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2018 in Books #1 : Outliers

My membership at the Evanston Public Library is my best-worst decision. Best, because I now have e-books delivered right into my Kindle without having me trudge in snow to borrow or return a book and the worst, because it is going to make me lazy and unfit.  Cut to the chase, Outliers has been a good start to 2018. At a modest 300 odd pages, Malcolm Gladwell writes a deeply researched and critically analysed account of success stories that we know of.  | The biggest takeaway you can get from Outliers  is the "other side" of stories, which are often ignored for the sake of glorification of the achievement. | It was enjoyable to see how tiny, seemingly inconsequential factors can help a person go a long way. A popular example the book talks about is Bill Gates' rise as a billionaire when he was a college dropout.  Treating his story superficially has led to popularizing the opinion, "hey, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were college drop outs
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Jigsaw Go! (Metaphorical Piece, pun intended)


Messy, no?


Well, perhaps that is how we got life handed out to us. A bag of pieces, waiting to be put together. And that is what we do, we put the pieces together, await our "missing" piece and so on.
Here is an idea however (stemming from the new sensation, Pokemon Go!), what if we haven't got all the pieces? What if all they are are fragments and no, we do not have the big picture.

The jigsaw is a fun thing to do and very analogous to life. There are pieces that fit wrongly; you need to change your view or the place where you fix them. There is a time and a place for some bits, that wouldn't be right otherwise. You cannot meticulously plan and anticipate where they would go, to put it in the most platitudinous manner, "it fits!"

Unlike a box where we know that all parts are part of the same picture, in life we have the wrong ones. Some parts belong to others and it is best we find these people and leave it there with them. And it works vice versa. Some may leave traces of themselves with us.

Now, why "Jigsaw Go!"?So while hunting Squirtle, for which I went all out to the Worli seafront, I realized that "baithe baithe woh Squirtle kabhi nahin aata" (had I remained at one place, the Squirtle would not have walked up to me to get caught). Just like filling up my Pokedex, I need to go out to find the other floating fragments of my life. Efforts hai, haan but this hare-brained (as a close friend fondly puts it) woman, romanticiser of life is playing a metaphorical Jigsaw Go!

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