Lessons from Life - III

What do we live for?

My answer is true freedom, because only a free individual can be truly happy and blissful

Freedom doesn't mean running away from responsibilities. Freedom and responsibility are not mutually exclusive. It simply means one does because they choose to from love instead of having to from a position of duty. This is not a ideology of just changing mindsets. This is truly possible only if one is really a loving person and can give and also receive when needed. One must however strive to give more than they take

Why did the chicken cross the road?

To evolve :)

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Love and Duty 

Sadness = Love becomes duty

Happiness = Duty becomes Love

When Love becomes Duty, it is important to spend "me time", recuperate, recover and love thyself and turn back some part of the duty back to love. The other non transferable part can remain as "duty with boundaries" for one's inner peace, for it does take two to tango

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Love 

Love is the highest vibration. Since this is a heavily misused word, I refer to love as that being unconditional and that gives freedom. Love that does not give freedom to the other cannot be termed as love. At the same time, freedom is a great power and with great power comes great responsibility that the "other" should recognize and act. We are all born free and thus it should remain so.

The greatest act of love is to simply sit by a tree and wait for its fruit to be offered to you and not plucking it, which is an act of violence. In the world we live in, this is not practical, but the analogy can serve as our moral compass to constantly evolve 

Society conditions us in various ways, even how we are named. To realize our true self, we have to break all illusions of who we really are and only then can any meaningful answer be found to the one true question "who am I?"

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Freedom 

Earthly Love < Pleasure < Money < Power <  Divine Love < Skill < Time < Self Love <  Inner Peace < My Morals < Freedom

My Morals = personalized and completely dynamic Inner moral code by which one lives. Every individual needs to define this for themselves for their happiness and not be influenced by any books, scriptures, etc. If one's individual morals goes against the prevailing collective moral code (say law and order), there will be consequences that one must be ready to face

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On Awareness 

Concentration = Focus outward on a single point

Meditation = Focus inward, slowly working one's way to observing thoughts

Awareness = Focus outward and inward and more importantly on body sensations and emotions, the gap between inward and outward. Do not focus exclusively on thoughts. Attention on thoughts gives more energy and power to thoughts. If you want thoughts to reduce for inner peace, one must learn to focus on the body sensations and emotions like anger, lust, etc and not focus too much on thoughts.

Awareness > (concentration + meditation)

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Money & Wealth 

Money != Wealth, Wealth > Money

Money = What you work for

Wealth = What works for you, even while you sleep 

Money and even wealth can buy assets, but not skills. All the money in the world can help you get good piano teachers, but can it give you real piano playing skills?

How much money does one truly need to be happy and make a meaningful impact to the world? Do not let anyone tell you how much is enough. Decide for yourself for what impact you want to leave on the world is and should be only your plan 

What are we all if we are not able to cultivate our individual skills and talents for our own happiness and for the betterment of the universe?

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The art of gifting 

The best gift is just money, cause money gives the "other" the freedom to "choose" what they want to buy with it for "their happiness". It might not be the best thing that they could do for themselves, but it's their choice. Who are we to judge?

True charity does not need branding and advertisement. If you are right handed, one's left hand must not know what the right hand provides

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Group dynamics

It is ok to be disheartened by the state of the world, but one cannot change it in groups without inflicting the same misery that one set forward to eradicate. Change your individual being instead and radiate peace, love, joy and freedom and effect change organically, not as a collective mob. One must therefore be very wary of every group they are associated with 

One must not chant mantras for which they do not know the meaning of and it's effects on oneself and the greater universe and that which does not make them happy to chant. One must specifically avoid mantras which require a certain amount of repetitions for as intelligent beings, we must question the very need for such repetitions. One must avoid chanting in groups as firstly the intention for the group chanting is not always clear and secondly it is very hard to get all participants to agree on the intent and the very nature of such groups would mean that they send negative vibrations to some other individual. 

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Healing 

Food can heal

Exercise can heal

Fasting can heal

Sleep can heal

Music can heal

Water is life

Movement is life

Life is energy in movement

Do not let anyone tell you how much and how often you should eat or sleep. Let your body be your guide

Music can heal. Real music is the raw emotion without the lyrics or the meaning of a song getting in the way. Listen more to BGMs than actual songs for healing, for the moment one hears lyrics, the mind takes on the role of attempting to find it's meaning and associating it with other unrelated facts thus establishing it's dominance

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Peace

There's a calm after every storm and there's a storm after every calm. 

Prepare for both by honing your awareness

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Schedule

Your soul, body and mind need to work in unison always. 

Timetable your life accordingly as per your needs

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Inner Peace

For peace, detox your mind

To detox your mind, detox your body

To detox your body, detox your immediate environment

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Thoughts 

Not all your thoughts might be yours. Don't attach too much importance to them. How you "act" is far more important than the thoughts you "get".

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Depression & Regrets

Be thankful for good times, for they come to bless.

Be thankful for tough times, for they come to teach.

It is therefore futile to regret anything that might have happened in one's life, if one sees everything as constant evolution.

When you hit rock bottom, the only way to go is up. Spend "Me time" to heal yourself. Focus on only yourself without any "other" and do good loving things for yourself. Buy new clothes, eat outside, spend time outside. Exercise is a good way to get out of any depression. When one takes care of their body, healing becomes faster. Spend more "body" activities than "mind" activities to get out of depression. Move your body, for it is only in movement one can get out of the vicious depression cycle created by one's own mind

Never let anyone regret or guilt trap you, especially for spending "me time" to heal yourself

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Observation 

Learn to "observe" without "labels".

