Power

I was listening to the song "Aa bhi jaa" from Sur, staring out of windows onto the beautiful lake outside our house. The tiny droplets of rain shimmering on the surface of the water, a beautiful piece of violin playing in the background and I thought about everything that is beautiful about life.
       In the background I heard Lucky Ali's voice nudging his student to perform, she on the other hand is shocked to see that her teacher has stolen her song after dismissing the song as a piece of crap in a previous instance. And then I thought about everything that is ugly about life. People hating each other, killing each other, wars and the list goes on.
      I have thought about this a lot, every time we read something horrible in the papers and I have tried to search for answers for this. I do not hate the people who do hateful things but I wonder what makes them do such things, what is it that makes them stoop to such levels that only hurting other fellow beings is the only way in which they get happiness. Is that true happiness, one can argue but there is something about that action that attracts these people towards performing that action.
      Every time I ask this question there is only one answer that I get and that is Power. The desire for power drives a lot of activities in our life, each one of us wants to feel that we have an identity, that there is someone out there who will listen to us when we say something, there is someone that looks up to us, fear or respect does not really matter, we want to make an impact, again positive or negative does not really matter.
      Why is it that power is that important one might ask? I think the answer lies in our animal past. Imagine a wounded lion in the jungle, he really does not have much chances of survival but then think of a powerful lion, he gets meat delivered to his doorstep, all the lioness' want to be with the most powerful lion. At the end of the day it is all about survival. We have left our animal past behind but the instincts are still there, we still believe that in order to survive we need to be powerful and not just that people around us need to recognize.
      This does not really apply to us right, we have all handled our animal instincts well. Have we? Lets take a closer look - what about the all the cases husbands shouting on wives, parents beating kids, bosses making life for their employees hell, all our peers at work fighting it out to be the next big guy.  How many times have you seen housewives shouting on their maids, men shouting on auto-drivers or servers in restaurants in India? Everyone of us is looking for an opportunity to feel powerful.
      Well wait a sec, you can tell me, not all desire for power is bad. Let me give you an example - you want to be the next director in your office, so all you do is slog it out to be the director. Lets assume you do  become the director, what now? Why did you want to become director, to feel powerful? You have all the power you want now, but what do you want to do with it ? All this while that you were busy slogging it out to become the director, did you ever think about why you wanted to be the director. Do you want to change things at work, motivate people, build newer products, what was it ? My guess is you have not really thought about it, all you wanted to be was powerful and that is all you strived to do. That is the problem with gunning for power, most of the times you do it because of how it feels, you don't really worry about what power does or why you want that power. When the chance finally comes for you to use your power most often that not you will not know what to do with it since you have not thought about it really. We all know what the consequences of having such people in power are. Politicians in India provide ample real life examples.
     All the external influences ( read facebook, linked-in, tv, the movies) around us do not really help us with the struggle for power. There are a lot more avenues to show case ourselves these days, compare our position with others and then stack rank ourselves on where we rank in the power chain. Depending on where you land in the chain, there might be various emotions that one might go through.
      We have heard it said from the beginning of time that unless we realize our true merit as an individual, realize that we are all in this together, not against each other, there will always be a struggle over the other. And mind you there will always be an other that you can compare yourself against. 

Profound moments

People often talk about some profound moments that changed their life. So far I have never experienced one, but that changed yesterday when we attended Karin’s funeral in Minneapolis.  All this while when Karin was approaching death, all I was telling myself was that when the moment actually comes I want to be present there. God willing, that happened and we made it to the funeral. Before leaving for the funeral I checked out Karin’s caring bridge site (https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/karintreiber/) one last time and the outpouring of love and affection for her as well as the entire Treiber family was very moving. I thought about how amazing it is that this tiny slender woman has been able to touch the hearts of so many different people  who spoke different languages, came from different parts of the world and on the surface looked and behaved a lot more differently than she did.

The minute we entered the church to attend the service, we knew this was not a mourning, it was a celebration of the person that Karin was and was happening the way Karin wanted it to be. There were some neatly made collages of Karin the teacher, the friend, the traveler, the wife, the mentor and the Rotarian – all of which had one thing in common – her smiling face. There was a bigger collage that had all the experiences that people had shared on the caring bridge site. Everyone had a different story yet it was so similar in the sense that each of them had been moved in some or the other by Karin. We then walked into the church to meet Bob and there he was with his trademark wide grin, thanking us for coming down and introducing us to his entire family. He sure was living up to his wife words of making this a celebration. He said all the love that people had showered on them in the past few days had created a bubble that was letting his carry on this ceremony. As I looked at her peaceful figure in the casket and how extra-ordinarily beautiful the church looked with all the flower arrangement and at all diverse people who had come to celebrate her, tears just flowed through my eyes. I missed her in the moment, her laughter, her warmth and her charm. That’s when I knew that even in death she would make sure that she taught us a thing or two about living.

