All posts tagged: last lecture

No more evil

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Randy Pausch wrote in The Last Lecture, “Find the best in everybody. Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waiting, it will come out… Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you.”   It never struck a chord with me, until now. The negativity in me had set my default mode to ‘don’t trust’, ‘the world is bad’ and ‘people are guilty’, until proven otherwise. Small gestures, strangers, life, does change the way we look at things, and sometimes for the better. I’ve realized that the world is not all bad and not all evil, but we have to believe that before we start to see it. I think I’m starting to believe it. It’s the beginning of a new phase for me, one that I hope will outlast all the hatred. Evil really lies in the eyes of the beholder. It’s a nice world from hereon. Shivya NathWelcome to my blog, The Shooting Star. I’ve been called a …

The Last Lecture

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I suppose we all have our notion of how we’ll confront death, when the time comes. Carnegie Mellon (CMU) created a platform for its professors to imagine such a confrontation and gave us the invaluable gift of Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. CMU’s tradition asks professors to imagine the end of their lives and address graduating students, sharing with them their philosophy of life and what they might have done differently if they could do it again. For CMU’s computer science professor, Randy Pausch, things were a little more real. He was diagnosed with cancer and given a few months to live. His Last Lecture was indeed his last.  Randy’s lecture was a keepsake. It did the rounds online and became one of the most inspiring, most viewed videos on youtube [The Last Lecture, view here].  “Under the rouse of giving an academic lecture, I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children. If I were a painter,  I would have painted for them. …