Would a rose smell as sweet by any other name? Sure it would

The label conjures up associated facts with totally unrelated things and can lead one easily astray from pure observation and hence pure awareness

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Judgement

Live life without judging the "other". The lack of judgement will lead to a loss in discernment which will eventually work against oneself, but it is far better to let at least the first interaction be judgement free. It is better to have loved truly and lost than to not have loved at all out of fear. If you have loved and lost, heal yourself before you can love another without your judgement or your discernment getting in the way of true happiness. The heart always knows the right thing to do, but to follow it, one needs to be fearless to overcome the mind's discernment especially if one has already experienced failure. Do not fear the mind's discernment, for it helps you survive, but do not let it colour your life with one or even more tainted experiences, for that's what destroys your true essence of being a loving personality

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Gods & Devils

We are all the devils for each other. 

We can however choose to be the Gods for each other.

If your kindness is exploited, learn to set strong boundaries. Respect yourself and value your time and energy and on whom and what it should be spent on 

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Happiness

Happiness is 99% effort and 1% divine grace.Even if you are not able to achieve 99% effort, let the bulk of the effort be yours truly. Do what is in your control and let the universe handle the rest. The universe does not give you problems, you cannot solve

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Discipline

Perfection is the enemy of discipline

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Science & Spirituality

Science is what we focus outward on. Spirituality or inward sciences is what we focus inward on. True happiness might be only when we focus in the intersection and be in balance, for deep spirituality would lead you astray with dogmas, rituals and superstitions and deep science would lead one into a state of giving away absolute power to the mind and not "feeling" enough. Without feeling enough, ironically we would have only one feeling, that of being a machine

 

Mouna Ragam - A study with age

Mouna Ragam (Silent Symphony) - One of my favorite movies of all time.

A beautifully made movie on all counts. Ilayaraja's mesmerizing BGM. You can even see the influence of western music on Ilayaraja, when the character played by Mohan is seen listening to the four seasons - spring vivaldi orchestration in one scene. Funny I remember that music having a good imprint on me when I watched the movie the first time. That was in early 1990's I guess, much before I had access to the Internet and I never bothered to know what that music was, even though it left a lasting impression on me then. Fast forward 15+ years and for some unfathomable reason I decide I have to start learning the violin and my violin teacher (a very good one) gifts me the four seasons CD to listen and appreciate the violin better and behold a eureka moment!

When I was much younger, I admired the character that Karthik played. Extremes of emotions in one persona - anger and violence that makes him beat up someone every 5 minutes on one side and light-hearted frivolity (remember the Mr. chandra-mouli!) on the other. What is there not to like in such a character? The character endears to us almost immediately.

As I have grown older, though I've started to admire the character essayed by Mohan in the movie more.
A calm head to almost every situation. You don't tend to like him much first, he's quite to put it bluntly - dull as compared to Karthik, but then he slowly grows on you and becomes much much larger than the role essayed by Karthik.
That slow growth in me has spanned almost a decade for me.
It's interesting today to me to see how my own perspective has changed with age, revealing the futility of believing in anything as the absolute truth.

Dear Mani Ratnam, please please make more movies of such kind.

Quietude

You know that awkward moment when your family does the things that you have indicated vociferously numerous times that you just can't put up with?
It happens frequently and then there's something that remotely resembles an apology that comes along after the fact and then it's family after all. So you act big-hearted and move on, until it happens again with another apology gift wrapped and then again and then again and again and again.
The apologies tired of this charade skip themselves out of the loop along the way, but the thing that riles you up doesn't and is damn persistent and without the pretext of an apology backing it up is even tougher to handle.

How does anyone handle all this in a sane manner?

After years of ongoing struggle, here's the answer - Resist all temptation to speak, communicate, opine or react and in that quietude lies the path of detachment - of being able to look at oneself as just another thing.

It's amazing how most solutions to tricky problems have their origins in quietude. Have you ever figured out a solution to something complex when you were totally involved doing something else or after a good night's sleep or while taking a bath?

Silence is totally underestimated in today's society. The people hogging the limelight are all the ones who talk incessantly. Everyone is constantly striving to be busy, everyone wants to be distracted - with work, with music, with chatter, with gossip. Most people just love to talk. Society rewards this. I've experienced it myself numerous times at work. It's not important what work you do, but how you project yourself about what you do/might do/didn't do.

Silence is underestimated. Quietude is underestimated and it's only in quietude, one can see this.

Spiritual Paths

Was talking to a spirituality minded friend and he remarked that for most people, the path of bhakti (path of devotion) and it's variants is a more colorful path and that the path of jnana (path of knowledge) is a boring negative path.

I thought that was a very subjective remark cause if they all lead to the same goal, how could one be more colorful and other not so and for the last 3 days have been completely confused grappling with this question and yesterday felt like a break through, which culminated in the creation of the picture below.

So like the picture says - From utter confusion, arises utter clarity, which are nothing but at two poles of the axis.

End result, I don't think one path is colorful or boring; though I can now appreciate why the majority of people would like to think so; cause life is to make a generalized statement more colorful when you add stuff than remove stuff.

