Sant Jordi: a book and a rose
Enrique Dans
Senior Advisor for Innovation and Digital Transformation at IE University. Changing education to change the world...
It is for sure one of the most beautiful traditions from Catalonia. Taking from Wikipedia),
"April 23rd, St. George, known in Catalan as Sant Jordi, is also known as The Day of the Rose or The Day of the Book is on 23 April, since 1926. The main event is the exchange of roses and books between sweethearts, loved ones, friends and colleagues. Historically, men gave women roses, and women gave men a book to celebrate the occasion — “a rose for love and a book forever.” In modern times, the mutual exchange of books is also customary. Roses have been associated with this day since medieval times, but the giving of books is a more recent tradition originating in 1923, when a bookseller started to promote the holiday as a way to commemorate the nearly simultaneous deaths of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare on 23 April 1616. Barcelona is the publishing capital of both Catalan and Spanish languages and the combination of love and literacy was quickly adopted."
Given the occasion, and considering that today is the first Sant Jordi spent in confinement and, therefore, the streets of Barcelona will be all sad and empty, I thought about honoring the tradition by giving away a picture I took from a rose in my garden, and a chapter of my book, “Living in the future”, that I just published for Kindle. In fact, the book is included in Kindle Unlimited, which is now temporarily free for the first two months, so in case you want to read the whole book for free, you can do so just by signing up for the offer.
I thought about offering the first chapter, but that one is already partially available on the “Look inside” feature in the Amazon page, just by clicking in the book cover. So, considering that quite a few people have told me that the book was extremely relevant for this pandemic and confinement situation we are going through these days, because many of the situations I predicted were experimenting a strong acceleration, I decided to share Chapter 11 (hopefully, it won’t be my own Chapter 11 :-) entitled “How many politicians does it take to change a light bulb?”, and hoping that, at least, it will give us a few ideas on the type of things we could ask our politicians in the future, provided that they were minimally proficient.
So here it is, in pdf version, produced from the original I wrote on Google Docs. Hope you’ll find it interesting.
Happy Sant Jordi!!
(En espa?ol, aquí)
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