have initiative, faith, and the will to win. His intense desire to work with Edison as his business associate became a reality. "He was constantly intensifying his DESIRE to become the business associate of Edison. Psychologists have correctly said that “when one is truly ready for a thing, it puts in its appearance.Maybe young Barnes did not know it at the time, but his bulldog determination, his persistence in standing back of a single DESIRE, was destined to mow down all opposition, and bring him the opportunity he was seeking.”

Opportunities come, but we do not recognize them always. Hill says, 'Often it comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat. Perhaps this is why so many fail to recognize opportunity.One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat. Before success comes in any man’s life, he is sure to meet with
much temporary defeat, and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to QUIT. That is exactly what the majority of men do.' However, 'WHEN RICHES BEGIN TO COME THEY COME SO QUICKLY, IN SUCH GREAT ABUNDANCE, THAT ONE WONDERS WHERE THEY HAVE BEEN HIDING DURING ALL THOSE LEAN YEARS.'

'One of the main weaknesses of mankind is the average man’s familiarity with the word “impossible.” He knows all the rules which will NOT work. He knows all the things which CANNOT be done.Success comes to those who become SUCCESS CONSCIOUS. Failure comes to those who indifferently allow themselves to become FAILURE CONSCIOUS.Another weakness found in altogether too many people, is the habit of measuring everything, and everyone, by their own impressions and beliefs.Henry Ford is a success, because he understands, and applies the principles of success. One of these is DESIRE: knowing what one wants.'

'Our brains become magnetized with the dominating thoughts which we hold in our minds, and, by means with which no man is familiar, these “magnets” attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with the nature of our dominating thoughts.' A successful person's desire is 'not a hope! It is not a wish! It is a keen, pulsating DESIRE, which transcends everything else. It is DEFINITE.'

Hill offers examples of many successful persons. He writes, 'Barnes succeeded because he chose a definite goal, placed all his energy, all his will power, all his effort, everything back of that goal.'
Barnes did not say, “I will keep my eyes open for another opportunity, in case I fail to get what I want in the Edison organization.” He said, “There is but ONE thing in this world that I am determined to have, and that is a business association with Thomas A. Edison. I will burn all bridges behind me, and stake my ENTIRE FUTURE on my ability to get what I want.”

Many unsuccessful people have one trait in common. When the going is hard, and the future looks dismal, they pull up and go where the going seems easier.

So what is the nature of desire that we should have? Hill suggests, 'First. Fix in your mind the exact amount of money you desire. It is not sufficient merely to say “I want plenty of money.” 'One must realize that all who have accumulated great fortunes, first did a certain amount of dreaming, hoping, wishing, DESIRING, and PLANNING before they acquired money.'

'Tolerance, and an open mind are practical necessities of the dreamer of today.“SUCCESS REQUIRES NO APOLOGIES, FAILURE PERMITS NO ALIBIS.”'

'Thomas Edison dreamed of a lamp that could be operated by electricity, began where he stood to put his dream into action, and despite more than ten thousand failures, he stood by that dream until he made it a physical reality. Practical dreamers DO NOT QUIT! It may interest you to know that Marconi’s “friends” had him taken into custody, and examined in a psychopathic hospital, when he announced he had discovered a principle through which he could send messages through the air, without the aid of wires, or other direct physical means of communication.A BURNING DESIRE TO BE, AND TO DO is the starting point from which the dreamer must take off. Dreams are not born of indifference, laziness, or lack of ambition.'

'Remember, too, that all who succeed in life get off to a bad start, and pass through many heartbreaking struggles before they “arrive.” The turning point in the lives of those who succeed, usually comes at the moment of some crisis, through which they are introduced to their “other selves.”

'Strange and varied are the ways of life, and stranger still are the ways of Infinite Intelligence, through which men are sometimes forced to undergo all sorts of punishment before discovering their own brains, and their own capacity to create useful ideas through imagination.'

Quite often we are disappointed by temporary failures and defeats and mourn over them. However, if we are able to transmute them, we can achieve great success. Hill gives an example of successful author Charles Dickens. Dickens' began by pasting labels on blacking pots. The tragedy of his first love penetrated the depths of his soul, and converted him into one of the world’s truly great authors. That tragedy produced, first, David Copperfield, then a succession of
other works that made this a richer and better world for all who read his books. Disappointment over love affairs, generally has the effect of driving men to drink, and women to ruin; and this, because most people never learn the art of transmuting their strongest emotions into dreams of a constructive nature.'