Why so many paths then? Depending on your personality, I guess you can choose what you like.

Family

I've never enjoyed Visu's movies. Let's be honest. Which would you rather watch? A Rajnikanth plot where the hero has revealed the huge challenge that lies before him at interval time and then when you go out and buy more popcorn and worry about what will happen next,  the hero non-chalantly sings the inevitable song that turns the tides and the day is saved or a visu family drama where you bunch a group of people in a joint family situation and each one tries their best to torture the other and make you pull out your hair as well?

Some scenes of his do stand out though. There's one movie where everyone lives in a joint family and they all constantly tread on each other's toes and then finally they all realize that, go their separate ways and get together only on festive occasions like pongal and diwali. Good riddance to living together. You can't fault the merit of that idea even if you can fault other aspects of his movie making skills.

I think the reason people start their own families is that, that existing thing that they call a family has become too authoritative, too dictatorial, too unbearable and too stressful. So the thinking is - Let's start a new one, where we are the boss. There will be some niceties along the way - someone to converse with, sex, shared goals and others.

And then there will be kids and everyone likes to say that they want their kids to grow up as independently as possible, but all the time knowingly and unknowingly feeding all sorts of ideas, beliefs, superstitions, restrictions into the kid's mind.

The kid grows into an adult, takes care of himself and yet the forces that need not be mentioned continue to exert their mis-guided and unwanted influence until it can be taken no more and then the whole cycle starts again.

This new adult however has fresher perspectives. So the next generation kid will be more independent. There will be lesser threats to the next generation kid's way of life, but they will still exist. This will go on and one day some lucky generation will have total freedom on how they want to live their lives. No one judges anything. No one dictates anything. No one has power to affect the individual.

The concept of a family will dissolve then and morph into something much more beautiful than that ugly thing that we call a family today. Maybe it will be the emergence of the commune that Osho spoke about in such glowing terms. Maybe it will be something else, but if it allows individuals to just lead their lives and get together on occasion without any judgement or control, that will be a beautiful thing indeed.


Reality today is not so cozy. No one in the family knows where to draw boundaries. It is no longer a place of support. It fosters fear in you, just like the news channels that I have stopped watching. Your ideas and beliefs do not matter. They are dismissed because they do not conform. Something as simple as taking a car key from my father becomes a stressful incident. The key is offered and you promptly try to take it with your left hand because it's not convenient to twist your body around and take it with the right hand and that leads to a sulking face, a dramatic moment, menacing words and inevitable hurt and that's just the simplest of the incidents that I can talk about right now. The big ones just make my blood boil. It is pretty much at this point I realized that all the self taught anger management was no good. Am back squarely at square one.

And the hits just keep on coming. It's all too stressful and hurtful for a sane individual to keep taking them. The solution to all this is to not start another family, which is what am expected to do, but to learn detachment from the existing one.

Modern day survival kit!

The absolute necessities required in descending order of priority...
Don't take my word for it though and hold me to it!

O2 - ✔

H2O - ✔

Idlis - ✔

Milagai Podi - ✔

Music - ✔
 
Internet - ✔

Ice water - ✔ (couldn't resist leaving it out!)

A light heart - ✘ (working on this still! I'll know when this bubbles up to the top of this list!)

Challenges -  ✘ (current challenge is to create challenges!)
 

Lessons from Life - II

I've always been angry at something or the other in my life. Still am, but now I am always aware of the anger, (cough cough) well most times, (ahem) some times, ok now and then!

Even though I've been angry for such a long time, it took me so long to learn this lesson about anger.

When someone is angry at you, walk away from them. It's the best thing you can do for them immediately, to remove the object of the anger (yourself) from their sight. Later - well that's a different story. I don't know. I only know the immediate solution.

I suppose it is not without merit that it took me this so long to learn, cause when one is angry, one tends to learn things very slowly.

Lessons from Life

Do not ever call another as judgmental. By calling them so, you turn judgmental yourself.

Do not ever call another as opinionated. By calling them so, you turn opinionated yourself.

Do not ever offer another your opinion. By doing so, you increase the chances of a misunderstanding.

Do not even say anything. By doing so, you increase significantly the chances of a misunderstanding.

Do not do anything. By doing so, you increase the chances of your action being misconstrued.

Do not ever take anything seriously. By doing so, you lose a chance at humour.

Do not ever take this list seriously. By doing so, you failed to understand this blog post!

... and thus we are lost in a state of infinite recursion termed as status quo

L-I-F-E

Life is too ridiculous sometimes.

You want to do good, so you set out to do some thing, but what actually happens is the unthinkable and the net result of what you set out to do becomes very bad. So in the end one ends up doing bad than doing good. So maybe we should not strive to do anything at all. There ain't no purpose to anything. Let everything rest. Let go of everything. everything.

Awareness - II

Ramana Maharshi had this to say about thoughts. Ask "To whom did this thought arise?" The answer being always "me", ask yourself again, "who am I?" and that eventually the question will dissolve leaving you with just the answer.

Dissolve into the answer? What did dissolve mean? Pondering over that, I wrote the below hypothetical account of how a question might dissolve into a answer.

Knowledge hinders the path to awareness by introducing beliefs, thoughts and ideas. 

Why learn at all? 

To have a job?

Which is that profession that doesn't harm others in some way or the other? None? Why work at all?

To earn more money?

