What I've been reading

I always look forward to the books Fareed Zakaria recommends every week on his show. This one from his last show, Mandela's Way:Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love and Courage by Richard Stengel is an easy read but a very powerful book.

In-spite of being in the limelight for decades, I don't believe we got satiated with Mandela. Most of us do believe we know so much about him but this book shows his human side sans that larger than life figure we are so used to.

Each of the fifteen lessons are to be savored and are timeless but these three were my favorites (in Stengel's words).

Courage - None of us is born courageous, Mandela would say, it is all in how we react to different situations. Sometimes it is only through putting up a brave front that you discover true courage. Sometimes the front is your courage. "Pretend to be brave and you not only become brave, you are brave."

It's always Both - For someone like me who has an obsession against cognitive dissonance this was great eyeopener that not everything that seems like cognitive dissonance is cognitive dissonance. Here is great story from Mandela about a young Africa man who left his small village to search for a wife. He spent years traveling all around the world looking for the prefect woman, but did not find her. Eventually he came back to the village without a bride, and his way in saw a woman and said, "Ah, I have found my wife." It turns out, she had lived in the hut next door to his all her life. "Is the moral of the story that you don't need to wander far and wide to find what you are looking for because it's right in front of you? Or is it that sometimes you must have wide experience and knowledge in order to appreciate those things that are closest and most familiar to you?
Mandela answer - "There is no one interpretation. Both may be correct". There are no simple answers to most difficult questions. All explanations may be true. Every problem has many causes, not just one. That is the way Mandela sees the world.
This way of thinking is demanding. It takes an effort of will and it requires empathy and imagination.

Love - No way in the world, I would have imagined Mandela as a romantic guy. Of-course things that matter to us most don't come easy, especially those who have the innate longing and made of that thing. For much of Mandela's life, love was something distant, existing more in his imagination and memory than in reality. And when it was reality, it was often a source of pain rather than solace. Yet he never gave up the idea that love would be in his life.
When someone goes through so much in life like Mandela, one acquires that  profound wisdom and his words of wisdom - "When you love a woman, you don't see her faults. The love is everything. You don't pay attention to the things others may find wrong with her. You just love her."
Wait was painful but he eventually found his love at age 88.

"To those who would say that everything happens for a reason, Mandela would reply that we are the reason and we are the ones who make things happen. There is no destiny that shapes our end; we shape it ourselves."