Hill states of himself, "Many years previously, I had written, “Our only limitations are those we set up in our own minds.”

EVERY ADVERSITY BRINGS WITH IT THE SEED OF AN EQUIVALENT ADVANTAGE. nothing is impossible to the person who backs DESIRE with enduring FAITH. Strange and imponderable is the power of the human mind!

So what comes after Desire? It is faith! We should have faith in what we desire. In my next posting next week I will be writing about this second 'mantra' of success: FAITH.

Bye Bye Bill Gates!

2008-07-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

Once the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, is not a new face for many people. He not only revolutionized the computer world, but also spent millions of dollars to make the world a better place. This week he left his 'fate builder' Microsoft Corporation and will be active in the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, a humanitarian organization founded by himself and his wife Melinda.

This week SharedTalks has decided to post his speech which he delivered at the University of Harvard, USA, on 7 July 2007. In fact, he himself had joined Harvard, but dropped out soon in order to quench his thirst of self-innovation. Remembering his days at Harvard, he said,

"Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn't guarantee success."

Below is his full speech where he talks about the true meaning of success and how to get it.

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Commencement address at Harvard University, June 7, 2007

President Bok,

former President Rudenstine, incoming President Faust,

members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers,

members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:

I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this: "Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree."

I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I'll be changing my job next year and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.

"I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities, on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity."

I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route to your degrees. For my part, I'm just happy that the Crimson has called me "Harvard's most successful dropout." I guess that makes me valedictorian of my own special class I did the best of everyone who failed.

But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I'm a bad influence. That's why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.

Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life was fascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn't even signed up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe, in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn't worry about getting up in the morning. That's how I came to be the leader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way of validating our rejection of all those social people.

Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there, and most of the guys were science-math types. That combination offered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where I learned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn't guarantee success.

One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world's first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.

I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: "We're not quite ready, come see us in a month," which was a good thing, because we hadn't written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.

What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege-and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.

But taking a serious look back I do have one big regret.

I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world-the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries-but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity-reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.

I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.

It took me decades to find out.

You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world's inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you've had a chance to think about how-in this age of accelerating technology-we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.

Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours a week and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause-and you wanted to spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impact in saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?

For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do the most good for the greatest number with the resources we have.

During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read an article about the millions of children who were dying every year in poor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless in this country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellow fever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killing half a million kids each year-none of them in the United States.

We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren't being delivered.

If you believe that every life has equal value, it's revolting to learn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not. We said to ourselves: "This can't be true. But if it is true, it deserves to be the priority of our giving."

So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. We asked: "How could the world let these children die?"

The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward saving the lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it. So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice in the system.

But you and I have both.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism-if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities. We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayer money in ways that better reflect the values of the people who pay the taxes.

If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits for business and votes for politicians, we will have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.

This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a conscious effort to answer this challenge will change the world.

I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: "Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end-because people just don't care."

I completely disagree.

I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.

All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing-not because we didn't care, but because we didn't know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still a complex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When an airplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference. They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and prevent similar crashes in the future.

But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: "Of all the people in the world who died today from preventable causes, one half of one percent of them were on this plane. We're determined to do everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives of the one half of one percent."

The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.

We don't read much about these deaths. The media covers what's new-and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in the background, where it's easier to ignore. But even when we do see it or read about it, it's difficult to keep our eyes on the problem. It's hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex that we don't know how to help. And so we look away.

If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.

Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks "How can I help?," then we can get action-and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares-and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.

Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have-whether it's something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.

The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, is to end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. The ideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunity with a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundations fund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have in hand-and the best prevention approach we have now is getting people to avoid risky behavior.

Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working-and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century-which is to surrender to complexity and quit.

The final step-after seeing the problem and finding an approach-is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts.

You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.

But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work-so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.

I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a global health panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives. Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person's life-then multiply that by millions. Yet this was the most boring panel I've ever been on-ever. So boring even I couldn't bear it.

What made that experience especially striking was that I had just come from an event where we were introducing version 13 of some piece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting with excitement. I love getting people excited about software-but why can't we generate even more excitement for saving lives?

You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feel the impact. And how you do that-is a complex question.

Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, but the new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been with us forever. They are new-they can help us make the most of our caring-and that's why the future can be different from the past.

