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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| In 1976, Meryl Streep walked into an audition and heard one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood call her ugly. She was 26 years old. She had graduated from Vassar College in 1971 and later earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama in 1975. But almost everything she had accomplished existed on a stage. Film was another world. And Meryl Streep barely had a résumé there. Then an opportunity appeared. The son of legendary Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis had seen Streep performing in New York and believed she should be considered for the female lead in King Kong. He convinced his father to meet her. For a young actress trying to enter movies in 1976, this was the kind of meeting that could change everything. De Laurentiis was one of the industry's most powerful producers. King Kong was going to be enormous. Streep walked into the meeting hoping she might leave with a chance. Instead, De Laurentiis looked at her. Then he turned toward his son. Speaking in Italian, he questioned why his son had brought him someone he considered unattractive. There was one thing he apparently didn't know. Meryl Streep understood Italian. She had studied the language. So while De Laurentiis believed he was commenting on her appearance without her understanding, the young actress sitting across from him heard exactly what he was saying. Streep could have pretended she hadn't understood. She didn't. Instead, she responded to him in Italian. She apologized for not being beautiful enough to be in King Kong. Then she left. She didn't get the role. When King Kong opened in December 1976, Jessica Lange was the woman audiences saw on screen. For Streep, there was no blockbuster. No breakthrough. No sudden Hollywood career. She went back to work. That decision turned out to matter far more than anything said inside that office. In 1977, Streep made her feature-film debut in Julia. It was a small role. But it was a beginning. Then everything started moving quickly. In 1978, she appeared in the television miniseries Holocaust and won a Primetime Emmy Award. That same year, The Deer Hunter brought her something even bigger. Her first Academy Award nomination. Only two years had passed since she had been dismissed partly because of how someone judged her appearance. Now Hollywood was nominating her for an Oscar. She still wasn't finished. In 1979, Streep appeared in Kramer vs. Kramer. The performance earned her another Academy Award nomination. This time, she won. At 30 years old, Meryl Streep had her first Oscar. Three years earlier, she hadn't been considered beautiful enough for King Kong. Now she was an Academy Award winner. Then came 1982. Sophie's Choice. Streep played Sophie Zawistowski, a Polish survivor of the Holocaust. She approached the role with extraordinary preparation, working intensely on the character's languages and accent. She learned Polish dialogue. She worked with German. She reshaped her voice until Sophie sounded as though she had lived an entire life before appearing on screen. The performance became one of the defining achievements of her career. And in 1983, Streep won her second Academy Award. By then, the question surrounding her career had changed completely. Nobody serious was asking whether she looked right for movies. They were asking what she might do next. And she kept answering. Silkwood. Out of Africa. A Cry in the Dark. The Bridges of Madison County. Adaptation. The Devil Wears Prada. Doubt. Julie & Julia. Again and again, Streep disappeared into people who sounded different, moved differently, and seemed to carry entirely different histories inside them. Then, in 2011, she portrayed British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Decades had passed since that humiliating meeting in New York. Streep was now one of the most respected actors alive. Still, she transformed herself again. The performance earned her a third Academy Award. And the numbers eventually became almost absurd. Across her career, Meryl Streep accumulated 21 Academy Award acting nominations, more than any other performer in Oscar history. She won three. Her Golden Globe record became extraordinary as well, with more than 30 nominations and multiple victories across decades. But perhaps the most remarkable thing wasn't the number of awards. It was the length of time she remained relevant enough to keep earning them. The actress dismissed in that meeting in 1976 didn't simply prove she could succeed once. She kept doing it for nearly half a century. Then, in May 2024, Meryl Streep walked onto the stage at the Cannes Film Festival. This time, nobody was deciding whether she was attractive enough for a role. Cannes presented her with an honorary Palme d'Or recognizing her extraordinary contribution to cinema. The audience gave her a standing ovation. Think about the distance between those two rooms. In one room in 1976, a powerful producer looked at a 26-year-old actress and made an immediate judgment based on her appearance. In another