I was wondering how someone could really capture Karin’s life for everyone present there but the pastor made the job easy for everyone that followed. He said Karin was the tiny horn with the big voice. She was our very own Mother Teresa. She selflessly cared for people around her and across national boundaries. All of her mentees will vouch for the fact that it was  because of her encouragement that they are where they are today. She has a total of 21 PHD students graduate under her, visitors from 80 different countries visited her and a lot of others benefited from her acts of charity at the Rotary and the church . However she valued service to the Lord about everything else. She was a constant learner in life, asking questions, constantly curious and at the same time valuing each and every moment in her life.

Right then I knew that I had met a saint and I only wish that I had more time to spend with her.

Listening to the songs interspersed with the eulogies I realized why I so passionately wanted to be there. It was because I wanted to hear people talk about Karin and her life.  I wanted to see if I can pick a drop from the ocean of love that she spread around and not be the self-centered person that I am right now. Bob, Paul, David and her friends talked about how much Karin had given to them both in life, through the process of dying and now in death. She had set the bar really high and as Paul mentioned if she was here today she would say there is no bar, just keep the bar pushing.

Karin’s life was not about power or material means. It was not a process of aggregation, it was a process of giving . The lesson that she taught us all was that only by making your life an outpouring of love can you really live life in its truest sense. I want all of us to remember that there was one amongst us who managed to live such an exemplary life and that it might indeed be possible for us to live up to the example that she set.

What would you do if you were not afraid ?

Over the past few months I have given some though to work life balance, woman at work and as I was hearing this Sheryl Sandberg talk today I finally decided to start putting down these thoughts in words. A lot more posts to follow on this as my thoughts progress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdvXCKFNqTY

Disclaimer - I really dnt agree with all of what Sheryl says, its just that it triggered a train of thoughts in me and I decided to write about it , most of these thoughts here are my ideas which may not really agree with what she says.

Here are a couple of things she said which got me thinking -

1) Woman quit long before they actually quit
We start making less ambitious choices even before we have actually started doing the required job , we somehow believe that it will take a lot from us and we will not be able to manage work life balance when we get to a bigger spot in the company. This in itself prevents us from getting to a spot where we will challenged enough or one that we believe we deserve to be at . Given this we end up at positions which are less suitable than the positions that we believed we deserved and hence the choice to quit becomes a lot more easier because we no longer feel challenged by the job or the position that we are at.

2) What would you do if you were not afraid ?
This I think holds for each one of us . Some of us are afraid of our jobs because we think we might not have the capacity , some of us are afraid of quitting the wrong jobs because we are afraid of not finding another one, some of us are afraid of asking for a raise or a job that you think you deserve because we think we will be berated for having asked for that.

I am turning into a big believer of questioning my everyday life choices that I make at my work place  and home. Questions like  -

1) Where do I work ?
Even though we tell ourselves we don't have much of choice in the jobs and people we land up with , that is wrong, with enough homework,trial and error you can call the shots on the place that you would like to work at.

2) How much time do I devote to my job ?
Is working long hours the only way of showing that I am devoted to my job ? What if I want to do a good job for 8 hours a day but then after that I want to devote time to my personal pursuits ?

3) Why do I choose to work long hours ?
Is it work pressure, my love for what I do or just because I don't have anything better to do with my time ?

4) Why do I  do my job ?
I see a lot of women these days do a job because they get a sense of identity and importance from the jobs they are at which they miss if they were to stay at home. But then if power and identity are our only reason for working then maybe we need to look at ourselves more deeply before we decide to work. Keeping track of the bigger picture is very important - how does me doing a good job impact the world around me ?

5) How do I deal with the pressures of a rat race ?
Sheryl Sandberg mentioned a very important thing, if you feel like you are caught in the rat race that might mostly be because you are not in the right job. To add to that I will say if you dnt have the right attitude you will feel the same way. If we are always trying to compete against the person sitting next to us, instead of just believing in what we do and trying to do a good job of it we might end up always having to be at the mercy of the rat race.

6) Work life balance
This happens to be my most favorite topics . How do you define work life balance ? Is it worth skipping meals, eating outside, working long hours, sleeping less to prove that you are a good employee?

People all around talk about how their jobs are stressful , there is a lot of talk about people not being able to handle the pressure, ambition, competition etc but what I find disappointing is that as a result of all of this we forget the basic reason for doing a job . We work to be able to produce something, something new, something useful and  worthwhile . Of course we need to do make money but then for most people I know we are at a stage where money is not the primary concerns.

And we need to think about these questions because even the most intelligent people in this world can create havoc in the world by working on jobs that they had no idea were causing the entire financial system to collapse.

Do I have answers to all of these questions ? Not at all , all I know is that I need to keep asking them because who knows someday I might actually have answers to some of these questions.

Death

I am in one of those moods today to write about a not much talked about topic , but of which I often think . Our normal excuse always is that we are too young to start thinking about death , I think there is never a right age to start thinking about death . It is a reality of life, as much of a reality as life itself is . We live and we die and the unfortunate part is we always forget in our daily routine that our life has a expiry date . We keep living our lives as if we are going to be on this earth for ever .

Ok , so why do I think we need to be aware of the fact that we are going to die one of these days , there is a very simple reason to it - It just makes us enjoy our lives better because we know that this awesome run that we are having on this earth is not going to last too long .