The defining and ongoing innovations of this age-biotechnology, the computer, the Internet-give us a chance we've never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.

Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: "I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It is virtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the real significance of the situation."

Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.

The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.

The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem-and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.

At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don't. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion-smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don't have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.

We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago.

Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the great collections of intellectual talent in the world.

What for?

There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, and the benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve the lives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? Can Harvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people who will never even hear its name?

Let me make a request of the deans and the professors-the intellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, award tenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, please ask yourselves:

Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?

Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world's worst inequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of global poverty the prevalence of world hunger the scarcity of clean water the girls kept out of school the children who die from diseases we can cure?

Should the world's most privileged people learn about the lives of the world's least privileged?

These are not rhetorical questions-you will answer with your policies.

My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here-never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: "From those to whom much is given, much is expected."

When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given-in talent, privilege, and opportunity-there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.

In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue-a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don't have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.

Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.

You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort.

You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.

Knowing what you know, how could you not?

And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world's deepest inequities on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Good luck.

Find What You Love

2008-06-25T03:04:00.000-07:00

This week SharedTalks presents a powerful speech by a man who was born to a single mother and was adopted by a couple in condition that he would be offered at least college education. He is Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios. His early life was full of struggle. In his commencement address at Stadford University, USA, he recalls,

'It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.'

The way of life is not alwasy smooth even one culminates the pinnacle of success. He was fired from the company that was established by himself. However, he persevered and again rose to a new height with great stature. Today, he is considered a leading figure in both the computer and entertainment industries. Steve Jobs was listed as Fortune Magazine's Most Powerful Businessman of 2007. He was lucky to survive a cancerous attack as well. Below is his full speech that he gave at Stanford University, USA on 12 June 2005.

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I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

"Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

The Fringe Benefits of Faiulre and Importance of Imagination: JK Rowling

2008-06-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

Speech Details
2008 Harvard University Commencement, June 5, 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates,

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honor, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So 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 realized, 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.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

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. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. 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.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilizes thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathize.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathize may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

A stroke of Insight!

2008-03-30T08:46:00.000-07:00

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness -- of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another(Click to watch the video above or read the text of her speech below).

I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. And as a sister and as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true -- what is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common, shared reality, so they instead become delusions?

So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared to the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or bipolar disorder?

So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain, which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then with what quantities of those chemicals. So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this kind of research during the day. But then in the evenings and on the weekends I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

But on the morning of December 10 1996 I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body.

If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. [Thanks.] So, this is a real human brain. This is the front of the brain, the back of the brain with a spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor. While our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each hemisphere thinks about different things, they care about different things, and dare I say, they have very different personalities. [Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy.]

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about right here right now. Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. What this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, all we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.

My left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment. And start picking details and more details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information. Associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home, and eat 'em in the morning." It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate. I become a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you.

And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain, caustic pain, that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me and then it released me. Then it just gripped me and then released me. And it was very unusual for me to experience any kind of pain, so I thought OK, I'll just start my normal routine. So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body exercise machine. And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands looked like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. I thought "that's very peculiar" and I looked down at my body and I thought, "whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing." And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.

And it was all every peculiar and my headache was just getting worse, so I get off the machine, and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perceptions so I'm just focused on internal systems. And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower and I could actually hear the dialog inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, "OK, you muscles, you gotta contract, you muscles you relax."

And I lost my balance and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end. Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy. Energy. And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me, what is going on?" And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button and -- total silence.

And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, "Hey! we got a problem, we got a problem, we gotta get some help." So it's like, OK, OK, I got a problem, but then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness, and I affectionately referred to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. So here I am in this space and any stress related to my, to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and the many stressors related to any of those, they were gone. I felt a sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! I felt euphoria. Euphoria was beautiful -- and then my left hemisphere comes online and it says "Hey! you've got to pay attention, we've got to get help," and I'm thinking, "I got to get help, I gotta focus." So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, "I gotta get to work, I gotta get to work, can I drive? can I drive?"

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. And I realized, "Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke! I'm having a stroke!" And the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow! This is so cool. This is so cool. How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?"

And then it crosses my mind: "But I'm a very busy woman. I don't have time for a stroke!" So I'm like, "OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening so I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine, OK."

So I gotta call help, I gotta call work. I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number on it. So I go in my business room, I pull out a 3-inch stack of business cards. And I'm looking at the card on top, and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell. And I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell, that's not the card, that's not the card, that's not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards.

