Darn. I just found out that this blog can have hardly any claims to originality as well now, adding to an already impressive list mentioned in an earlier post. As a matter of fact, the words idle and ramblings are so wildly popular among bloggers that I almost feel sorry for adding another one to this extravagant buffet of idleramblings.

Anyway, I just discovered after attending a certain seminar that I have an innate dislike for business mantras. They are usually so indelibly meaningless, that I suspect that they must have been created by a group of linguitic terrorists who sat around a round table (pun intended), deliberating on the latest piece of imbecility to inflict upon an unsuspecting public. I know I am being terribly biased here, but that's okay 0 a perfectly objective view would be so ... boring.

I mean, catchphrases are usually bad enough ( catchphrases ! ..... Jesus, I mean, just look at the word !) but why anyone would want to put on a public display of idiocy in the name of serious business is just beyond my comprehension. To be fair, it wasn't always like this; things actually started going downhill when a certain gentleman by the name of Francis Bacon proclaimed that 'Knowledge is power' which has since been so overused and overabused that even Frankie must be turning in his grave, besides unleashing a whole Pandora's box of other such phrases .... Since I am feeling particularly benevolent today, I will spare the poor reader from other examples. I also imagine Frankie must have been feeling a little pompous when he said that, or else he was drunk, but here I digress.

So at this seminar I attended very recently, the speaker was proudly proclaiming that the brain is truth-seeking and thats why it is important to feed the brain with the necessary knowledge in order to achieve business success. This was followed by a couple of minutes of silence, in which we marvelled at the nature of the profound truth that we have just been privy to. I mean, that is some revelation, right up there with ' Assume and you make and ass out of u and me', or something along that line. All these, of course, can be conveniently found in books titled ' 10 Easy Steps to Business Success'. But I might be wrong. You have to be pretty good at business to publish, sell and laugh your way to the bank even with books like that, so they might have a point after all.

But never mind, English is nothing if not malleable, and if a language is capable of such beauty as in ' Good night sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest', I am sure it is capable of accommodating mantras to business success as well.