So what exactly are the advantages of thinking about death

1. You become aware of the fact that life passes by really quickly - 25 years have passed by already in the blink of an eye , how much time do you think another 50 years is going to take . Another two blinks of a an eye and it will be all .done

2. Once you know that life does not really last that long , then you know that you better use it in a good way and feel happy about it . There is no point really cribbing about anything , anything that brings negative emotions in you and prevents you from enjoying life is really biting into the small amount of time that you actually have on this earth . In short you stop taking Life too seriously .

3. Knowing that life has expiry date also means that you have to start making a list of things that you want to do when you can do them . Do you really want to spend your entire day , locked up in a office , doing things you hate when you can actually be out there doing something you really like .? Well you can afford to do those hateful things if you had infinite time in your hands not when you have only a few moments .

I know we have all heard this thousands of times in the thousands of forwards that get sent to us , but one thing I have found is that any time I am aware of this thought , my life changes , my actions start to have more meaning to them . I know I need to enjoy this moment thoroughly because this moment will never come back ever again . Is it tough to do this , ohh ya , what with our minds jumping around all the while , but is it worth doing this , for sure it is .

So what started this chain of thoughts today in my head . I met a couple in the temple today . They lost their 19 years old daughter due to distracted driving . Her friend was driving the car , turned around to pick up a napkin and crashed . So now they work on promoting awareness on distracted driving , they hold a vigil and walk every year , the money that they collect goes to her foundation , they are trying to contact reporters , govt officials and people everywhere to spread awareness on this . I could see the emotion in their face , when they talked about their daughter but at the same time there was a strength that if they have to make her memory a good one , they need to do something about it . It is very rare to meet people like this who can turn around misfortunes in their life into a meaningful passion . I told them , I cannot express in words but what they are doing is truly great and not many people are able to do that .

Here is one couple who has understood that death exists and accepting that it is a part of our lives and then dealing with it is makes our lives on earth even more worth it.

Continuing this chain of thoughts was a movie that I saw " Driving miss daisy " . The movie is about a old woman , who suddenly realizes that she is too old to drive . But she does not want to give up on being the independent woman that she has been all her life and ask around for help . She resists being given a car and driver , but eventually starts warming up to the idea that it is not bad to ask around for help .

Seeing that movie I suddenly realized that I am going to be that old and senile one of these days, I will constantly need someone's help , will no longer be able to do everything I wish to , I will forget stuff and I might get stuck in a one bedroom apartment with not many people around me .

Does this scare me ..sure it does , I love my youth and want to stay in it for ever . But that is not the natural way of life and I think the best way to deal with it is to be aware of it . Everything in nature starts with a seed, becomes a sapling , a full grown tree and then dies and so it is going to be with us too . A lot of times we get frustrated with our elders that they do not understand our ways of life , but we always forget that we will have to be in there shoes one of these days and it might mean all the same things for us then .

The Bhagwad geetha sums this up

"Death is as sure for that which is born as birth is for that which is dead . Therefore greave not for that which is inevitable "

Spirituality

I rarely venture to try to write on this subject , mostly I think because of my lack of definition to what that word completely entails and also in the recent times the word has been mauled so much that people wonder how any self respecting rational person can talk about rationality and spirituality in the same breath .

Anyways after reading a article yesterday and sleeping over it , I decided to express my views on certain points in the article , essentially because I needed to clear up my head on those ideas .

Here is the article that I am referring to .( The article is the last one on the page , his address to india today conclave )

http://www.javedakhtar.com/inner/interview.html

So why do I think i should comment on this article? I took a course with the isha foundation a year back and have been a regular follower of all their courses and talks ever since . I can see how much difference that has had on me in the past one year , so I have some kind of experience that I can speak from .

The other reason is that I have always been generally interested in spirituality , questions on life , after life , death and so have been following and reading up a lot on these subjects , primarily more so in the last year.

Here is what Akhtar says .

"Now, if you leave your mind what do you do? You need the Guru to find the next station of consciousness. That hides somewhere in the spirit. He has reached the supreme consciousness, he knows the supreme truth."

Leaving the part about the what the Guru tells you , Akhtar questions the need for having a Guru . In our life at every instant we have a teacher trying to teach us something . Parents teach us how to behave in the society , teachers at school teach us math and science , mentors at work teach us how to get around at work , so why is it that in this one sphere we so abhor the idea of having a teacher . I can read all the Vedas , Upanishads or whatever I want , but it could be possible that I did not understand what was written in them , is it wrong for me to approach a spiritual teacher at that point of time ? I would think not.

I think the reactionary feeling to the word Guru is primarily because of its misuse in English language and also the prevalence of hoax Gurus all around .

Akhtar then talks about the Gurus trying to paint a picture of a supreme cosmos , trying to lure people into believing that there is something out there that only the Guru understands and that is why we need to go to him . So I dnt know if a supreme cosmos exists or not and at this point it does not matter to me , but looking at this rationally why do we go to a engineerning college to pursue further education , because we believe professors at the university know have a deeper understanding of that subject and I would like to learn from them . I dnt see how this is different than from going to a Guru who has a deeper understanding of the spiritual subject. Also it can happen sometimes that our professors really dnt know anything and we end up pursuing other sources or figuring it out on own , I would expect the same intelligence to carry over when you go talk to a Guru . We should be able to figure out if he really knows the subject or not .

