Day: March 15, 2008

Beware the Ides of March

Caesar ignored the soothsayer’s warning to “beware the ides of March” and on March 15th in 44 BCE was assassinated. Cassius was among the attackers. Caesar knew that there was something suspicious about Cassius. He had remarked to Antony:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

Be very wary of people with lean and hungry looks who think too much.

[Here’s Act 1, Scene 2 of The Life and Death of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.]

POSTSCRIPT: All sorts of bad things happen on the ides of March. In 1876 on the ides of March, test cricket was born with a match between England and Australia.

Adding Humiliation to Plunder

I used to have a blog at UC Berkeley. It was titled “Life is a Random Draw.” I wrote it for a couple of years and decided to shut it down as it was attracting too much spam. I will re-publish some of the posts from the Berkeley blog depending on relevance. Here’s one from 13th May 2003. This one is related to the recent incident in which an exhibition of some historical records related to Aurangzeb was shut down by the police in Chennai because some people felt that they could not bear to know that Aurangzeb was a vicious tyrant.

Continue reading “Adding Humiliation to Plunder”