The One Who Wrote Destiny Quotes

“At Starfleet Academy, there is a simulated test for trainee crews called the Kobayashi Maru, named after a ship marooned in the Klingon Neutral Zone. Your job is to decide whether to try and rescue it, thereby risking war with the Klingons, or sacrifice it to collateral damage. It’s a purpose-built no-win situation designed to show that sometimes decisions needing to be made don’t necessarily have a clear-cut right and wrong road, a best course of action and a worst course of action. Some things you can’t win –it’s how you don’t win that counts. If you’re going to not win, then do it with style, integrity and aplomb. Not with misery, depression and defeat. Not by cheating the system the way Kirk did –by surreptitiously reprogramming the simulator so that it was possible to rescue the freighter. The irony is, he was awarded a commendation, for ‘original thinking’. The Kobayashi Maru wasn’t one for fancy semantic solutions. Nor was it for cheating on; that defeated the lesson to be learned. It was to prove a point. That you can’t win ’em all, champ.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The One Who Wrote Destiny

“And so you became the worst kind of immigrant. You talked of the good old days. You compared the prices and outside temperatures of everything to Kenya. You cursed the influx of immigrants as my cousins and I flocked around you in a ready-made community. You would even go as far as to quote Margaret Thatcher. To think that you, an immigrant yourself who had been hard done by her and those who came before, used her to score points against the next wave. I loved you still but you became difficult to live with. You switched from drinking to chewing tobacco although you didn’t actually chew”
― Nikesh Shukla, The One Who Wrote Destiny

“We only become the good type once we’ve transcended the stereotypes of benefit-scrounging and job-stealing. And we can only do that by being successful at sports, or winning national talent shows, or by baking delicious cakes. I am not a good immigrant, because my skills aren’t transferable, in a broad sense. No one is standing over the coders of tomorrow saying, well, this young South Asian coder, she is a good model for her people. I can never transcend.”
― Nikesh Shukla, The One Who Wrote Destiny