Epistles

From the NYTimes, a must-read and a must-watch (the inset video). Very moving.

G. P. Sawant entered the letter-writing trade in 1982 when he won a government contract for a coveted stall inside the post office headquarters. Before long, he earned a reputation among illiterate migrants as a gifted writer of letters.

But now the professional letter writer is confronting the fate of middlemen everywhere: to be cut out. In India, the world’s fastest-growing market for cellphones, calling the village or sending a text message has all but supplanted the practice of dictating intimacies to someone else.

And very positive.

He is happy, of course, because his four children, all of whom he sent to private school using the proceeds from letter writing, have pulled the family into the upper middle class. His son works at a bank; one daughter works as a civil engineer in Denmark; another daughter is studying computers in college; and there is Suchitra, who is currently in New Jersey on assignment for Infosys.

A billion mutinies now !

~~~

A MINT article on running :

The granddaddy of marathons Fauja Singh ran the London Marathon when he was 94. He not only finished the run but also improved his timing…. He ran his first marathon at 89 and since then has taken part in at least six, defying age and proving several armchair sceptics wrong about age, knees and long-distance running.

From the same article :

And then there is Dean Karnazes of San Francisco. Last year, between September and November, he ran 50 marathons in 50 states in the US in 50 consecutive days. He finished the New York City Marathon, his strongest finish, in three hours flat.

Esquire’s annual article on the “Best and the Brightest of 2007″ :

On Franziska Michor, Austrian prodigy and genius at baking cakes, driving 18-wheelers and math. Among other things :

a) twenty-five years old;

b) a slip of a thing, about a hundred pounds;

c) employed by the department of computational biology at Sloan-Kettering, the cancer hospital and research center in New York;

d) equipped with a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Harvard, which she earned at twenty-two;

e) determined to change the way modern medicine deals with cancer, so that it may truly be called modern;

Her area of work – bringing (more) math into biology, in particular into cancer fighting efforts. And why ?

And she thinks medicine is — though she would never use this word — dumb. Not doctors, not scientists, and certainly not the people she’s gotten to know at Princeton, where she was a theoretical biologist at the Institute for Advanced Study when she was nineteen, or at Harvard, or at Sloan. No, medicine — at least in comparison with cancer, at least in comparison with the blind god of evolution. And what she wants to do is make it smarter. What she wants to do is teach it math.

Read the whole article ; the article itself is well-written. You do get the impression that the Esquire journalist must have been totally floored by someone of this caliber. Look at this extract :

So yeah, Franziska Michor is pretty smart, but that’s not really the point, even though a certain amount of smarts helps, given what she’s setting out to do. She’s also pretty determined and pretty dedicated and pretty damn dauntless, but that’s not the point, either, any more than are her talents at cake baking or ballroom dancing or the fact that she speaks six languages. No, the point is this: Franziska is, in the statistical sense of the word, improbable. She’s to the general run of human capability what she is to truck driving in Austria. Her position on the bell curve of what people can and can’t do is so far-flung as to seem exotic, even impossible.

Genius is fascinating, scarce, inspiring and a real turn on – at the level of personality sure, even by its very nature. We are only beginning to understand the brain, and someday we will better understand genius, and many varieties of these.

I somehow think that one must engage in pursuit of excellence in a way to be really good at one kind of science, one kind of art and some sport. How do we define great ? Maybe say 99.5, 95 and 93 percentile in these 3 domains ? Of course, by definition (of percentile) we cannot all be in these percentile brackets, but wonder where the pursuit itself will take us.

This story has much resemblance to that of a person I know.

On his way down to Wall Street, my father, who was driving a Stanley Steamer, one of the earliest automobiles, noticed an acquaintance whom he didn’t especially like. But Edgar Kohler looked frail and dejected and my father felt sorry for him, so he offered him a ride, mentioning that he was going to stop off at a Japanese-print exhibit. Kohler decided to accompany him.

Going into the gallery, they met two friends coming out, who assessed the exhibition this way: “There’s a girl walking around who’s better-looking than anything on the walls.” Once inside, Kohler and my father immediately spotted her — a tall young woman with fair hair and blue eyes, clearly strong, dynamic, and self-assured. My mother always remembered what she was wearing that day, because she felt that her “costume,” as she called it, had played a part in her destiny. She must have been quite a sight in her gray tweed suit and small squirrel cap adorned with an eagle feather. My father, on seeing her, said to Kohler, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.”

Are you serious?” Kohler asked, to which my father responded, “I was never more serious in my whole life.” Kohler, supposing that they’d never run into her again, suggested that my father speak to her. “No. That would offend her and spoil everything,” my father replied. The two men then agreed that whoever subsequently might meet her first would introduce her to the other.

The story above is that of Katharine Graham’s parents – this extract is from the first chapter of her autobiography. The couple I know await their formal union sometime next year.