There is a popular forward running around internet possibly created by Charlie Schulz. It asks you to name people who have achieved wonders in life Vs people who affected your personal life (teachers, friends etc).
As I found the line of reasoning to be essentially flawed and illogical, I framed a long reply to one such forward. Feeling sorry for the poor girl who forwarded this email as a nice gesture and earned my clinical, unemotional, rational reply. I am posting the reply below without editing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Call me materialistic but I think people who changed many lives are still more important than people who changed just my life.
As for the questions, here are my thoughts:
1.Name the five wealthiest people in the world: Bill Gates, Carlos Slim, Warren Buffet, Lakshmi Mittal, Mukesh Ambani (I can even talk for at least 10 minutes to 1 hour about each one of them)
2.Name the last five Heisman trophy winners: Not so popular around here.
3.Name the last five winners of the Miss America pageant: Never cared for beauty pageants
4.Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize: can easily name the 6 Indians/ Indian origin people winning Nobel (CV Raman, S Chandrasekhar, Mother Teresa, Tagore, Hargobind Khurana, Naipaul) and few others like Einstein, Feynman, Fleming, Samuelson. As for Pulitzer, I know Bob Dylan got it a couple of years back.
5.Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and actress: I am not so good with chronology. But I can surely name lots of Oscar winners. Recently being Portman, Winslet, Sean Penn and many others.
6.Name the last decade's worth of World Series winners: Again, don’t care about it.
Everyone has answers for the questions below because they are personal questions. It takes outstanding achievement to be remembered by those whose lives one didn’t directly affect. The people above managed to do so.
So I don’t care about Charlie Schulz or his Peanuts. Never get those Charlie Brown jokes anyway. Calvin can kick their ass anyday.
And yes I put special efforts to write this reply because this forward bugged me earlier as well. Also, I hadn’t written anything in a while.
Thanks for the forward and I hope you’d appreciate my two pence as well.
Cheers,
Ashu
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Charlie Schulz Forward
Labels:
calvin,
charlie brown,
charlie schulz,
peanuts,
philosophical questions
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)

0 comments:
Post a Comment