In the meantime, for 45 minutes the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it's the only plan I have. So I take the phone pad and I put it right here, I'd take the business card, I'd put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I come back if I'd already dialed those numbers.

So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump, and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality I'd be able to tell, yes, I've already dialed that number. Eventually the whole number gets dialed, and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, "Whoo woo wooo woo woo." [laughter] And I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a golden retriever!" And so I say to him, clear in my mind I say to him. "This is Jill! I need help!" And what comes out of my voice is, "Whoo woo wooo woo woo." I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I sound like a golden retriever." So I couldn't know, I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried.

So he recognizes that I need help, and he gets me help. And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to Mass General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air just, just right out of the balloon I felt my energy lift and I felt my spirit surrender. And in that moment I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life or this was perhaps my moment of transition.

When I awoke later that afternoon I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life, and my mind is now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expensive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Harmonic. I remember thinking there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

But I realized "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." I picture a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated my to recover.

Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who's a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover.

So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me.

Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

Muhammad Yunus: Creating a Poverty-Free World

2008-01-05T13:01:00.000-08:00

Preview of Muhammad Yunus: Creating a Poverty-Free World. Dr. Yunus, who was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, offers his insights into what is required to eradicate global poverty. Yunus envisions a new kind of capitalism, and demonstrates how his organizations, the Grameen Bank and the Grameen Family of Companies, offer viable solutions to the challenge of pervasive poverty.

A Dollar A Day

"Living on less than a dollar a day" is a familiar phrase, but what does it really mean? Mike Wooldridge uncovers the brutal hardships facing the world's poor.

Almost half the people of the world live on less than US$1 a day - yet even this statistic fails to capture the humiliation, powerlessness and brutal hardship that is the daily lot of the world's poor.

BBC’s Mike Wooldridge asks whether the global target of halving world poverty by 2015 can really be achieved, reporting personal stories from around the world that vividly illustrate what it's really like to have to live on a dollar a day and how it can mean different things in different countries.

Part 1: Kenya
In Kenya, Isaiah and his family live on the few crops they can grow on their small plot of land and the US$7-10 a month he makes from growing tea. He has debts to pay to the tea company for the fertiliser he needs and the family can only live a day at a time. In contrast, their neighbours make about US$2 a day growing and selling maize, mending bicycles and making bricks. They have plans for the future, but find that pressures on the land due to a growing population mean that things are much harder today than they were 20 years ago.

Part 2: Peru
Ayacucho in the Andes is one of the poorest areas of Peru. Gerarda Castro Ramirez, who fled to the city following the conflict between the Shining Path Movement (Sendero Luminoso) and the government in the 1980s and 1990s, now lives with her ten children in searing poverty. Mike reports on a new government programme which attempts to help the poor by giving women the equivalent of a dollar a day in cash in return for sending their children to school and getting them vaccinated.

Part 3: India
Veeran is a spirited 75-year-old living alone in the back streets of the town of Rohtak, north-west of Delhi. In her small, spartan home she symbolises one of India's newest challenges. More and more people are surviving into their seventies and beyond, thanks to overall improvements in health care, but there is a growing problem of destitution among the elderly too. Mike hears at first-hand how elderly people cope and how they view the changes taking place around them. Younger people who neglect their relatives could end up before tribunals - but is this what the elderly themselves want? The policy issues involved are crucial. It is predicted that by the middle of the century Asia will be home to almost two-thirds of the world's older people

Part 4: Ghana
At 15, Dzifa Adjanu said she wanted to become an accountant so that she "wouldn't get cheated in life". Fifteen years on, this determined young Ghanaian has achieved her ambition, although it has been an enormous struggle for her family to find the money to complete her education. Education, and in particular girls' education, is one of the Millennium Development goals for halving global poverty by the year 2015, and Ghana is one of the few African countries on track to meet the target of getting more girls into school but the challenges are still enormous. Mike accompanies Dzifa as she returns to her old school, and meets her mother Margaret, who sacrificed so much to get her through - along with other girls who have not been so fortunate.

Charm Tong:Fighting Repression with Education

2008-01-05T10:55:00.000-08:00

As a teacher and activist, Charm Tong is on a mission to educate people about human rights abuses in Burma – starting with the world’s most powerful man.