Money buys happiness? By the kilo? No? So why slog and earn at all?

To eat? To have a roof over one's head?

Why not be content with what one has then? Why be greedy?

To provide for one's kin?

Which person have you got close to and not had misunderstandings? None? So why get close at all?

To love? Do we know what love is? Heady feeling? Intoxicating? Ocean of blah blah? No clue? So why love at all?

cause we think? About what? Love? Love is a thought? That ain't it?

cause it's instinct? Love is a instinct? Oh Feeling? What feeling? of being miserable at separation? Misery is love? That ain't it?

What is it then? It just is? is? is.

Vishwaroopam

* Might have spoilers - don't read it if you haven't seen the movie *

I have this friend who loves movies but who insists on watching morning shows. I find it tough to get up so early on weekdays when I have to (work!), so why on Earth do I agree to go for a movie at 10:20 on a Sunday morning when I could be cozily tucked in bed?
The answer: I called him for the movie and those were the only tickets available!

I've forgotten how beautiful the mornings are. Today reminded me of that. Sunday mornings especially are a gift. Sleeping on a Sunday is not the luxury (well that too), but getting up on Sunday early and doing everything so leisurely is the real luxury! And even at that leisurely pace, we both landed up at the theater well in advance for a change. Tell me again though, why one has to book tickets online and still stand in a long winding serpentine queue to collect tickets. Beats me.

The movie started quietly. Kamalahaasan's name was quietly displayed without the customary titles that shadow the heros of Tamil cinema like 'world hero', 'superstar', 'padmashri', 'star of the galaxy', 'white-dhoti man', 'smell of the village mud', blah blah
The first 40 minutes were amazing except for one thing, the scene where the gentle dancer turns into the maniac intelligence agent killing all the bad guys in seconds. That was really a brilliant idea of a scene, for it could have filled one immediately with a sense of awe about the main protoganist. Sadly the execution is terrible. First we see the scene. Then we see the same scene again in slow-motion about how it was all done. The only problem is the first time was slow enough for me and when I saw it again in super slow motion, it was almost like insulting the viewers. The concept was brilliant and the execution would have been flawless if they had sped up the first scene to last something like 2 seconds. They could have then spent the next 20 seconds in slow motion, Instead it's more like 12 and 20 seconds I think. The beauty of the idea was lost and for a artist of Kamalahaasan's calibre to err such is well kind of sad.

Once the characters are introduced, the plot moves into Afganistan, where an in-ordinate amount of time was spent. I figured out at the end why they spent so much time in Afganistan building up Rahul Bose's character. It's because there is a vishwaroopam part II coming up where these two characters will try to match wits against each other again. So given the overall context, it might have made some sense to spend so much time in Afganistan, but given the context of just this movie, it became boring. When my friend queried why were they spending so much of the plot in Afganistan, the only straight-faced answer that I could give him was that Afganistan is a big country and they have to cover everything! One only hopes that in Vishwaroopam-II, they don't think of covering the entirety of America as the story moves to New York from Afganistan again.

There are snippets from Nayagan - 'Neenga Nallavara illa keta vara' (Are you a good man or a bad man) as everyone tries to unravel who viswanath a.k.a vishwaroopam is really. At a spiritual level everyone trying to figure out who Kamal is, is downright funny, cause we don't know who we are ourselves! The prime minister has a personal chat with Kamala-haasan to assure us all that he is a good guy after all. Never mind that we are losing faith in democracy and our elected leaders. After all these scenes, my friend was trying to get the right phrase to describe what was happening and I filled it in for him, 'delusions of grandeur'. That's simply what the protoganist suffers from and for all his skilled prowess at being a intelligence agent, the protoganist isn't even well toned.

The villains want to detonate the whole of NY and they want to be air borne in their own private plane with it's own cute air hostess (couldn't resist eh?) just before the detonation, but the protoganist has his own ideas. Miraculously his nuclear oncologist doctorate wife is the one who really saves the situation, even though the intelligence agent, who even the prime minister banked upon was intelligent enough to not want his wife anywhere near the proceedings.
 
For a movie like this to succeed, one needs a equally powerful enemy and Rahul Bose could have been adept, but he exists only to boost up the grandeur of the hero even further. With a more capable adversarial image for Bose, this movie could have really had something without fizzling into the inevitable comic book triumph of good over evil.

The last straw of insulting the viewers was to indicate at the end of the movie that a part II was coming up. Was it coming up immediately that we can't even get out of our seats? Did they really think they had to advertise that fact as otherwise, ... otherwise we would have just missed it totally?

Frankly I don't think we needed a vishwaroopam to un-detonate the situation, a chemisty grad might have been just enough.

Kara Kulambu (You have been warned spicy kulambu!)

In the last post I talked about how washing dishes was turning out to be fun. What about cooking then?

Been suffering from a bout of bad cold, cough and sore throat this week. Could hardly speak without sounding like a minimalistic gruff-voiced villain, somewhat like Raghuvaran, though I don't have his persona. So as a result felt like having some really spicy food - I guess primarily to serve the cold with notice papers and eviction orders from my system.

Now what could be more spicier than tasty kara kulambu? The way my mom used to make kara kulambu, we mostly used it as a side-dish! Fancy that! You top rice normally with some kind of podi, eg: thenga podi and then use kara kulambu alongside. If you are adventurous, you could also eat it directly with rice and spend the next 45 minutes gasping for icy cold water.

