To stop people from getting ideas…burn books!

News of the guy who threatened to and actually did burn the Koran has been all over the networks. Funny thing is; book burning isn’t a new thing. It’s been around from the middle ages where books printed by John Wycliffe and Johannes Gutenberg were burned to recent times when Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses had copies of his book burned in public and a fatwa placed on his head by Islamic authorities in the middle east.

Most authorities have (rightly) recognised that books are a veritable mine of information and are powerful avenues for the propagation of ideas and cultures. But what they fail to understand is that ideas do not die out simply by book burning. They are simply transferred from one place to another and persecution only makes it spread. I wouldn’t have (I think!!!) been interested in The Satanic Verses if the authorities hadn’t threatened Rushdie’s life.  So much for killing his ideas. The only sure way to kill an idea is to introduce a more powerful one. To paraphrase the words of Rick Warren, ”Book burning is only practiced by those who are unsure of the strength of their ideas”.

We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory…In this war, we know, books are weapons.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945)

U.S. president.

Message to the American Booksellers Association

Book Review: Blink: The power of thinking without thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, 2005, 2005 Paperback Edition.

Image via Wikipedia

We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it…

The first task of blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

-          Malcolm Gladwell, Author of Blink and The Tipping Point.

We make snap judgements everyday. From simple things such as deciding what foods to eat to complex things such as deciding whether we like people or not at first glance. Many times, we can’t explain why we decide the way we do and any attempt to do so ends in frustration and utter failure.

Welcome to Blink.

In this insightful, simple yet beautifully written book, Malcolm Gladwell explores the inner workings of the mind that enable us to make spur-of-the-moment decisions. He goes beyond explaining the process to the conditions that can make this process faulty. Highly recommended reading.