Nice to discover and rediscover amazing songs. Check out some of the history behind the songs and their era. Some of the notes on each singer is written by prominent singers themselves. Check out the one on Bob Dylan by Bono. Bono’s prose sounds lyrical.

Thank god for the internet. Probably the greatest invention of the 20th century. Nothing seem to help connect minds and knowledge, at an ever accelerating pace, like the internet. Even I am able to learn and write about diverse issues. Something impossible in pre-internet days, unless you have lived all your life, read and thought all your life. How many can claim this – Nehru, Churchill, ?

Very moving stuff.

Here is something I am trying. I turn on the Spanish subtitle while listening to the talk. This way I get to learn Spanish while listening. It is not easy since the subtitle changes fast. But I think this could be a good way to learn since you start getting the jist in Spanish, while you understand the talk in English. Try it in the language you want to learn. Creative education I suppose.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

Turns out Mr Nelson Mandela gave a copy of the following speech to François Pienaar, captain of the South African rugby team, before the start of the 1995 Rugby World Cup^[1], in which the South African side eventually defeated the heavily favoured All Blacks. In the film based on those events, the poem Invictus is used instead.

Full text of Citizenship in a Republic – The Man in the Arena

The following lines a really powerful even though the rest of the speech is a bit tedious. We all encounter, in all walks of life, people who face life with a a sneer.

Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows…….

For how this speech became what it is, how King developed the theme, check out

Parting the Water America in the King Years, 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for history. This is first of the trilogy.  As you would expect from any movement, there were lot of intrigues, pettiness, jealousy, etc. One can even see King as a regular guy, afraid of the future and what will happen to him and his family. But the moral of the story is how he and others rose above it all and lead the way.

My favorite part is the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. What I found most interesting, and you never hear this angle, is how the license-permit raj added to the problem. More on this later.