Do(n't) Kiss The World !

So I read these two books and that's when I started to pen down this one. The first being Chetan Bhagat's "The Three Mistakes of My Life" and the other being Subroto Bagchi's "Go Kiss The World". It is very ironic that I read these two books one after the other. One being the story of a loser in life who introspects as to what went wrong in his life and the other book about a winner who gives us success-mantras taking an example of his own life.

I found it very odd, to read about how a person succeeded and the reasons behind his success and how another person lost and what were the reasons for his failure, both in a very short period of time. One books keeps inspiring and the other shows what can happen if things don't go the way planned. The result? I found there is no formula for success in life. Everything depends on whether you "can" transform your circumstances into opportunities to do something big or just treat them as they are and live with it.

After reading "The Three Mistakes of My Life", the immediate question one would ask oneself is "What were the big mistakes that I did in life?" I did ask myself too. But at 24 years of age, with no big failures to worry about, do I think I have made any mistakes at all? No. But how do we even know we did a mistake? Don't we only know it when we planned something and failed to implement it? What if we haven't planned anything? Then we wouldn't do any mistakes, would we? When you do not plan anything in life and just follow destiny to where it takes you, the result is, you neither repent for anything you did nor you have anything to boast about.

So, do successful people follow destiny or have a dream and work hard to realize it? Did Gandhi or Nehru or Sachin have such a dream OR were they in the right place at the right time (meaning luck) with the right talent?

What did I take back from the books?

From the first, I sure did learn one thing - "what not to do".

But from the second? I am not really sure. Reading a success story is very inspiring. But all I can take back from any such book is "Work hard and hope for the best". Because no two persons end up at the same destination though they take the same path. That is the beauty of life. You take the example of a highly successful person and follow the same route, you might end up as something else. It is impossible to tell someone "What to do". It changes from person to person and from situation to situation.

So do we go and kiss the world or just wait for the world to kiss us :-) ??

On a different note, Abhinav Bindra made India proud by winning the first gold medal. Congratulations to him!! This reminds me of my post back in 2004 during the Athens Olympics. I have been writing for over four years now. Good or bad.