“I told him about the forced labour and mass relocations, about extra-judicial executions and rape,” recalls Charm Tong of her hour-long meeting with George W. Bush at the White House last year. “He asked many questions. He was very interested and concerned. He also asked what else the US could do to promote change in Burma.”

Charm Tong, herself a refugee from Burma’s long-running military dictatorship, is still only 25 years old. But as her meeting with the US president shows, her dedication to her country’s brutalised ethnic minorities has already won her an authority beyond her years. She is a founding member of a small but vocal
group called the Shan Women’s Action Network, whose infl uential reports have documented the rape of hundreds of women

and girls by Burmese soldiers. She also runs a unique school in northern Thailand that is training a new generation of human rights activists for Burma. “It is promoting young people to promote other people’s needs,” she explains. Most of the school’s 100 or so graduates now work for youth or women’s organisations as teachers, rights defenders, health workers and community radio broadcasters. “Some are now risking their lives doing cross-border work,” adds Charm Tong.

OPPRESSED MINORITIES
Charm Tong belongs to Burma’s largest ethnic minority, the Shan. Ethnic minorities help make Burma a land of dazzling human diversity, with groups such as the Naga, Akha, Kachin, Karenni, and Pa-O making up a third of the 50 million population.Tourist brochures depict Burma as a Southeast Asian paradise where these hill-dwelling people live peacefully alongside the majority Burmans. The reality is complex, shocking and ill-reported. The Burmese junta is waging a campaign of calculated savagery against these ethnic minorities. More than a million people have been driven from their homes.Hundreds of thousands have spilled into neighbouring countries, where they are stalked by poverty and disease and trafficked into the sex trade.

Thanks to her parents, and to a woman she still reveres as “Teacher Mary”, Charm Tong’s own education began early
and soon dominated her life. She was born in Shan State, and as the Burmese army stepped up its murderous campaign, her parents sent her to the relative safety of a Catholic orphanage on the Thai-Burma border. She travelled there in a basket strapped on the back of a horse. At the orphanage, a Shan nun called Mary brought her up with 30 other children.She was five years old, and from then on only saw her parents once a year. “I cried a lot,” she remembers. “I was young and did not understand why my parents had sent me away. Now I appreciate it. They thought I would be safe and get an education.”She did. Teacher Mary “gave me such a big opportunity”, says Charm Tong, who was determined not to waste it. She started with English lessons at dawn, spent the day at a Thai high school, and then took evening classes in Chinese. At weekends she studied her mother tongue, Shan. (This is why, today, she speaks out for Burma in not one, but four separate languages.) And through the years, as she watched refugees fleeing poverty and persecution in Burma pour across the border into Thailand, she learned to see her heart-breaking separation from her parents against a much greater backdrop of human misery. “Many children suffered more than me,”she says.

LECTURING THE ENEMY

At age 16, Charm Tong began working with human rights groups in Chiang Mai, the capital of northern Thailand and home to many exiles from Burma. She interviewed sex workers and illegal migrants, HIV-sufferers and rape victims. At age 17, she travelled to Geneva to address the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. She described the Burmese junta’s savage campaign in her homeland to a 200-strong audience which included junta members. “My voice was shaking,” she admits. “But I thought,‘You have to do this. You don’t get so many opportunities to tell the world.’” In the end, the presence of Burmese officials only emboldened her. “They were forced to listen to what I had to say,” says Charm Tong. “We are the voice of people whose suffering is not heard. If we do not speak out, who will? We have to continue to break the silence.”

Charm Tong considers herself “very lucky” to have received nine years of education. Many of her compatriots are less fortunate.With mass relocations and forced labour common, survival is the first priority for many people in Shan State. “Staying alive comes first,” says Charm Tong. “Education is not a priority.” Especially for young women, who are often obliged to cross the border into Thailand to seek work to support their impoverished families. Unlike some other ethnic minorities from Burma, the Shan have no refugee status in Thailand, and therefore no official protection or support.

Many risk arrest and ill-treatment as illegal manual labourers,and desperate young women and men are lured into the sex trade. Even outside conflict areas, Burma’s education system is collapsing. Teachers at state-run schools supplement their meagre salaries by private tutoring, often leaving their day students teacher-less, or by exacting bribes from parents. The state of university education is equally dire. Students played a key role in nationwide pro-democracy protests in 1988, which the military crushed with the loss of thousands of lives. Since then, the junta has closed universities for long periods and ordered undergraduates to complete their studies through distance-learning courses. Such cynical measures have successfully kept students from organising democracy protests on campus. They have also helped to destroy the educational prospects of a whole generation of young people in Burma.

