shashi tharoor

wow, shashi tharoor reading habit:

The recent furore about the IPL scam gotten me interested in knowing about shashi tharoor. I stopped getting to know the news long time ago for no apparent reason :). So I didn't bother to enquire about him when i first saw him in some newspaper. But recently i got to see his interview called "Conversations with History" that was given at the Unviersity of California. I was amazed at the pace with which he thinks and talks. 

In the interview, he told that 
He finished his schooling in a Boarding School in Mumbai, college at St.Stevens, Masters from ....university(I don't remember), later his Ph.D at the age of 22 from Tufts University. I was like wow! this man is really something. He also told that in one of his schooling years, he resolved to read 365 books a year and he kept that promise. How wonderful!! 

This man thinks twice as fast as we think. And he speaks twice as fast as he thinks. It was a real pleasure just watching him speak. That's it. 

I am getting a very big doubt lately. There must have been a connection between the number of books people read and the speed with which they think. I deduce this from one of my other role models - Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan. Whenever he is asked a question, he takes a minute to respond and the first things that comes out of his mouth is "there are three perspectives or three sides". This means that he processes the question and the answer to it from multiple perspectives in that SINGLE minute. Can you believe it? 

I think all this happens because they have jogged their minds enough to process huge amounts of information in much less time with pinpoint accuracy by means of thinking while reading. In other words, reading bootstraps thinking. 

The issue is not over with that. They also process the answer in their mind in that one minute. So they manipulate the language also with pinpoint accuracy to convey their ideas. Isn't this wonderful? How many of us can really be confident enough to state what we have in our minds in such a little time. That's almost impossible.

Therefore, we have to master the language to understand other's ideas as well as to epxress ours. If we neglect language we can be sure that we have lost half the abiltiy to think. Becuase it is only through language that we think. Language boosts our thinking process. We develop our language only when we READ. We need to read a lot.