Next he talks about

"You see that the clientele is well heeled, it is the affluent class."

He claims that only the rich and powerful are the people who go in search of a Guru and so you see the Guru chooses to hang out with only affluent people because that has some kind of material perks for him. One thing I want to make clear is I have disregarded all kinds of hoax Gurus from this conversation , I am talking about the few genuine ones.

So at isha this is not essentially true , because I know they do programs with prisoners , villagers and all too because their belief is that no matter where the individual is in his life , there exists the possibility of a him being a happy person . A happy person would then translate into everything else a good person , a good citizen etc .

Anyways coming back to the point , why is it that most of the times the clientelle is rich

1) From a poor man's perspective , there is always something higher that he desires and has a belief saying once I get that it will give me happiness . So there is always a yearning for something bigger that keeps him going . Again this does not apply to every one , there could be a lot of people who are poor and very contented , I am saying it does for most people. But if you look at a rich man's life there comes a point where there are very little desires left in his life that have not been fulfilled , and there is a certain kind of frustration that creeps up in his life , he thinks I have everything I want , why is it that fulfilling all these desires still does not give me any kind of contentment . If they are the thinking types they would then go ahead and start looking at the nature of desire , contentment and how to derive that .

We have all been taught "Ohh be content with what you have" , but the problem is there is a big difference between knowing something and experiencing it and that is where the Guru comes in according to me , giving you guidelines as to how go about the path of contentment , acceptance and ultimately bliss.

2) Another reason I think is that only when a society is free from the problems of sustenance only then can they explore other areas of life . Like art does not florish in a poor , malnourished society , why is that? It is because all the subtle aspects of human nature would show up only when people's mind are free to explore these aspects . If I dnt know where to get food for my family tommorow , I am very unlikely to go around painting a nude women .

Sprituallity and self awareness are also very subtle aspects of human nature which need a certain balanced environment to flourish .

3) Why is that the Gurus always target rich and powerful people ? So like I mentioned before a happy and a balanced person would translate into a good friend , good husband and a good citizen but imagine only if the president of your country was in the same state , how much more difference can he bring to the world . If the President is a man of extremes , has family issues , personal issues , alcoholism , mental diseases , physical diseases , how do you think he is going to rule the country vs a President who is balanced , healthy , can think consciously in stress situations , has a loving family . The future of 300 million people could be changed entirely by having such a president . So it makes sense to have Spiritual people in seats of power because the future of a entire nation can be changed by that .

Next he talks about life events

"Then there are other people. Who are suddenly traumatized. They lose a child. The wife dies. The husband dies. Or they lose the property, they lose their business. Something happens that shocks them and they ask - why me? So who do they ask? They go to the Guru. And the guru tells him that this is Karma. But there is another world if you follow me. Where there is no pain. Where there is no death. Where there is immortality. Where there is only bliss. He tells all these unhappy souls - follow me and I will take you to the heaven, to the paradise, where there is no pain. I am sorry sir, it is disappointing but true that there is no such paradise. Life will always have a certain quota of pain, of hurts, a possibility of defeats. But they do get some satisfaction."

So Akhtar tries to say that the Gurus are mechanism of providing people with solace . In my experience that is not true . A popular misconception is well these Gurus would just do some magic to you and get you going but a true Guru is not a pill that you can pop in , but a exercise regime that you need to practice to get into a physically fit state . All I have learnt as Isha is that this life does not always happen the way you want it to . You can either give up , blame life for being unfair to you or you can accept it and then see what to do about this . Acceptance and taking responsibility I think are the two main pedestals to leading a happy life. No true Guru will ever tell you , come to me and all your problems will be solved , he will actually go ahead and warn you , only if you are willing to sweat it out in a marathon come to me , or else go home there is always the option of having virtual avatars run the race for you :-)

Finally

"You may ask me, that if I have this kind of ideas about religious people, why should I show such reverence for Krishan and Kabir and Gautam? You can ask me. I'll tell you why I respect them. These were the great contributors in the human civilization. They were born in different points of time in history, in different situations. But one thing is common in them. They stood up against injustice. They fought for the downtrodden. "

I am a little ambiguous on this but will try to answer this too . I think this is a case of revolt vs reform . What method do you choose to do away with the injustice . There are two ways of doing this fight the system or reform the system . I think by trying to address issues with our leaders , the Gurus are trying to take the later approach . I know Jaggi Vasudev is regularly a part of economic forums trying to talk to world leaders about the economic policies they implement. Does that mean these spiritual leaders have given up on the poor people , i dnt think so , they run schools , adopt villages and work with prisoners . It is just a matter of how do you want to do it , by means of running a revolution or by silently working your way up in it . In todays times revolution would not be a viable option i would guess , also given that we have media , technology and other things at behest we might be able to lead a more silent revolution that can bring about big changes.

Overall I think Akhtar missed out on looking at the complete picture but just used his perceptions to come up to the argument .

Having said all this I think it is time I put forward my own definition of spirituality .

