knowledgeable - A blog by Shivam Lotusway

  If By Rudyard Kipling  If you can keep your head when all about you    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;    If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breat...

Three Days to See by Helen Keller I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being was stricken blind and deaf for a few days at some time during his early adult life. Darkness would make him more appreciative of sight; silence would teach him the joys of sound. Now and then I have tested my seeing friends to discover what they see. Recently I asked a friend, who had just returned from a long walk in the woods, what she had observed, “Nothing in particular,” she Replied How was it possible, I asked myself, to walk for an hour through the woods and see nothing worthy of note? I, Who cannot see, find hundereds of things to intrest me through mere touch. I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. I pass my hands livingly about the soomth skin of a silver birch, or the rough, shaggy bark of a pine. In spring I touch the breches of trees hopefully in search of a bud, the first sign of awakening Nature after her winter’s sleep. Occasionally, if i am very fortunate,...

  Report of an Adjourned Case   Between Nose and Eyes a strange contest arose, The spectacles set them unhappily wrong; The point in dispute was, as all the world knows, To which the said spectacles ought to belong. So the Tongue was the Lawyer and argued the cause With a great deal of skill, and a wig full of learning, While chief baron Ear sat to balance the laws, So famed for his talent in nicely discerning. In behalf of the Nose, it will quickly appear, And your lordship, he said, will undoubtedly find, That the Nose has had spectacles always in wear, Which amounts to possession time out of mind. Again, would your lordship a moment suppose ('Tis a case that has happened and may be again), That the visage or countenance had not a Nose, Pray who would or who could wear spectacles then? Then holding the spectacles up to the court, - Your lordship observes they are made with a straddle, As wide as the ridge of the Nose is, in short, Designed to sit close to it, ...

 The Two Gentlemen of Verona by A.J Cronin  As we drove through the foothills of the Alps two small boys stopped us on the outskirts of Verona. They were selling wild strawberries. “Don’t buy,” warned Luigi, our cautious driver. “You will get much better fruit in Verona. Besides, these boys.....” He  shrugged  his shoulders to convey his disapproval of their shabby appearance. One boy had on a worn jersey and cut-off khaki pants; the other a shortened army  tunic  gathered in loose folds about his skinny frame. Yet, gazing at the two little figures,   with their brown skins, tangled hair and dark earnest eyes, we felt ourselves strangely attracted. My companion spoke to the boys, discovered that they were brothers. Nicola, the elder, was 13; Jacopo, who barely came up to the door handle of the car, was nearly 12. We bought their biggest basket, and then set off toward town. Next morning, coming out of our hotel, we saw our friends bent over shoe shine ...

 Mending Wall  Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’ We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do no...