The Reading Room with Murtasa Khambati

The Reading Room

“As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

A book that impacted me greatly is David and the Goliath by Malcom Gladwell. My first thought was to recommend an inspirational book which… simply inspired me. Something that you could get on the market for dozen a dime. Instead, the book I choose to write on, David and the Goliath, is one which so marvellously delivers on the twin ideas that an advantage can sometimes be a disadvantage and that a disadvantage can sometimes be an advantage.

This book has made me contemplate topics, which otherwise I usually would dismiss with a smirk. The idea that stuff is rarely as we perceive it to be - Increasing jail time equals a reduce in crime rate, right? Wrong. Londoners who encountered remote misses of bombings during WW2 become traumatised? Wrong, exhilarated in fact. Can an Indian living in USA, who never played basketball before, coach his daughter’s basketball team into the national finals? Very much indeed!

To share a gist of the book, here is the story of David Boies, who was dyslexic. He struggles to read, his speaking vocabulary is limited, and uses small words and short sentences. Yet, he is one of the greatest litigators in the history of law, and has been named the greatest litigator of the world by Who’s Who legal an unprecedented 7 times! He might have not been a reader, but the things that he was forced to do because he could not read well turned out to be even more valuable!

There are hardly any decisions/actions in the world which do not come with their own unique set of cons. And simultaneously no decision or action which doesn’t have its own pros. It’s all a matter of which pros maximise reward, and which cons you can tackle. The real problem in what I just stated is that, the pros and cons are never neatly presented side-by-side the options. In fact, it could probably never be known unless a lengthy research is conducted on the topic. Another problem, is that sometimes there’s a very blurry line (if any) separating the pros from the cons!

I wish I could further elucidate, but I’m afraid I would be required to type out the entire book for you. This is an amazing book, do read it. Malcolm Gladwell is an author I bow down to! I hope his writing encourages you to read and think, just like it did for me.

Murtasa Khambati, DP1