1) First I dnt understand , or know anything about a higher consciousness and so I decide to skip over that in my definition

2) To me this world is the highest definition of anything . Nature is GOD and no other GOD exists

3) Spirituality to me on a personal level means being self aware and honest with onself

4) It is about having a balance in life - most of the times we are so pulled away by outside forces ( animal instincts i call them ) that we are always operating in some kind of extreeme . Extreeme sadness , guilt , anger , excitement . The problem with that is such emotions is that they are like glue , pulling you down to the ground , emotions should be like water , have fun stepping into the puddle of water but then when you choose you can move on .

5) And ultimately spirituality is about understanding the transitory nature of life , we are born and will die one day , neither our birth nor our death will cause any major changes to this world , it has and will keep moving on .

So all we need to do is have the maximum fun while we are here because as they say " The holiday will end sooner or later "

A plum's story

Got up in the morning to this lovely article

"A plum once said, 'just because a banana lover came by, I converted myself into a banana. Unfortunately, his taste changed after a few months and so I became an orange. When he said I was bitter I became an apple, but he went in search of grapes. Yielding to the opinions of so many people, I have changed so many times that I no more know who I am. How I wish I had remained a plum and waited for a plum lover.'

Just because a group of people do not accept you as you are, there is no necessity for you to strip yourself of your originality. You need to think good of yourself, for the world takes you at your own estimate. Never stoop down in order to gain recognition. Never let go of your true self to win a relationship. In the long run, you will regret that you traded your greatest glory - your uniqueness, for momentary validation. Even Gandhi was not accepted by many people. The group that does not accept you as you is not your world.

There is a world for each one of you, where you shall reign as king /queen by just being yourself. Find that world... in fact, that world will find you.

What water can do, gasoline cannot and what copper can, gold cannot. The fragility of the ant enables it to move and the rigidity of the tree enables it to stay rooted. Everything and everybody has been designed with a proportion of uniqueness to serve a purpose that we can fulfill only by being our unique self. You as you alone can serve your purpose and I as I alone can serve my purpose. You are here to be you... just you.

There was a time in this world when a Krishna was required and he was sent; a time when a Christ was required and he was sent; a time when a Mahatma was required and he was sent; a time when a J.R.D.Tata was required and he was sent. There came a time when you were required on this planet and hence you were sent. Let us be the best we can be. Don't miss yourself and let the world not miss you.

In the history of the universe, there has been nobody like you and to the infinite of time to come, there will be no one like you. Existence should have loved you so much that it broke the mould after making you, so that another of your kind will never get repeated. You are original. You are rare. You are unique. You are a wonder. You are a masterpiece. .. your Master's piece. Celebrate your Uniqueness."

~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Beauty in details

Was reading an article yesterday when I came upon this wonderful concept " Look at everything as if you are looking at it for the first time " . This was follows by a couple of examples of how when you look at your wife , or your home or your friends try looking at them as if you are you are doing it for the first time , there will be a sense of excitement of having discovered something new in your life .

I have always been a person of comparatively less detail . For me the bigger picture has always been important and as soon as I grasp that I move on . I remember when I was kid I went to this painting class where the teacher asked us to paint 30 leaves . I was done in 2 days , there were kids there who had been painting the same thing for weeks , I did not understand the concept then . The teacher kept asking me to go back and refine the painting more , after a while I could not find anything else that can be done with the paintings and eventually got bored , tired and left .

Browsing further into the article mentioned above I found too paintings mentioned in it , so I checked them out . The two paintings were Van gogh's paintings - The shoes and The chair . It is believed that Van gogh spent months painting these relatively mundane things . Looking at these paintings it got me thinking on vision that the painter must have had . Every single day he must have sat down with his easel to just make sure the lace on the shoe looked perfectly like the original one , to make sure that the cushion on the chair gives you a homely feeling and so on.

Leave alone shoes how many times do we actually stop and take a nice deep look at our friends , our job , our surroundings . For us it is just the same people , the same house and the same sun rise everyday .

The whole world as they say is in a state of flux where nothing remains constant , then why is it that we find everything the same everyday . We need newer and newer things to excite us each day . I was recently having a conversation with a friend and I mentioned that maybe because I travel so much I no longer find each trip giving me the kind of adrenaline rush I used to get when I was a kid . Trips now just come down to visiting landmarks , checking them out on my list , hanging out with friends and cracking a few funny jokes but the newness of it all is missing . I have stopped embracing the fact that each one of these events occur only once in my entire lifetime and more totally I am present in each one of them , the more newer things I will be able to discover each day .

Now on anytime I am suffering from the lack of newness in my life , I plan to use the image of Van Gogh's shoes to guide me to dwell deeper into life and discover life it in all its richness !!!

The meaning of LIFE

"There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness. Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip's eager fancy, and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and sing. He had not been so happy for months.

Oh, life,' he cried in his heart, 'Oh life, where is thy sting?"

- W . Somerset Maugham ( Of Human Bondage )

"It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

"It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it."
— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slipped through his fingers. His ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect?

— W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)

Taking the bollywood out of our lives .!!

I was reading Midnights with Mystic and it got me thinking about the melodrama each one of us carries around in our lives. I guess mostly influenced by the emotional barrage that we see in bollywood movies :-) .

