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.
When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
As a flower that is lovely and beautiful, but is scentless, even so fruitless is the well-spoken word of one who practices it not.
If you give a good thing to the world, then over time your karma will be good, and you'll receive good.
There are a million 'oughts' in the world. There's a million ways in which I ought to be serving the world. But the ways I'm gifted to serve and the opportunities that come to me to serve are not a million.
Your value should not be determined by how somebody else has treated you.
The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
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