Impact

Q: What is the best way to entertain anyone? (Boss, wife, husband, kids, parents, friends…)
A: Listening

Made for each other

Relationship is easy when spouses know each other. There are two examples:
1) A husband comes home after attending a club meeting. He tells his wife, “Dear there was a drinking competition after the meeting today.” His wife spontaneously asks, “Who’s got the second position?”
2) A wife tells her husband, “Dear there was a letter to you. It’s written on the envelope, ‘Private and confidential.’” The husband casually asks, “What is the message of the letter?”
Great understanding of each other.

Responsibility

A person accepted a challenge to stay with a young and beautiful lady for an hour in a closed room. There was no candid camera. The person was allowed to choose the room. Others could not see what the person and the lady did inside the room.

The person came out of the room after an hour and claimed that he was able to control his temptation. He was proud of his ability. Someone, on hearing that, said, “But, I don’t believe in your claim.”

Moral: We are not responsible for what others talk about us. But we are responsible for what we give others to talk about.

Sudoku Challenges
The human brain is an incredible pattern-matching machine Jeff Bezos

Doing Sudoku itself is an insightful experience as every Sudoku is different and demanding. Teaching that to someone to do better and faster is more insightful. This write up presents one incident among many incidents related to the experiences of teaching Sudoku to people with different ages, experiences, educational qualifications, expectations, and styles of learning and doing. “We can define a Sudoku square as a 9x9 grid in which every row, column, and a 3x3 block contains the digits 1-9 exactly once. A Sudoku puzzle is then a square in which some of the cells have been filled while others are blank. The goal of the solver is to fill the blank cells in such a way that the result is a Sudoku square,” Jason Rosenhouse and Laura Taalman.

An eighty year old man curiously kept looking at my solving a Sudoku. That happened inside the coach of an express train. He was sitting beside me. He hesitantly asked me, if I could teach him to solve one. I agreed to his request as we had almost another five hours travelling time to reach our destination. I had a copy of a one star Sudoku. I taught him from the basics. That experience was that of teaching a kindergarten kid. After forty minutes of our discussion, he said that he needed some time to relax as he was tired and could not concentrate. We had resumed after an hour and spent another forty minutes to complete. He was determined and he took that exercise as a challenge to learn doing Sudoku. After completing my teaching, I gave him a copy of another one star Sudoku and told him to solve that without my assistance. He tried, made a lot of corrections, over writing and smudges, and the sheet appeared shabby. He requested for another copy. I gave him and I slept off.

When I woke up he showed me the solved copy to check if that was done right. He took thirty minutes to complete that. I said, “It’s right. You have learnt how to do." His eyes glowed and he threw a broad smile. I continued, "Now you can continue to practice and teach others, if possible.” His face became serious as the reference to the word 'teach' triggered a negative thought in him. He became emotional and spoke in a low voice, “I asked my son to teach me when he was solving one. My son said, ‘It is very difficult to teach you and what will you do by learning that?’ Now, I have learnt it and I will teach my old friends, ten of us meet in the evenings to while away our time. We will spend that time usefully. Here are my wishes and God’s blessings for your health, happiness and service.”

Jason, Rosenhouse and Laura, Taalman. Taking Sudoku Seriously The Math Behind the World’s Most Popular Puzzle. New York: Oxford University Press.