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Actualización de SMTOWN con Taemin junto a Donghae y Eunhyuk de Super Junior.

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Actualización en las redes sociales oficiales de SHINee con Taemin junto a Eunhyuk y Donghae de Super Junior.

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"TAEMIN 2ND CONCERT T1001101" en Seúl.

I was cleaning the apartment yesterday and listening to an episode of the TED Radio Hour. The episode was about Luck, Fortune, and Chance, and in one of the stories, Tina Seelig defined luck as:

... success or failure apparently caused by chance. Apparently - that's the operative word. It looks like it's chance because we rarely see all the levers that come into play to make people lucky.

Which, on its own is a fine definition. Tough to argue with that. That is, until you see how she defines chance:

Chance is something - you have to do something. You have to roll the dice, or you have to buy a lottery ticket, or you have to apply for a job.

That definition is suspect. I mean, sometimes you need a chance to apply for the job or buy the lottery ticket. The definition of something cannot contain the very thing it’s trying to define. 

Here’s how the Oxford English Dictionary defines chance:

The occurrence of events in the absence of any obvious intention or cause.

The operative phrase, of course, is “absence of any obvious intention or cause.” I would argue that rolling a dice or applying for a job qualify as cause.

But why would she choose that particular definition, you might ask? To answer that, we need to see how she defines fortune:

Fortune is things that are out of your control. I'm fortunate to be born in this place in time. I'm fortunate to be healthy.

She goes on to tell this story about finding herself on a flight next to someone who happened to be a publisher, and she took the step to talk to him, and the step to show him her manuscript, and the step to invite him over to her school... and then basically she got published two years later and the book sold a million copies or something.

Now, you might say, oh, you're so lucky, but of course I was lucky. But that luck resulted from a series of small risks I took starting with saying hello. And anyone can do this. No matter where you are in your life, no matter where you are in the world, no matter even if you think you're the most unlucky person, you can do this by taking little risks that get you out of your comfort zone.

The fact that she was on a flight with a publisher, that’s fortune right there. The fact that he accepted her offer to come speak to her students. The fact that she was on a flight at all.

For what’s worth, I’m not against Tina Seelig’s message. I think everyone could do better by “taking little risks that get you out of your comfort zone”. My issue was just downplaying of fortune in her luck narrative. It’s that inverse law of hard work/privilege when it comes to successful people.

Thankfully, the very next story was Amy Hunter’s, which touches on this exact issue.

But I thought about the TED Radio Hour episode because I watched Period. End of Sentence, and was surprised -- although, really, I shouldn’t have -- that it was made by Americans. USC graduates. 

It’s a well made film. There were parts of it that brought me to tears. And I’m genuinely very happy that it won the Oscar. If nothing else, a lot more people in other parts of the world will now have an idea of how taboo the topic of menstruation is. And it’s not an exclusively Indian problem. I, for example, grew up in a house with female cousins and aunts and I never knew periods were a thing till I learned it in school when I was like 13.

But I thought about the film today, and the value of fortune and luck, because about three years ago, a Pakistani friend of mine made and distributed comics all over schools in Lahore as part of a campaign to normalise periods. To goal was to get people -- girls especially -- to feel comfortable talking about it. I don’t think anyone outside Pakistan wrote about that campaign. 

This is someone I personally know. My point is, I’m sure there are many people in India who’ve written, created campaigns, or even -- who knows --  made documentaries about sanitary pads that no one outside India has heard of, but it’s this American one that’s getting all the attention.