room nearly five decades later, an entire film festival stood to honor what she had created. The first judgment took seconds. The answer took decades. That is what makes the story worth remembering. Meryl Streep didn't leave that meeting and immediately become successful. She didn't get some perfect revenge the following morning. She simply kept working. One small role. Then another. One performance. Then another. One decade. Then another. Until the résumé became impossible to argue with. The producer's opinion lasted a few seconds. Streep's work lasted generations. Sometimes somebody will decide what you're worth before you've even had the opportunity to show them what you can do. You may never convince that person. You may not need to. Meryl Streep didn't win the argument inside that office in 1976. She spent the next five decades making the argument irrelevant. The loudest voice in the room doesn't always get the final word. Sometimes time does. |
| Swamiji [Vivekananda] was a moderate eater. Usually he took two eggs, two pieces of toast, and two cups of coffee. Once I offered him a third cup of coffee. At first he declined, but when I urged him he finally yielded and said: "All right. Woman's business is to tempt man." Breakfast would usually last about an hour, for we never hurried. Ralph had to be at school at eight eight-thirty, and Helen would leave for work, but the rest of us were not occupied. After breakfast Swamiji would stroll in the garden again or browse through the library. Often he would play with the children in the yard. Dorothy [Hansbrough, who was four years old] had several friends who would come, and Swamiji would hold hands with them and play ring-around-the-rosy and other games. He used to like to talk with them, and would ask them many questions about their activities, why they played this game or that, and so on. He was much interested in the problem of child training, and we often talked of it. He did not believe in punishment. It had never helped him, he said. "And I would never do anything to make a child afraid," he declared. ... ... He made a great effort to do something for us. He took away any feeling on our part that he was superior to us. He paid a good deal of attention to children when he met them privately. There was an old stable in the vacant lot next to our home in Los Angeles, where Swamiji used to sit with the children and look at their picture books. He particularly enjoyed 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass'. He said they were absolutely typical in their portrayal of the processes of the human mind. He said that Lewis Carroll had some kind of intuition, that his was not an ordinary mind, to have written these books. |
| Sunday morning musings Shakespeare once said - 'what's in a name........'. I think we should ask the hospitality pandits this question! Gone are those good old days where recognising a hotel by it's name gave you an immediate connect to the brand. It was just Oberoi, Taj, Ashok, Clarks with one more word after it, and you were done. But what has happened in the last one decade is in simple language, a 'khichdi' (hotchpotch). Master brands have introduced a flury of sub-brands and I think it has reached a stage where the Master-brand itself no longer knows which sub-brand stands for what. The The Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL) brandscape encompasses 14 major hospitality brands. Marriott International operates 18 distinct hotel brands in India as part of its Marriott Bonvoy portfolio. Hyatt operates 11 distinct brands in India.The Clarks Hotels & Resorts operates a multi-brand portfolio consisting of 12 distinct hotel brands. Increasing with new introductions - Marriotts Marquis and City Express; Hiltons Waldorf Astoria; IHG with Kimpton; ITC with Epiq Collection; this list can carry on. And the question I ask myself often is - how do you identify the brand positioning and product offering of such multiple brands? Other than the four odd key differentiators, is it just a play with words which justifies this plethora of brands mushrooming at a break neck speed? Stay tuned for more brands on your plate !! |
| Pencil: I'm sorry. Eraser: For what? Pencil: I'm sorry that you get hurt because of me. Every time I make a mistake, you're always there to erase it. But with each mistake you fix, you lose a little part of yourself, becoming smaller and smaller. Eraser: That’s true, but I don’t mind. You see, this is what I was made for—to help you correct your mistakes. Even though I know that one day I’ll be gone, I’m happy to have been there for you. So please, don’t worry. I wouldn’t be happy if I saw you sad. Reflection: Our parents are like the eraser, and we are the pencil. They are always there for us, fixing our mistakes, guiding us, and sacrificing for our well-being. Over time, they grow older, and one day, they may no longer be with us. Moral: Cherish your parents. Love them, appreciate them, and never take their sacrifices for granted. |