So how does one make Kara kulambu? So from what my mom explained, here's what I actually did. Turned out quite well though. The first instruction was to take a lime size of tamarind (Tamil: Puli). How do I know what I picked up is lime sized? Simple enough - you roll it up and visualize a lime momentarily replacing that dark tamarind mound in your palm with that of a lime. If the size agrees, proceed to the next step.
Note: If at anytime during this stage while you were rolling that mound of tamarind in your palm, and you happened to think of the Ferrero Rocher chocolate, then muster all that you can to resist the urge completely and totally to put the tamarind ball in your mouth! ok?

Take about a dosa batter spreading spoon (I think approx 5-7 tea spoons) full of cooking oil and spread it in a nonstick container. Even a tawa would do I guess. sprinkle mustard and wait until they start cracking. I always add the Jeera only after the mustard has shown some signs of life for I believe they can then enjoy each other's company. Plus Jeera and oil don't exactly have a great relationship and if you leave them together too long, Jeera gets a blackened face from Mr oil's front jab punches. Put some curry leaves and some garlic whole pieces. Add about a table spoon of toor dal (yes raw just like that. Don't ask.) Add one big sized onion and if you don't have any other vegetable, add more onion if possible and fry until the onion turns golden brown. Add any vegetable that goes well with Kara Kulambu. I had only ladies finger - so in it went.

Note to self: Need to make a list of all vegetables that work well with this kulambu. I have a faint suspicion that mushrooms won't. I remember once adding mushrooms to sambar and my sis-in-law spoke against my culinary skills for a entire week!. Oh! You think I should'nt have brought that up while you were diligently following my instructions till this point?

The moment you add ladies finger, sprinkle some salt. From a friend, I've found that if you don't follow this salt sprinkling diligently, you better be prepared for one really messy ladies finger web that spider-man might relish, but not us mere mortals.

Fry the mixture for some time on a low flame. While all this happens you have already made the tamarind paste with about 500ml of water right? You haven't? You better hurry up then and add to this! And then finally before increasing the flame to high, add three table spoon mounds of sambar powder. Be sure to add before the whole thing is boiling, as the powder won't dissolve well otherwise. I think it's kinda analogous to staying away from people who are boiling with rage! Philosophy aside, leave the mixture to boil on a low flame or a high flame as you desire until you see a thick mixture. If you don't see a thick mixture, somewhere you didn't follow these instructions to the letter, so your case against me doesn't have much of a stand in a formal court-room.

And you did add some salt in between all those steps right? The good part about salt is it can be added anytime! If it's thick and if it tastes well, then it's done. Refrigerate and use as side for all sorts of rice - coconut rice, thenga-thool rice, curd rice, blah blah...

Update: I think as a last step we need to add a tea spoon of sugar too, but I forgot while preparing the above. So it's ok if you forgot too!

A good friend of mine remarked some time back that he found cooking very therapeutic! I agree heartily! I think my cold disagrees though!

 Salt and Pepper having a dreamy dinner with Kara Kulambu in Romantic Paris. 
I think the yellow streak could be oil. It could also be a technical lighting issue. You do need some oil for it to stay without being spoiled (like a pickle) for some time, but probably not too much.

Awareness

When I was conversing with a friend what 'Listen to the heart' really meant (Yes I don't have better things to do!) , it triggered me to read and discover, that what people really meant by that line is to listen to one's own intuition. I've considered myself intuitive for long, but it has always seemed like it comes in flashes and I couldn't really invoke it whenever I wanted to. There was a period of time when I believed also that intuition was nothing, but trouble.

My research showed me that intuition works best in dreams and thus it's important to remember our dreams (Many people suggest sleeping with a note-book and pen by the bedside for this reason). About two days after I had read about how intuition and dreams were connected, I had the most vivid dream that I have ever had in my life. (Maybe it was vivid, for I was conscious about having to remember every single detail of it)


The cast of characters in my vivid dream were a varied lot. There was a relative who's long dead now, a close friend at work with whom I confide a lot, Sachin Tendulkar, Superman and another friend and his father. I'll spare the details and cut to the end, for that was the most significant part.

A death had happened, but people were actually hosting a function that was scheduled to be held. The friend's father with my friend was questioning the need for such a function at the present time very vociferously and very aggressively. Lots of people were trying to convince them that things happen, but life goes on, but they weren't quite in the listening mood. Seeing the proceedings, I venture towards the group and was just about to say, "There is no right/wrong. What people believe is only the right thing." and at the moment the words were to come out of my mouth, I woke up.

I didn't have a notebook or a pen handy, but I didn't need them. I was quite awake and I vividly recollected the whole dream in complete crystallized clarity (not the eastman color types of yore!)

Little did I know then, that simple message would prove to be the corner stone of a big transformation within.