UNIQUE SCHOOL
In 2001, aged 20, Charm Tong set up the School for Shan State Nationalities Youth to rescue this “lost generation”. It serves not just Shan students but also those from other ethnic minorities such as the Palaung, Akha and Pa-O. Most are in their early twenties, and hail from a variety of backgrounds: some are migrant workers or war refugees, others are already teachers or community workers. Charm Tong receives more than 150 applicants every year. This year she can accommodate only 29 students.
Largely funded by private donations, the school is located in a two-storey rented house in northern Thailand. (Due to the school’s ambiguous legal status in Thailand, Charm Tong asked Global Knowledge not to reveal its exact location.)
It is spartan: the tiny classroom has plastic chairs, a whiteboard and walls decorated with inspirational homilies, one of which reads: “Only education can provide a nation.”

Some of the furniture is water-damaged. Last year northern Thailand endured the worst fl oods for four decades, and one of the dormitories was chest-high in dirty water. For a sur- real few days, Charm Tong was obliged to travel to the nearest main road in a borrowed canoe. Students study English and computing, and receive human rights training from Charm Tong and other experienced local activists. Unlike in their distant homelands, they are encouraged to discuss political issues. One student is 22-year-old Hseng (not her real name). She had been attending university in Taunggyi, the capital of Shan State, but poverty forced her family to flee Burma. Hseng ended up as a housemaid in Bangkok, earning USD 80 a month, a paltry wage but still four times what she might earn at home. Then Hseng successfully applied to studying with Charm Tong. At the time, she spoke no English and had never seen a computer. “When I touched one for the first time, I was so excited I was shaking,” recalls Hseng, in excellent English. She is now training to be a human rights journalist.

When not at the school, the workaholic Charm Tong works with the Shan Women’s Action Network. Their meticulous 2002 report, “License to Rape”, enraged the junta, by establishing that its soldiers used rape as a weapon of war to terrorise communities. The practice is “still widespread and very systematic,” says Charm Tong.

Not surprisingly, a fighting spirit runs in Charm Tong’s family. Her late father was a commander with the Shan State Army (SSA), one of the few ethnic insurgent groups still battling Burmese government troops. The SSA headquarters lies not far away at Loi Taileng, a settlement clinging to a cloud-raked ridge which straddles the rugged Thai-Burma border. It is the refuge for thousands of villagers fleeing the junta’s troops. The SSA’s goal – an independent homeland for the Shan, Burma’s second largest ethnic group – is nearly impossible to achieve: its 2 000 fighters face a 400 000-strong Burmese army. Charm Tong says she and her father “fight for the same goal. We want our people to be free and happy in their own land.”

Charm Tong knows the fight against the Burmese dictatorship is not just a military affair. The Shan and other ethnic minorities must also resist a similarly ferocious assault on their cultures. At a basic school at the SSA’s hilltop headquarters, teachers write in Shan script on blackboards, an act for which they could be arrested in Burma. The junta has banned books and school lessons in the Shan language, destroyed signs bearing village names in Shan, and razed historic Shan buildings. The practical result? Many young Shan in Burma have little knowledge of their culture and cannot speak their mother tongue. Similar government restrictions have pushed other languages in Burma, such as Mon, to the very brink of extinction.

CANDLE IN THE DARKNESS
Charm Tong’s thriving school and high-profi le campaigning have doubtless won her enemies in the Burmese junta. But those enemies are far outnumbered by her admirers among Burma’s ethnic diaspora. May, a 19-year-old student from the northerly Kachin state, marvels at how early Charm Tong gets up each morning, and how hard she works. So what time does her teacher go to bed? “I don’t know,” replies May. “We’re always asleep before her.” Charm Tong is “a candle in the darkness,” continues May. “She never behaves like she’s superior or better. She is like our sister, and the school is our family.”

A family waiting to go home. Ask Charm Tong about her earliest memories, and for the first time during the interview this driven, dry-eyed woman becomes nostalgic. She talks about foraging for honey in the jungle, of eating rice fire-roasted in a length of bamboo. “That was how good a childhood could be,” she says. “You had friends. You were connected to your birthplace, connected to your culture. That’s what the people of Shan State are missing today: the life of normal human beings.” Adapted from Global Knowledge with permission