If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously vary your speed. You accelerate to 100 and slow down to 30 and then accelerate again. In a city, you make a lot of turns against the stream of traffic. You go around a roundabout twice.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that taking unpredictable actions can help one determine if they are being followed.
Salman Rushdie's quote illustrates the principle of using erratic behavior to test one's surroundings and discern whether someone is pursuing you. By varying your speed and direction significantly, you can gain insights into the intentions of those around you, as those who might be following will likely struggle to keep up with your sudden changes.
In practice
During a motivational talk about staying aware in your environment, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of being alert.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.
The hard discipline, with the exception of one great good point, is fraught with evil. The good point is that men can do one or two things well with very little effort, having practiced them every day through generations.
The object of reflection is invariably the discovery of something satisfying to the mind which was not there at the beginning of the search.
An error can never become true however many times you repeat it. The truth can never be wrong, even if no one hears it.
It was a very cool thing to be a smart girl, as opposed to some other, different kind. And I think that made a great deal of difference to me growing up and in my life afterward.
Maturity: Be able to stick with a job until it is finished. Be able to bear an injustice without having to get even. Be able to carry money without spending it. Do your duty without being supervised.
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