I was discussing the dream with a spiritually minded friend and his immediate remark was 'Fancy you saying there is no right/wrong!'. It was true. I've always lived my life with a strong sense of what was right and what was wrong and the slightest deviation from that was enough to trigger anger in me. This was not any mild anger, but pure destructive rage. Rage, which sets my blood boiling, muscles to contract, eyes to shrink, teeth to grit and my face to assume massive ferocious contortions.
I've written a lot of posts about people jumping queues, about people jumping traffic signals, people not doing their work properly - all these used to trigger that rage within me and over the years, quite a few people have fallen victim to this rage. My close friends and family would also vouch for this rage within me. It is this in-built sense of right/wrong that prompts me to question the Maha-bharata too, as to why things happened the way they did. I've been trying to figure out that reason for a really long time and I never thought the answer to that perplexing question would be so simple.
For a background, read All is fair in love and war?,

In the Kurukshetra war, the Pandavas are quite apprehensive about the kinds of trickery Krishna asks them to do, but they eventually do it. Why would Krishna do such things? Weren't they wrong to do? This question has stumbled me for such a long time and to understand the answer to this, one must understand what awareness is all about. One must understand what enlightenment is all about. Of course neither am I enlightened, nor am I aware, but I can see my own transformation within once I see that there is nothing that absolute as right/wrong. We all know that murder is wrong and yet there are situations am sure that we could justify that it would indeed be the right thing to do. How could we have such contradictions in us? How many more of these contradictions do we have within us?

Krishna was not wrong in doing what He did. He did what He had to and in his heightened state of awareness, anything that He did would have been the right thing to do... We can also get to this state of mind by practicing awareness.

What is awareness? Different people call it by different names. Deepak Chopra calls it the gap between thoughts. Eckhart Tolle calls it the stillness of the mind. Buddhists call it nirvana. Some call it moksha. Some call it just awareness, 'to be aware'.

What I've come to understand about it is to be mostly conscious of what's happening outside and within us. Be conscious of your feelings, your emotions, your thoughts, your actions, everything that you do with the body and the mind. Just be aware of all these without having to classify them. For instance we get a thought, just be aware of the thought and when you are aware, you realize that there's a choice on whether we really want to act out that thought. This was a huge revelation to me for it meant I could control my anger quite easily, effortlessly. All I had to do was be aware of the thought that led to the rage and once I was aware of that, I noticed that it never came out as rage. All this time I had led a very robotic conditioned response to situations. Shit happens. So does my anger. It didn't need to anymore. There was a choice and strangely enough once I became aware of this choice, it seemed to always come out in much more loving terms. There was no violent repulsive action, there was just a calm sense of being. This is what prompted me to write the earlier line about Krishna. "He did what He had to and in his heightened state of awareness, anything that he did would have been the right thing to do."

How aware are you?

Watch the video below at least twice. (You don't need my prompting you to watch it twice, you'll watch it at least twice!)

Done with the viewing?

The moment we heard that a murder has been committed, we are immediately lost in thoughts. We weren't paying any attention to what was happening (at least I wasn't). To pay attention is to be completely hopelessly focused in the present, to live in the present.

Here's another simple experiment. Switch on the telly. Done?

Ok. Now think of the colour red. Done?

Watch the telly for one minute with as much attention as you can give this task and then come back here and read below.



Did you see the color red prominently feature on the visuals you saw on the telly? It's not just red. Think of another color if you don't believe me. The moral of the story is our thoughts cloud everything. To really pay total attention, one has to be in a zone of no-thoughts and that is not a easy thing to get into, for that's the state of awareness, that's the state of enlightenment.

When we grow-up, we are conditioned in all sorts of ways by parents, friends, schools, colleges, our experiences, beliefs that we see life through all sorts of thoughts, all sorts of filters. Education gives us a lot of these filters. These are what we call Knowledge, but sadly they don't allow us to see things as we are. J Krishnamurthy asks us to understand each of this, so we can discard them and eventually get to be aware. The moment we say this is right/wrong, we see the world through that filter of right/wrong, not quite conducive to seeing things as they are.
Isn't it interesting? Once you remove all these filters, you wouldn't have any thoughts and if you don't have any thoughts, you would be destroying the concept of the ego and then be enlightened.

Not by any means a easy thing to do. One will have to scruplously understand every little thought that one gets. Think of this one which everyone would have experienced at some point in time. "I Love her. I know. I do." Now watch the video below where Osho speaks about love.

Revealing eh?

Personally life's a lot more pleasant these days once I've been practicing awareness, discarding the in numerous mindless judgements that I have inflicted upon myself.

My initial experiments with awareness were simply to be more conscious of what I was doing. I was holding a cup. I was aware of how I lifted the cup and held it to it's current position. I was constantly aware of my breathing at least a 100 times in a day, something that I was not aware of at all earlier unless my heart was beating very fast. Even this much awareness was instantly rewarding. I was suddenly seeing new things in the sights that I have taken for granted. I was experiencing the car engine's vibration on the steering wheel in a more pronounced manner. Washing dishes turned out to be fun after all! So was ironing clothes. Life was turning colorful and when I researched more out of intellectual curiosity, I discovered that

Hinduism talks of 4 different ways of achieving enlightenment.

a) Jnana - Path of wisdom
    - The path of J Krishnamurty, Ramana Maharshi.
    Ramana Maharshi's teaching is really very very simple. The moment you get a thought, ask yourself to whom did this thought arise. The inevitable answer being "me", ask yourself again, "Who am I?". Eventually all attention will be on that singular question without any other thoughts and He says that too will dissolve in due time revealing the answer.
I see J Krishnamurthy's approach as more holistic. He asks us to understand the nature of thought itself, about how important it is to not subscribe to any guru, religion or school of thought including what He himself says as all of that would introduce more judgements and beliefs. Once we understand and discard all these judgements, beliefs, right/wrongs, thoughts, He says we'll experience the pinnacle of his teaching - 'The observer becomes the observed.", a state of being where we can observe ourselves independently and not have to associate us with our body or mind, a state of being without the ego.

