I’m back! After several days – I’ve finally managed to unlock my mind again – to toss out those pointless nuggets of wisdom to the world and causing much embarrassment to myself. What had happened? I don’t know – guess I had gotten stuck into the work routine rather intensely – refusing to give myself that time to reflect and contemplate. I had become too cautious of what I put out there giving up the opportunity to make a fool of myself. So what changed? After several months I finally downloaded a couple of podcasts from the Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner and listened to Jeff Housenbold – the CEO of Shutterfly and Tom Kelley from IDEO. Tom’s talk was fantastic and woke me up. Guess I need to do this podcast and random reading thing as often as I used to. As Tom says – treat life like an experiment.
So what’s this one about? It about Schadenfreude. The happiness that humans experience upon others’ misfortunes. You’ve always felt it – but did you know there was a word for it?
A very common feeling, which unless you’ve actually heard the word – making it an identifable part of the human condition – is otherwise followed by feelings of guilt and remorse.
I think it’s fascinating that words exist in other languages which actually capture something so succintly, and in another language you need a full sentence to explain it. It’s just make the very experience immediately relatable because when you know there’s a word for it – you know that you’re not the only one experiencing it.
Of course we all know Deja Vu. I remember reading this fantastic book by Milan Kundera called The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (which I now intend to carry with me to Goa and reread) – which has a short story called ‘Litost’. Litost is an untransalatable Czech word that ‘represents a state of torment caused by the sudden sight of one’s misery’ – Kundera says that he finds it difficult to imagine how one can understand the human soul without it. More on it once I’ve reread it.
Any Hindi words?
Found two more: Zeitgeist, Jugaad