| Andrew Huberman is one of the few people whose work I follow. I love human psychology, the study of how the mind works, and he explains it in ways you never see coming. He's the Stanford neuroscientist behind one of the largest science podcasts in the world, the person millions turn to for how the brain really works. In our recent episode, I talked to him about how to build an unstoppable, dangerous. Early in our conversation, he explained fear. Two people can face the same risk, but one takes it, and the other freezes. You'd assume the one who freezes is imagining everything that could go wrong. Andrew says it's the opposite. They're imagining how well it could go, and the weight of everything riding on it, the feeling that failing here means failing at everything, is what makes one stuck. Your brain's first job is to keep you alive, and staying alive means avoiding danger and treating risk as a threat. The instincts that kept your ancestors alive are the same ones holding you back from what you most want. None of it is fixed. Courage, he says, is built the way strength is, by moving to the edge of what unsettles you and staying there long enough for your brain to learn you survived it. So how do you train a brain built for survival to reach for more? |
| The Higgs Field is one of the most important ideas in modern physics. It explains a major mystery about the universe: Why do particles have mass? Scientists discovered that the entire universe is filled with an invisible field called the Higgs Field. Every particle moves through this field and interacts with it. These interactions determine how much mass a particle has. In 1964, physicists Peter Higgs, François Englert, and Robert Brout proposed the idea that an invisible energy field exists throughout space. Their theory suggested that particles gain mass by interacting with this field. Different particles interact with the Higgs Field in different ways. Some particles interact strongly and become heavier, while others interact weakly and remain lighter. Particles like photons do not interact with the field and remain without mass. The amazing part is that scientists could not directly see the Higgs Field. However, they predicted the existence of a related particle called the Higgs boson. In 2012, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider discovered a particle matching the properties of the Higgs boson, confirming this important theory. The Higgs Field changed our understanding of reality. It showed that mass is not simply something particles naturally have, but something created through interaction with an invisible field that fills the universe. Without the Higgs Field, atoms, stars, planets, and life as we know them could not exist. |
| A German man spent years locked in psychiatric institutions after accusing his ex-wife and her bank of financial wrongdoing. Then investigators uncovered evidence that major parts of what he had been saying were true. His name was Gustl Mollath, and his case became one of Germany's most notorious judicial scandals. Mollath's ordeal began during a bitter separation from his wife, Petra, who worked for HypoVereinsbank. He accused her and other bank employees of illegally transferring clients' money to Switzerland and helping wealthy customers evade German taxes. He produced documents, wrote letters to authorities and repeatedly demanded an investigation. But instead of being treated as a whistleblower, Mollath increasingly found himself portrayed as mentally unstable. The conflict escalated dramatically. His wife accused him of physically assaulting her and damaging property belonging to people connected to the dispute. Mollath denied the allegations. In 2006, a court found that he had committed several acts but ruled that he could not be held criminally responsible because he was suffering from a psychiatric disorder. He was committed indefinitely to a secure psychiatric hospital. And there he remained. Year after year. All while continuing to insist that the banking allegations everyone treated as part of his supposed paranoia were real. Then an extraordinary piece of evidence emerged. HypoVereinsbank had actually conducted an internal investigation into Mollath's accusations years earlier. And its investigators had concluded that some of his allegations were substantiated. Employees had indeed violated internal rules while helping customers move money to Switzerland. The revelation caused an uproar in Germany. If Mollath's claims about financial misconduct had a genuine factual basis, critics asked, how had those same accusations been used as evidence that he was delusional? Journalists began digging deeper. Politicians demanded answers. Previously overlooked documents resurfaced. And questions multiplied about the psychiatric evaluations and court proceedings that had kept Mollath confined. By 2013, after approximately seven years in psychiatric detention, a court ordered him released and granted him a new trial. The retrial produced a complicated result. In 2014, Mollath was acquitted because the court concluded he could not be held criminally responsible for the offenses it found he had committed. The judgment also recognized serious problems surrounding the original proceedings. Years later, Mollath successfully