The peculiar case of tumour and humour

I was just now watching this TEDx talk from 2016 delivered at the Tel Aviv University by Eyal Eltawil.


I came across this yesterday thanks to a question my good friend and well wisher Prasad Bartakke asked me on one of my LinkedIn posts. I came across this TED talk when I went online to find the YouTube link to another TED talk on role of humour in leadership.


It reminded me of one of the all time Indian movie classics in Hindi - Anand that came out in March 1971 and it looked like Eyal was the Israeli Anand on a concoction of opioids and steroids of a better kind.


I highly recommend everyone to watch this short 15 minute TED talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-82DsjuXOpA titled - The Cancer that died of laughter. 


Towards the end of it, it struck me all of a sudden that there is a connection between the English words tumour and humour. They both have the same number of and almost the same set of letters with the difference being only in the starting letter. And that we can try our best to heal our tumour by going back to humour.


And Eyal presents a great example of this. Thanks a lot Eyal.


And as you watch Eyal, you will understand the meaning of a line I came across nearly a decade ago. It was a simple & profound definition of the word humour: humour is tragedy + passage of time!


And then there is the example of the pacifist Norman Cousins who also healed himself of a degenerative disease through the conscious and active use of humour. Here are a few links to him:


We can compare ourselves to cars as a metaphor for a moment.


And if the success of cars is measured in miles per hour then we can certainly measure our success in smiles per hour as well as smiles per life time - the number of times we willed ourselves to smile, the number of reasons we found or created to smile out of gratitude or plain humour and the number of number of smiles we spread around in and after our lifetime. (Like Mukesh sahab sang for Raj Kapoor sabab in Anadi in 1957, "...Kisi ki Aansuon me muskuraenge...")


_/\_






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