Carve your own path

The best course I did at IIT was not from Electrical Engg but humanities.

In those days, the humanities course allotment was done first-come-first-served. Hence, laggards like me who showed up just before the closing time would get the last available course.

In the 1st semester, the most dreaded humanities course was ‘Introduction to Symbolic Logic.’ And I later understood why — when Prof RS Mishra gave out the first mid-sem papers in the order of the lowest to highest marks, the lowest guy had -2.5. After 10 odd students, the score reached zero.

Yet, this is the course that served me best in my life, be it in the logical reasoning section of the GMAT, or just analyzing the logical (illogical?) debates we keep hearing.

For example, the negation of ‘If I study, I will score high’ is NOT ‘If I don’t study, I won’t score high’.

Instead, it is, “I studied but did not score high.”

A fun fact: The following statement is true – “If the Sun rises from the West, I am the king of America.”

I am not kidding; you can say this to your boss tomorrow. To prove you wrong, he will have to wait for Sun to rise from the West.

On a serious note, the crowd is always looking for easy — you don’t have to agree. Carve your own path. That is what life is for.

– Rajan

Similar Posts