pursued compensation over his confinement. His case became a national debate in Germany about psychiatric detention, judicial accountability and what can happen when someone making extraordinary accusations is dismissed as mentally ill. However, one part of the story is often exaggerated online. There was never a definitive court finding that bankers and Mollath's ex-wife had orchestrated a conspiracy to have him institutionalized specifically to silence his accusations. What IS documented is disturbing enough: Mollath made allegations of serious financial misconduct. He was portrayed as delusional and spent about seven years confined in psychiatric institutions. And evidence later emerged showing that important parts of the financial wrongdoing he had been describing were real. Sometimes the difference between a conspiracy theory and a scandal is the evidence that hasn't been uncovered yet. |
| An entire industry worth billions of dollars had a problem hiding in plain sight, in the pictures printed in its most important papers. There were editors. There were peer reviewers. There were universities with whole offices devoted to research integrity. And nobody was looking. One woman, working alone at her kitchen table after dinner, unpaid, started looking. And what she found should worry anyone who has ever swallowed a pill a doctor prescribed. Her name is Elisabeth Bik. She is a Dutch microbiologist with a PhD from Utrecht and fifteen years at Stanford's medical school studying microbiomes. An ordinary, respectable scientific career — right up until 2013, when she discovered that somebody had plagiarized a piece of her own published work. That made her angry, and it made her curious. She started hunting for plagiarism in her spare time. She did it for nine months. And then one evening she opened a PhD thesis that had lifted its text from somewhere else, and her eye snagged on something different. Not copied words. A copied image. The same photograph, used twice, doing two different jobs. She sat there thinking: wait. That happens? That same night she opened a handful of other papers, and she found more before she went to bed. And she realized something about herself that most people cannot do: she can see things in images that other eyes slide right past. A duplicated patch of cells. The same photograph appearing twice in one paper under two different labels. A single band on a lab gel, copied, flipped, and pasted back in to fake a result. In January 2014, she found duplicated and altered images running through a set of papers from an American medical school — Case Western Reserve. So she kept going, evenings and weekends, for the love of it. And then she decided to find out how common this really was. So she sat down and went through 20,621 published biomedical papers. Forty journals. Twenty years of the scientific literature. By eye. There were no software tools for this at the time. She looked, one paper after another, for as long as it took. She found inappropriate image duplication in 782 of them. One in every twenty-five papers. And 196 of those were not honest mistakes. Those were figures that had been deliberately altered — rotated, flipped, shifted, stretched. Somebody had sat down and done it on purpose. Her own reaction was flat and stunned at the same time. One in twenty-five papers I looked at had image problems, she said. I thought, that's a lot. Now here is the part that says the most about the whole system. She wrote to the researchers. She wrote to the journal editors. And mostly, nothing came back. Silence. So in 2016, she published the entire study herself, with two colleagues, Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, in the journal mBio. And it landed like a bomb. Understand who was not doing this work. Scientific publishing is a business worth billions. Every paper is supposed to pass through editors and peer reviewers. Universities employ research-integrity officers. And yet nobody had been systematically checking the pictures. One woman with a sharp pair of eyes was doing it in her own time, for free, after the dishes were done. And these are the papers that medicine is built on. Every drug your doctor reaches for sits on top of this literature. If the foundation has cracks in it, everything built on top is a little less certain. In 2018 she left her job in industry and made this her full-time work. Nobody employs her to do it. She is funded by strangers, ordinary people donating small amounts through a subscription page. Since then she has raised concerns about more than 7,600 papers. By late 2024, that work had fed into more than 1,300 retractions, over a thousand corrections, and hundreds of formal notices of concern. Papers by senior figures. University presidents. Institute directors. Drug-company research. Then, in 2020, she looked at hydroxychloroquine. A professor in Marseille named Didier Raoult had published a study claiming success using the drug against Covid. The claim raced around the world. Governments moved on it. Millions of people took it. Bik went through the paper and raised serious problems with its methods and its missing