b) Bhakti - Path of devotion
    - Surrender your ego to a guru or God if you prefer. This is what the majority of the population does today, followers of all religion, but sadly they are all lost in mindless rituals and traditions than following the true essence of what bhakti means - surrender of one's ego.

c) Karma - Path of Duty
    - Do your duty without expecting any reward thus destroying your ego.
Everytime you see A R Rahman speak you might hear, "Ella pugalum irivannuke!" (Loose translation: All credit goes to God - something like that)

d) Techniques like meditation, Japa, Raja Yoga etc
  - Osho and other gurus advocate this.

All these paths talk about destroying one's ego thus helping us understand who we truly are. The path of Jnana is supposed to be the easiest, but that's kind of subjective for me to say right now unless I am of course truly aware.

My mom used to tell me that to be a genuine person, one must speak out their thoughts as and when you get them. Well today I know that, that statement is as far away from the truth as it could ever be.

Have you noticed that thoughts are always about the past or the future and never about the present? I've been noticing my thoughts for some time and my automatic tendency now is to classify them as past/future. I couldn't classify them as present. The classification can't really help much and I need to learn to be just aware of them without any judgement/classification.

Here's to awareness!

A LONE

This thought gently creeped upon me today and entwined myself comfortably in it's solace.

To not feel alone in this world, one has to actually be alone in order to realize awareness and see how one is connected to everything else in a different plane

Ambition

The other day, a really good friend of mine taunted me for not upgrading my car yet. He even remarked that my father was so much more constantly on top of new gadgets out in the market, whereas I was sticking with the old and the dusted and wasn't really enjoying life.

There's not much basis to the more material things mean more enjoyment statement. Once your basic needs are met, I feel the rest are all clutter. His statements however put me into a really introspective mood on what I really wanted in life. Not surprising, cause I really don't need a excuse to start the introspection engine these days. A few years ago I had a ambition of making a lot of money, becoming famous, owning a mercedes. I was working relentlessly carving out a name for myself in my work circle. And today, where's that drive? That ambition?

I had a revelation some time back when I was tinkering around with the piano. That all the money in this world cannot make me play this instrument beautifully, it's just my own time and practice that can. It's difficult to arrive at such a revelation until you actually sit in front of the piano and try to play with your hands together. It's only then the sheer magnitude of difficulty strikes you and then you strain every nerve in yourself to make it work and when it does, it's sheer joy, joy beyond what you would have experienced anywhere. The experience was so surreal that I described my sensations to a musically inclined friend and asked him what it meant and he laughed and explained that I had just felt the equivalent of a musical orgasm.

Maybe money can buy the best teachers, best books, but one still can't drill musical knowledge into oneself. Well, they probably can if you are Neo and you are inside the matrix movie. Forget my hatch, I don't even remember when I last upgraded my wardrobe. If I look at people who have been inspirational, Ilayaraja, Einstein, all of them had minimal wardrobes. That Steve Jobs always wore his trade mark turtleneck sweater mostly dwarfs his collection in theory, however large it might have been in practice. I read somewhere that Einstein had just 4 suits and that they were all alike because he didn't want to waste time deciding what to wear. I am not sure if the story is true, but it resonates with me and agrees with my own portrayal of Einstein's character.

We all live finite lives averaging around 70 years. Do I want to waste this finite time here figuring out day after day what I want to wear? I guess not. I think unless you devote every second that you can muster to your interests/passions, our lives are limited to a short time span here. If we want to truly immortalize us, we need to treat time as the only thing we have and spend it wisely. In the pursuit of such a path with some talent and luck probably lies immortality. Einstein will live forever in our memories and the generation after ours and after theirs and ever. Ilayaraja too, Malaysia Vasudevan too, for who else could render such a soul striking melody like 'kodai kaala kaatre' like he did? Immortality - How's that for ambition?

Listen to this song with headphones. Crank up the volume as much as you can so you can discern every note that's being played and you will see how beautiful this melody is.

The lure of facebook

A lot of people continue to be surprised that am not on the Facebook and have never been. I was at a tumultuous phase in my life, where I was finding it extremely challenging to balance real relationships in the real world and it seemed rather silly to act out the ideal sort of a guy in a silly virtual world, where you grow silly virtual farms and poke at each other. I deleted my orkut account also during the same time and that formed the beginnings of the coup de resistance.

Over time though, there's been this incessant barrage of pressures to join this world, where somehow the whole of Earth including my loving family and relatives that I don't want to be associated with ever have all converged. Some friends would show me photographs and comments posted by their friends on their wall. Some others would mock me as anti-social. One friend even remarked that she would find it difficult to be in touch with me after her marriage because I was not on Facebook. (Is this what communication has reduced to? What-ever happened to good old e-mail?)
I would get frequent reminders from friends on joining. Facebook itself would be sending me these e-mails about joining the bandwagon every now and then, courtesy people I've been wanting to avoid anyway. Pages on the Internet would lead me to a Facebook page, that would have absolutely no hesitation in enlisting me to join. Googling for people on the internet would pretty much lead me to their Facebook page, which I couldn't see in complete detail because I was not part of this privileged parallel universe.