I have never been a very emotional person but have always had my moments of emotional outbursts . The happy moments I dnt really question but the sad ones I do . I think we as humans take ourselves too seriously at times and so when things do not turn out exactly the way that we want them to we start to despair coz this is not how we imagined our very own Bollywood movie to go .

Life is a just a beautiful story which we are watching playing on the big screen in front of us. We walk into the movie called life with no knowledge of how it is going to be and we live through it . Sometimes it turns out to be a awesome movie , other times a average one , but at the end of it that is what it is , just a movie that we are all supposed to njoy and then walk out off . So moral of the story eat all the popcorn you want , cry , laugh but at the end of it remember that it is just a movie which will end in the so called three hours . So why not make the most out of the movie and enjoy it to the fullest ?

I look at Bollywood movies that so dramatize the romance between the hero and the heroine, people going to the extent of killing themselves or giving up on their lives just because they lost a loved one . I often wonder after watching all that how much more of life could that person have experienced if they were not stuck in melodrama of that one single moment in their lives, if they could seen clearly through it and just said to themselves , "Ohh that turned out to be a not so ok experience , so let me just move on and see if there are any other interesting experiences to be had".

As some wise men have said most people have too many fanciful ideas about themselves and their future lives , if only the one person that you can be really honest with becomes you , right at that very moment all the melodrama will drop out of your lives .

My quest for my very own version of a simple , honest bollywood movie still continues :-)

Life of insanity !!

Just finished reading Paulo Coehlo's Veronica decides to die . I find that I always find his passages very impactful . He has a amazing was of putting down life's great truths with some very simple words.

I have great respect for authors that can use simple words to convey the whole gamut of life. I always joke that I will one day sue authors ( primarily technical )who use really complicated terminology to communicate something really simple just for the heck of sounding intelligent. There is that complete other array of authors who try to make life sound more depressing that it is , the crime in their novels sounds more treacherous than it is ..all the stories are in darker shades of black ( i.e if there can be a shade darker than black , wherein lies the irony of their stories I believe ) . I can only manage detest for these authors.

Nyways coming back to this novel , I would think everyone should give this book a read , it very powerfully communicates the inevitability of dealth . If all of us believed our lives would end tmrw they would be so different , we will have not time for anything negative after all there is just one day left ...no one wants to die crying !!.

Rest I will leave it to Coehlo's words to communicate the meaning . This is written by a lady who had resorted to a life in mental asylum just because she found it too tough to go back to a normal society and confirming to the rules of the society . She thought living in a asylum was more of living because you got to be as insane as you wanted to and no one questioned it . But then because of a new young girl in the asylum who is about to die in a day she starts re-evaluating her understanding of life and insanity.

" But yesterday because of a piano and a young woman who is probably dead by now , i learned somthing very imp : Life inside is exactly same as the life outside . Both there and here people gather together in groups , they build their walls and allow nothing strange to trouble their mediocre existences. They do things becuase they're used to doing them , they study useless subjects , they have fun because they're suppossed to have fun and the rest of the world can go hang let them sort themselves out. At the very most they watch the news on television as we often did as confirmation of their happiness in a world full of problems and injustices."

Destiny

One of our all time favorite topics . Is there something called destiny , do we create our own destiny , is it all upto us ?

For me my opinion on destiny has been changing over the years but the pattern has been somewhat like this . When things are going great then it is I create my own destiny , when things hit a rough patch or more accurately when I have trouble keeping up with some of my tough decisions , then it is destiny and that is how it was meant to happen .

So past few years have gotten me to think on this subject believing and unbelieving it at the same time . It was only recently when I read an excerpt by Jaggi Vasudev that something struck a cord . He says 100 years ago if a 4 year kid died of a disease we would say it is his destiny . Today we have methods to make sure that a 4 year old kid does not die , what happened to his destiny now , we have changed our destinies.

Man has been meddling with nature in so many ways , when the first ice age occurred that destroyed all dinosaurs it was the destiny of dinosaurs . But now if we drown due to global warming it is destiny , we have created this . Man is becoming his own creator in certain ways .

As we are becoming more aware of our surrounding and the laws that guide it , a lot of things are coming out of the purview of destiny . It is only the things that we dnt understand that still fall under the label of destiny .

The thing that got me thinking more deeply on this was showing of horoscopes before marriage that is still very religiously followed in india . 50 years back a girl was married of to a guy from one of the families that were related to us or stayed in the same village as us . That was the extent of our social circle and so the girl's destiny lay in that village . Now we use the internet to find matches and are reaching out to people who we could not have contacted or even thought about 50 years back . So internet has changed our destinies in a certain way . Even after meddling with our destinies in so many ways we still believe that the stars above will tell us how each one of our lives are going to be .

Sadhguru says if you were to leave your life and death both in the hands of the creater then you can say " Ohh this is my destiny and this is how it is supposed to be " but now we want to meddle with our lives as well as our death and still believe destiny will take care of everything .

Maybe that to an extent is the problem with India too , we still believe God will come and take care of everything for us . It is high time we realize he will not , either we stop changing all of his creations to suit us ( which we would not ...) or take things into our hands and build them up responsibly.

