The Mystery of the Pisa Airport Hippos

Pisa's Galileo Galilei airport is the largest in Tuscany. Hundreds of thousands of tourists will pass through this summer, on their way to pay homage to some of Western civilization's greatest works of art, like Michelangelo's David.

En route, these tourist-pilgrims (like me, on holiday last week) will also encounter other more contemporary Western works of art, like this statue of two hippos baring their teeth at each other. In fact, these hippos will probably be the first work of art a visitor to Tuscany encounters: they are located just outside the airport's arrivals lounge.

Hippos @ Galileo Galilei airport

What spark lit the artist's imagination, inspiring these airport hippos? 

Is it a critique of the contemporary human condition, a lament that we now are just a bunch of corpulent beasts, submerged in mud, snarling at each other? Is it advertising, meant to promote sales of the candy brand Happy Hippos?. Did the bureaucrat responsible for decorating Pisa airport go on a safari along the Limpopo River? Is it a joke?

Unfortunately, even Google is not able to answer this question. If you do find out, dear reader, please post a comment to let me know. As clues, consider that the hippos are not alone. They are accompanied by crocodiles and dolphins.

Dolphins @ Galileo Galilei airport

Crocodile @ Galileo Galilei airport

Things can get messy for hippos in Tuscany. Like when rainwater fills up in a hippo's nostrils...

"Oh, my sinuses!"

Happy Easter from Anthony Gonsalves

An old friend put me on the spot recently, and quizzed me on how I found the enthu to keep blogging.

I wasn't expecting the question. So, understandably, I lapsed into my native language: geek-speak. I chuntered on about "intrinsic motivation" and "the universal need for self-expression, for which there are only limited opportunities in contemporary corporate life". Instead, I really should have answered my friend musically, by serenading him with the Amitabh Bachchan - Kishore Kumar classic "My name is Anthony Gonsalves".

Anthony Gonsalves has a real insight into an amateur blogger's psyche. His phrase "you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity", is spot on. In fact, if I'm asked the same question this Easter weekend, I might enhance my answer by emerging from an egg, unless "such extenuating circumstances coerce me to preclude you from such extravagance".

Happy Easter blog readers. For further clarification, please refer roop mahal, prem galli, koli नंबर चार सौ बीस . Excuse me, please!

JRR Tolkien, the lousy teacher

"At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict on his teacher. Tolkien, he reported, would write long lists of words on the blackboard, obscuring them with his body as he droned on, then would absent-mindedly erase them without turning around. “I can just about stand learning the filthy lingo it’s written in,” Philip Larkin, another Tolkien student, complained about the old man’s lectures on “Beowulf.” “What gets me down is being expected to admire the bloody stuff.”

It is still one of the finest jests of the modern muses that this fogged-in English don was going home nights to work on perhaps the most popular adventure story ever written..."

More evidence that genius in one aspect of life, even in one aspect of communication, can go hand in hand with mediocrity in other related aspects of life, or communication.

Extracted from this (very nice) story in the New Yorker, which is still visible online...

Slip Slidin' Away into a Bed of Roses

I've never thought of Paul Simon and Jon Bon Jovi as kindred souls, until these words rolled shortly after each other on my iPod:

“...a bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been...” in Paul Simon's Slip Slidin' Away, followed by

“...as I dream about movies they won’t make of me when I’m dead...” in Bon Jovi's Bed of Roses.

The same emotion, the same sentiment, the same thought. Maybe that is a universal experience...thinking of the different branching paths life might have taken...the alternative universes we might have inhabited. Regardless, I love the shuffle function on my iPod.

Why the Irish, and Indians, rationally believe in fairies

"Because the upside to disbelief is too small."

Zigackly. I picked this gem up from Michael Lewis' hilarious new book, Boomerang. The passage in question is about Ireland:

Ian (Michael Lewis' Irish guide) will say “Over there, that’s a pretty typical fairy ring,” and then explain, interestingly, that these circles of stones or mushrooms that occur in Irish fields are believed by local farmers to house mythical creatures. “Irish people actually believe in fairies?,” I ask, straining but failing to catch a glimpse of the typical fairy ring to which Ian has just pointed. “I mean, if you walked right up and asked him to his face, ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ most guys will deny it,” he replies. “But if you ask him to dig out the fairy ring on his property, he won’t do it. To my way of thinking, that’s believing.” And it is. It’s a tactical belief, a belief that exists because the upside to disbelief is too small...

To my ears, that rings true of India too. Superstition is about economic, rather than scientific, rationality. Lewis' chapter about Ireland is still visible at Vanity Fair.

Teaching compassion through drama

"Why don't we teach our children compassion?". 

Roshi Joan Halifax asked this question in the TED talk I posted about last week, implying that we don't do enough to teach our children compassion.

On reflection, I think we do more to teach our children than we generally give ourselves credit for. This teaching is not called "compassion class". It is called drama. For instance, my daughters attend a very popular theater workshop in our neighbourhood. The faculty that they develop through theater is compassion; they learn to get into someone else's skin.

I didn't learn drama as a child, but I did attend a couple of corporate leadership workshops, in America, that were built around acting technique. The idea is - learn to act, get into the other's skin, understand others more completely, communicate better, discover yourself, discover your own authentic leadership voice, and therefore ride away into the golden sunset of promotions and profits - which sounds awfully naff, but was actually quite helpful. 

Compassion: Moral Outrage :: Dalai Lama : Arnab Goswami

"Compassion has enemies...like pity, and moral outrage..."

I came across these words in a TED talk by the Buddhist Roshi Joan Halifax, to whom compassion is a higher faculty, a more important experience, than outrage. Obvious maybe, but worth noticing, amidst the cacophony of shrill news-anchors.