patient data, then raised concerns about dozens more papers from him and his institute. In April 2021, a lawyer acting for Raoult and a colleague filed a criminal complaint against her with a prosecutor in Marseille. Aggravated moral harassment. Attempted blackmail. Attempted extortion. She denies all of it — the "payment" remark they seized on was a joke, she said, and her donation page is public for anyone to see. Her inbox filled with threats. Anonymous accounts went after her appearance. Somebody promised her justice in a real prison in France. She posts under her own name. Almost nobody else in this field does. And then more than a thousand researchers signed an open letter standing behind her. In 2021 she was given the John Maddox Prize. In 2024, the Einstein Foundation Award. She gave that prize money away, to fund other people doing the same painstaking work. Her method has real critics, and she would want that said. A leading digital-forensics expert has argued that detection done by eye can't be independently audited the way a software tool can. A validation exercise put her accuracy at around ninety percent — meaning roughly one call in ten needs a second look. Fair enough. And it does not touch the number underneath it all. One in twenty-five. Because here is what still has not been fixed. Ten years on, many of those original 782 papers are still sitting in the journals, uncorrected, some of them well past anything you could blame on an innocent mistake. She is still going. Still unpaid. An industry worth billions had nobody looking at the pictures. She did it in the evenings, for free — and they tried to have her charged with a crime for it. |
| LOVE.......♥️ 1. " It is Better to have Loved and lost, THAN never to have Loved at all....." 2. " Love is PATIENT, Love is KIND. It Does Not envy, it Does Not boast, it is NOT proud. It is NOT rude, it is NOT self-seeking, it is NOT easily angered, it keeps NO record of wrongs. Love Does Not delight in evil but REJOICES with the Truth. It ALWAYS Protects, Always Trusts, Always Hopes, Always PERSEVERES........" 3. " I no longer believe in the Idea of Soul Mates, or Love at First Sight. But I BELIEVE that a very few times in your Life, if you are LUCKY, you might Meet Someone who is EXACTLY Right for You. Not because he or she is Perfect, or because you are, But BECAUSE your combined flaws are arranged in a way that allowed two separate beings to hinge together..........." AN EXTREMELY IMPORTANT THOUGHT ABOUT RELATIONSHIP........ 4. “No Relationship is Perfect, EVER. There are always some ways you have to Bend, to Compromise, to Give Something Up in order to GAIN something GREATER. The Love two individuals have for EACH OTHER is BIGGER than small differences. And THAT - Is THE KEY. It's like a big pie chart, and the Love in a Relationship Has to be the BIGGEST PIECE. Love can Make up for a Lot..........." WHAT SAY... |
| Dolly Parton has died at 80, born so poor that the doctor who delivered her was paid in a sack of cornmeal, and she spent the fortune she built giving away more than 200 million books and helping fund the vaccine that pulled the world out of a pandemic. She grew up in a one-room cabin on a Tennessee riverbank, the fourth of twelve kids, in a house with no electricity and no plumbing. Her father was a sharecropper who never learned to read. That last part never left her. In 1995 she started the Imagination Library, which mails a free book every month to any child under five who signs up, no questions asked about what the family earns. It has sent more than 200 million books to kids across the United States, Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia. When wildfires burned families out of their homes in her home county in 2016, she did not send thoughts and prayers. She cut checks. A thousand dollars a month for six months to every household that lost its home, part of a relief effort that ran to $12.5 million. Then, in 2020, she quietly gave a million dollars to researchers at Vanderbilt working on the coronavirus. The official report on the Moderna vaccine credits the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund as a supporter. The girl who was too poor to afford a doctor grew up to help pay for the shot that protected millions of strangers. She never made a show of asking who deserved it. Poor kids got the books. Burned-out families got the money. Sick people got the vaccine. To Dolly, a person in need was reason enough. In a country that can barely agree on what day it is, she was the rare thing almost everyone could agree on. She never demanded you pass her political test before she'd help you. She just showed up, cornmeal roots and all, and treated everybody like they were worth the trouble. She could have done what most people with her kind of money do, which is buy a bigger version of everything they already own. Instead she spent thirty years making sure a child she would never meet had something to read. She died peacefully at home in Nashville, her nephew Bryan Seaver announced. The last book she paid for is already in the mail. |
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