The test - Sapa, Vietnam

Human resource experts are interviewing candidates for a good corporate job. What's the best way to make sure they're selecting the smartest people, those able to think outside the box, to break out of their comfort zone, to adapt to change, to expect the unexpected and any other common place they like to use in that field? Those cunning sneaky questions of them? Hmm...you can easily find the best answers on the web. Group sessions? They often turn out to be sad displays of ill-concealed aggressiveness. And again, instructions can be found online. No, none of that stuff will really help. My suggestion? Vietnamese railways. Here is a good test for you, recruiters! The state railways of Vietnam.

Thoughts, rounding up!/17

With these thirteen new thoughts we reach a total of one hundred.

- It's mathematics man. If you spend too much time worrying about how you live you won't have a lot left to enjoy your life.

- Growing up? No way! I prefer dying like this than living like that.

- Sometimes I feel like a hermit lost in the midst of a crowd.

- Surrounded by so much mediocrity...and not  even being able to take advantage of it.

- If you really want to feel alive sometimes you have to make a mess.

Silence is not an absolute necessity

The restaurant (in Thailand).

You're having dinner at a nice little restaurant, vapors rising from the iced bottle of beer mixed with the aroma of the spices that soak the seafood laid out in front of you stroke the flushed skin of your cheeks. The breeze of a distant fan intermittently struggles to divert the course of the beads of sweat that are gliding down your brow. It's stifling hot. The heat of a season that will end soon, swept away by the violence of the monsoons, but you've learned to fend those heat waves off and keep them out of the peaceful and cool cocoon where you like to hide yourself away. Maybe it's your ancestral spirit of adaptation, or maybe some of the nirvanic skills of the Buddhist monks have been finally absorbed by an unidentified spiritual element hidden somewhere inside of you. You might even be able to enjoy the moment. Because it is supposed to be a nice, enjoyable moment. You might, as I said, if it wasn't for the vibrations of an electric guitar and the catlike yelling of a singer hitting your eardrums pointblank. You realize that this place is really changing you when you notice that instead of cursing and insulting them you are actually singing the refrain between a mouthful and the next one, while your right sole keeps the rhythm under the table, chasing away a cockroach or a rat that had come to feast on the leftovers.