I am going to miss Walter and Ram.

Thank you for making the course so fun and interesting. That great shave has inspired me to complete the course (before the deadline) so that your efforts are not gone to waste.

For those who are familiar with coursera, go take this course Think Again: How to Reason and Argue. I promise it's going to be a great experience.

"Looks can be deceiving."

This is probably the biggest takeaway I have gained from watching the movie The Reluctant Fundamentalist. From a psychological perspective, the show reminds us how automatic and deeply ingrained stereotypes can be, and the seriousness of its consequences.

Many a times, due to various reasons (intentional or not), we apply stereotypes into different facets of our lives. Perhaps given the complexity and massive amount of stimuli around us, there is a pressing need to apply a reductionist approach to classification. For instance, this beagle is a "dog". What is lost in this translation is the rich descriptions that makes each and every item unique.

It can be a dangerous thing sometimes, as depicted so powerfully in the film. The same character starts to behave differently due to the perception of others, which somehow becomes a form of self-fulfilling prophecy? To complicate things, the perceptions held by others can be so easily influenced by the external circumstances. So does that mean that the ability to exercise sound judgement on people can be so vulnerable, cognitively speaking?

And it leaves me with more questions than answers.

After almost a year of hiatus, I seemed to have caught the reading bug once again. Perhaps I have been deeply inspired after watching so many wonderful films such as Les Miserables and the recent The Great Gatsby. One day I aspire to be able to write something of that quality.

On a random note, below is the list of books that BBC has consolidated as the "100 Books to read before you die". I am going to start an arduous journey of trying to complete it all.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (have this book but too thick to read it)
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Bible - Council of Nicea
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare (And then some of the individual plays are also on this list?)
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Ulysses - James Joyce 
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

23/100

"Better a worthy failure than a mediocre success" - Kuo Pao Kun.

what inspiration.

It's 2013 (and we survived the doomsday prophecy).

As much as I would like to rant about the daily happenings, I decided to only record down the significant events. After all in the grand scheme of things, such incessant complaints about work becomes so much less important over time.

2012 was an important year for me. I have experienced and learnt much from it, even though some rides were more bumpy than others. I have lost and gained back relationships and have learnt to cherish the ties I have with others. That was my most significant takeaway last year. But building relations is not an easy feat, since everyone are so busy with our own respective lives. Yet, it is important because anything can happen and it may be too late when one finally realizes it. 

I have also grown to be more independent. While I still lack the self-confidence in my own abilities, I am slowly changing my perspective. "Maybe I'm not that good, but I'm not that bad either". The 2 overseas trip has exposed me to the big world out there. There are so many things one can do, but it depends on whether he/she has the courage to take the plunge. While this might be a small achievement to some, it's an accomplishment to be able to travel alone in 2012. I want to thank Dr Sandy (my thesis prof) for giving me this wonderful opportunity. That sense of unprecedented freedom can be so enticing at times but I know things still need to be grounded in reality.

In the coming year, I will want to challenge myself to do more. Happy CNY and 2013.