Jehan Manekshaw

“Nationalism may begin with ideas among the elite but its propagation involves having mass support. Initially, anti-colonial”
― Romila Thapar, On Nationalism

“We now use our phones so habitually that I don’t think we consider doing a task and checking our phones at the same time as multitasking, any more than we think scratching your butt during a work call is multitasking. But it is. Simply having your phone switched on and receiving texts every ten minutes while you try to work is itself a form of switching – and these costs start to kick in for you too. One study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20 percent worse.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention

“John’s was a lived and practical wisdom. “The self-renewing man,” he wrote, “looks forward to an endless and unpredictable dialogue between his potentialities and the claims of life—not only the claims he encounters but the claims he invents.” He was a half century older than me, but John’s enduring curiosity, his sense of possibility and willingness to try made him seem the youngest person I knew. So, just start.”
― Jacqueline Novogratz, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: Practices to Build a Better World

“The second way switching harms your attention is what we might call the screw-up effect. When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in, because – Earl explained – ‘your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off’ – and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur. ‘Instead of spending critical time really doing deep thinking, your thinking is more superficial, because you’re spending a lot of time correcting errors and backtracking.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention