Tag: Knowledge

Hi All,

Here’s your weekly dose of “5-Bullet Tuesday”, list of things I’m enjoying or pondering. I have been inspired by Ram for this consistency in coming for morning walk and the way he does it all so rigorously. At the age of fifty plus, that is awe inspiring. But today, Ram gave me a piece of his mind on an entirely different topic – general knowledge.

He picked a couple of topics related to politics -the recent SCO meet, Gyanvapi mosque, WAKF board – and I hadn’t an inkling about most of these. Seeing me stumped, he said, “You’re like my brother, so I have to tell you that you must read the newspaper and watch TV news daily. (He even recommended Black and White on Aaj Tak and DNA on Zee TV).  If you don’t keep yourself posted, how will you educate your children?”

Ouch that hurts. Real bad. Today’s blog will hover around this topic err.. hurt.

Conversation I enjoyed–

My 9 year old Sohana is enthusiastically prepping up for her GK quiz when my teenager Tanav jumps out to prove to her that there is no use of GK. “How will it help?”, “Why should we know who’s the PM of UK?” and on and on. 

Now the truth is that I’m not fully convinced how GK would help (which is part of the reason for my plight at the morning walk!).

However, being an equal opportunity parent, I can’t take any ones side. Besides, I don’t see any reason why anyone should bring down the passion for someone else.

But the usual arguments would never ever work with a teenager. So, I tried something new. It must have been profound because all I saw after that was a silent puzzled teenage face and a mouth continuing her practice for tomorrow’s GK quiz.

I had just said, “If you believe GK will help you, it will. If you believe GK will not help you, it won’t”.

I later realized it applies to everything else in life too, isn’t it? Belief is powerful.

What I learnt—

What should one do to live a high class life in a place like Delhi?, Tanav asked me when we were waiting for dinner to be served.

Thankfully, 😅 I recalled Scott Adams advice to he highly effective or successful (He suggested these as proposed additions to Stephen Covey’s 7 habits of highly effective people):

1. Education (the right kind)
2. Overcoming the fear of embarrassment (/fear/ shame)

I gave Tanav just these as the secret sauce for success. He’s hard to convince in general but he seemed content with this.

Adams is clear that these two qualities can compensate for each other. Successful people either have a great ability at something (through education) or they keep experimenting and failing without ever giving up.

New TV program I’m watching –

I have watched two episodes of Sudhir Chaudhary’s Black and White on Aaj Tak. It is really interesting and the information is shared in a way that make it sticky. Well researched and well presented.

Quote I’m pondering —

Blog I loved reading–

Peter Fuda explains how best to connect with your audience using the heart-head-hand technique (in that order). Read his full blog here. (TL/DR? – see the summary in the image below)

(And that makes me wonder, Did Ram from the morning walk use this technique to connect with me? He did cover the three although not in the right order.. It was more like Head (those news topics got me thinking), Heart (how will you educate your children?) and Hand (action to watch specific programs, which I eventually did!)  

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