Predictability of Future 

This is a question I have been pondering over a lot over the past one year . How is it that some astrologers who know nothing about you can predict your life so acurately ? What kind of patterns exist in this world if any . There have been almost the same answers every where , yes life is predictable but ultimately it lies in the hand of the human being to decide his course .

Recently I came across this beautiful written paragraph of predictiblity by E.F.Schumacher in his book Small is beautiful ( which btw I think every Indian should read ) .

Here is how it goes  " When the Lord created the world and people to live in it . He must have reasoned with Himself as follows : " If I make everything predictable  these human beings , whom I have endowed with pretty good brains with undoubtedly learn to predict everything and they will thereupon have no motive to do anything at all  because they will recognise that the future is totally determined and cannot be influenced by any human action . On the other hand , if I make everything unpredictable , they will gradually discover that there is no rational basis for any decision whatsoever and , as in the first case , they will thereupon have no motive to do anything at all . Neither scheme would make sense . I must therefore create a mixture of the two . Let some things be predictable and let others be unpredictable . They will then , amongst many other things , have the very important task of finding out which is which ."

Remember some times in life when nothing seems to be going quite well ..i remember a few in my life ..well now would go down in the memory lane as one of them ..you dnt do well on course ..you think oh well i will make up for it ..not quite though ..you left a job back home in intel thinking jobs were not a big deal and to your utter suprise nobody here even wants to higher you for a internship ..and well to top it all your prof realizes that you have been feigning interest in his subject all this while and that you no longer are a important enough comodity for the lab ...
wat did i want to achieve when I started on this path you wonder and suprisingly you get no answers bcoz you no longer know ..but then life's not always fair is it ...
but what is not good you know ..to sit down here brooding about it all the while and wait for things to get rite ..bcoz thats just not going to work ..
having said that i should get back to work asap ...

Lazying around

Its been almost a week since I finished my exams . Haven't been upto anything great lately . Get up late , watch movies , eat , watch online videos , eat and then sleep again . Thats been my daily routine for quite some days now . I hate to be in this kind of lethargic inertial state , some how I have never come to like this lazying around much . Back home holidays used to mean meeting up with relatives and friends and there always used to be some extra curricular activities to pursue ..
somehow all of them seemed to lost in oblivion now . I have work to do for my prof but after 4 months of slogging I just do not want to see the face of that lab again and so here I am sitting in the house doin nothin ...
I guess all of us have these days of nthiness ..they are there to tell us the importance of the days where there is work to be done and goals to be achieved . a life without goals could be so boring and worthless ...
Holidays have thier own goals to ..they are there so that we can pursue stuff we usually do not find time to attend to ..its time to tend and nurture our hobbies ...and relax ..some times when you have been workin for so long ..relaxing can cause you considerable amount of guilt ..but we need to realise that every single person is entitled to their share of relaxation and it is not a crime to relax ..one thing we need to keep in mind is that "the mind" needs to refreshen ...we should not confuse and put the mind to sleep instead ..the latter happens when we do not pursue our alternatives goals during the holidays ...

I sometimes need these blogs to put things into the rite perspective for me ...and this one surely helped..

Play while you work..

Do you find your work like a play ..how different is your life from 9am -5pm from the 5 pm - 9 am life ..here is a excellent article on how to make your work ..your play ..

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/New_way_of_learning/articleshow/690639.cms

A lot of us slog the whole day ..thinking we are doing a lot of work ..but ultimately what happens is that we are really tired but the productivity has been almost nill ..what we need sometimes is a break ..take a 30 min break and you will be raring to go again ..and if you enjoy your work ..life will just be a series of breaks ..while you work it is a break from the your extra curriculars and the extra curriculars are a break from work ...so life becomes just a serious of playful games..

Complicated

Was listening to the song with the same title as above by Avril Lavigne .

Chill out whatcha yelling' for?
Lay back it's all been done before
And if you could only let it be
you will see
I like you the way you are
When we're drivin' in your car
and you're talking to me one on one but you've become

Somebody else round everyone else
You're watching your back like you can't relax
You're tryin' to be cool you look like a fool to me
Tell me

Why you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you're acting like you're somebody else gets me frustrated
Life's like this you
And you fall and you crawl and you break
and you take what you get and you turn it into honesty
and promise me I'm never gonna find you fake it
no no no

This song is approriate manifestation of how we unnecesarily complicate our lives ,trying to live up to the society , the people around us ,every other tom dick and harry we meet all along our lives. For a moment just forget about them and be yourself . The best problems often have the simplest solutions . Our lives can be many more times more simple if we throw out these unnecessary complications from it .

The Goal

Since I have been using this blog as a medium for introspection , I should start using it as a means to find out what I really want to do in life . As of now I am not sure as to what I want to do with my life . The challenge of living up to new hurldles each day , using analytical skills each day is wat keep me going as of now . I am not too much bothered about wat are the objects of application of these skills of mine are , it can be helicopters or it can as well be people. But where is it that my real passion lies . I have been asking myself this question almost daily for 3 years now but I have never stopped to listen to the real answers I get coz they do not go very well with wat I have presently set out to do .
I want to do a masters in psychology or social services , work for a social service organization but wat everyone tells me is that I can manage to do that along with my main job and that I have the talent go ahead and do a Phd or work as a manager in a company and make some good money .
There was a time in my life when I used to be really ambitious I wanted to achieve name , fame everything . I used to get afraid of my own ambition sometimes as in if I failed to achieve all this wat would I be like , would my entire life be wasted .
I dont aim that high these days , I just have immediate goals as of now , my present is wat is important to me ,neither the past or the future . It saves me a lot of unnecessary worrying .

I still lack a direction though and its high time in life that I have one . One thing I am sure of that to go any one of such directions will require a huge sacrifice on my end and am my ready to give up the security and surety of my present life to follow my passion is wat is to be seen.

Watch the Time fly out the window ...

One can actually sit and watch time fly past him and crib about the lack of time or actually take time in ones hand and use it the way one wants too ..

When I was in my undergrads I used to get time to do loads of stuff ..play , study , social work , dance , read ..etc etc ..I used to look at a lot of my working friends and cousins and they used to always complain about the lack of time to do any extra curricular activity . I thought maybe when I get to grad school life will be the same for me . I will have no time to have fun , play etc etc ..

Now I am in grad school and I realize I still do have time to pursue a lot of interests . I go to the gym regularly , have fun with friends on weekends and still have a desire as well as the time to do more stuff apart from academics .My friends ask me ..How do you find time to write a blog so often ..? So is it that I study less as compared to others. Well maybe ..but thats how much I can manage too...i need a break ..and all these extra curricular do fit in well into those breaks ..
So what I am trying to drive at is that nobody lacks time in this world ..you just need to decide what you want to use your time for ...you may not want to go to the gym now coz you want to sleep ..but in the future this 1 hr you did not spend at the gym will convert into 3 hrs with a doctor ..

You decide what you want to do with your life ..some sacrifices now will surely reap rich dividends later on in your life ...

Winners vs Losers

Who is winner ..how is he/she different from a loser ..here is my definition ...
A winner is a person who loves himself/herself ...it means that they care for what happens to them and wat is that they are doing to better themselves ...he ( taking he as default from now on ..:-) ) believes in his ideals and is willing to stand by them..doesnt easily compromise on them ...his life is continous process of introspection and betterment coz he believes in outdoing himself every day ..that is the challenge for him in life ..
making the most of the life ..he gives importance to only those elements that he finds are fruitful for him ...everything that one does ..having fun , studying , cooking is an investment for him in himself ..all these things teach him something .. in short a winner is a person who is comfortable with his own self ...others opinions about him do not matter much to him ..coz he knows himself ..he only values the opinions of the people he think are worth considering ...doesnt get bogged down by illogical constraints of the society ...

on the other hand you will find that a loser will always crib ..he will want to place the blame on everything around him rather than just taking charge of things for himself and then going about how to solve them ....losers want attention ..they want people to sympathize with them ..tell them they are very nice and hence give a false boost to the ego of the loser ..they need constant reassurances ..

Losers are parasites who will always want to cling to winners , try to gain their assurances but the self composure of a winner is what they lack and they try to get a part of it by clinging on to them ..by trying to enter their good books ...what they dont realise is that this is all in vain ..a the spirit of a winner cannot be sucked out by them until and unless they take charge of themselves and start building up on thier own ...

There is light at the end of every dark tunnel

As every day in this place goes by I come to believe this statement more and more . When I came I was put up all alone . I was the only person who was not put up at some senior's place . I used to curse my luck for having been thrown in such a place . All the other ppl stayin at the other side of the university were having so much fun . I had no aid , no job.. nthin watsoever.

I could have sat dejected and cursed my luck but I decided to explore the university for this is the place i m going to spend a long time at . Courtesy those early days spent exploring the univ I know a lot more about the univ and the place than ppl who have stayed here for a long while . In the process I came to love and appreciate the place I am staying at and that is very important coz once school starts life becomes so monotonous and you hardly stop to look and marvel at the place around you.

Eventually once my room mate came back I realised I was really in luck to have such an understanding room mate ..had I been somewhere else dunno how many probs I would have had. I soon found a group of really mast gult people around my place too and now I get to have more fun than my friends who stay at univ avenue ( the place where I wanted to go to earlier ) ..


People started to get aid or jobs all around me . I was upset for a while but then I some how had a deep hope inside that one day things will work out for me too . Then thanks to Shiva ( a friend of mine ) ..i got a job at ADCS .. a well paying easy job ..a good start I thought .
I met with this prof in aerospace , who does some really cool work on trajectory planning for unmanned air vehicles . I decided to take the plunge and work with him for free . Though it meant taking 3 grad level courses , a 20hr job and a project , i thought i will manage .
And now I get to work with one of the coolest profs I have known on smthin really interesting and to top to it all ..he is payin me some form of compensation starting today ..so now I dnt have to work on that on campus job .

I still dnt have aid to pay for my tution but what I have is a belief which grows stronger by the day that there is always light shining at the end of the tunnel . Just be true to yourself and never loose hope is the moral of the story .

There is another big thing that I learnt from all this ...everyone has problems but the day you stop enjoyin our life and things around you... life ends there ....so always take time to step back and marvel at nature at its best .