A Parallel universe ... It's always seemed like a parallel universe to me. I think we are worse off for it for it brings us in greater contact with people we are especially trying to avoid. In the real world if you don't like someone, you aren't exactly confronted with having to bring that fact out. In this world there are however no such choices. An innocuous friend request from someone you are trying to avoid can't just be laughed away. You accept at your own peril. You reject at your own peril. Your neutral stance comes with it's own set of peril.

Apart from the initial motivation for the resistance, there's of course been the constant scare of privacy issues, your likes being tracked, your non-likes being tracked (Why the heck are you not liking anything), settings being constantly changed and with each passing day, it just became more of a experiment to see how much I could resist joining it.

Maybe I am missing a lot. Maybe I am not leading the perfect life by posting photographs about how cool my life is, how eventful it is, how loving my family is, how everyone gifts me something, the exotic cuisines am trying at the moment. It's both sickening and saddening seeing people's advertised attempts at leading out the perfect life. Does the perfect life really need such constant advertising as well as constant approvals in the form of likes and comments from others? Do we really do all this in the real world? I mean do you really call up everyone in the real world and tell them that you are currently cutting your 1 year old daughter's finger nails and that it qualifies as one of the toughest jobs? What's this pressing need to tell everyone what we are doing at the moment? Instead why don't we just live out the moment just for it's own beauty? How do we ever hope to be in a flow like experience as defined by mihaly csikszentmihalyi, if all we are worried about is how that moment is going to be perceived by others, by how many comments/likes we are going to get?

If I were an advertiser, Facebook would make perfect sense to me. If I was running a business, I might have made my presence on it and in the same vein I guess if I wanted to advertise my life, it does actually make sense, which is sort of ironical because people always complain about there being too much advertising in this world!

For leading a regular life that more closely mirrors the importance of living out each moment for it's own joy, I don't know. I think I would be a whole lot better off with just E-mail and something like Flickr/picasa.

And when I think of myself being free of a universe that confines and binds almost most of Earth's inhabitants, I feel free and I feel happy. Maybe it's 'cause am a libran.

P.S. I did try twitter for I was intrigued by the charm of the 140 character limit, but stopped tweeting due to the constant intrusion of spam followers and I am on Google+. I was/am using a lot of Google services and it just sort of made sense to use one more, not that am a heavy user of it anyway. 
I am not on Linked-in for I don't see any need to network professionally and build up a host of recommendations. I would rather let my work speak for itself.

Life is a stage

Forgiveness

A friend who's not been very honest with me in the past called me and wished me on my birthday. I had cut off links from her a while back due to her not being very honest with me. I mean, what do you really do with a person who does not answer pointedly direct questions? and yet here she was calling me on my birthday. I didn't take the call as I was caught up in something, but I called her back.
 She was adamant that I not talk about the thing that had caused the friction between us in the first place. Her attitude was that she hadn't done any wrong. Her contention was that it's not ok to lie, but it's ok to hide the truth. Well, apparently it's ok to hide the truth even if asked a very direct question! People! Strangely enough during the conversation, my anger melted away and I began conversing more normally with her. Now that could only mean one of two things.
Either I've grown to become very forgiving or am just plain dumb (read nice).

I even remarked to her, maybe I look like someone who goes around with a sign on his forehead saying it's ok to trample me, cause I'll eventually forget about it. I dunno what I really am, but I guess I've grown more accommodating over the years. Maybe that's why they say, time heals everything.

Whatever...

Black Money

There's uproar in the country about bringing back the black money that's stashed abroad. As usual not surprisingly everyone is missing the point. It is not without reason they say, 'prevention is better than cure.' So why doesn't our economy behave in a way that it's impossible (or at least makes it very hard) to generate black money?

Here are two scenarios where black money is generated and possible solutions.

Land Registration
So there's a guidance value of x Rs/sqft for a specific area. Now this 'x' was probably set a long time back (order of maybe 3-5 years back). Real estate is very volatile and using 'x' as the basis to compute tax is probably not ideal. It's no secret that people quote just about 'x' even if they have paid as much as 3x for a specific property. When I bought a property I quoted it all in 'white' and paid a size able amount for registration and stamp duty and during the same day when I was at the registrar office, I could of course see other apartments in my own complex with exactly the same size being quoted for much lesser and I believe that I got a reasonable rate for my own apartment that I refuse to believe that anyone else buying at the same time paid drastically lesser than me. So black money was generated. How could it have been avoided?

Now is this really a problem that can't be solved with centralized software? There's too much power with the people working at the registrar offices. Move this power from the people into the software and all we really need are clerks who work with the software to help the common man, as R K Laxman would poignantly put it. Can't a software intelligently arrive at a appropriate guideline value based on recent transactions, yearly appreciation, year of the property, area guideline, builder reputation, amenities offered etc? It would be complex, but it's definitely do-able and all it needs is one guy who does "white" transactions to catch all the "black" stuff and automatically impose penalties.

Of course this can be abused.
What if the Govt. gamed the system by creating a really pricey transaction and fed it into their centralized system through the back end? Maybe the MPs have been brushing on their SQL skills!
How do we tackle this now? Hmm maybe we don't need to. This would have simply driven up the guideline value by a exorbitant amount that the property with taxation is now simply unaffordable and hence there are no buyers and in the long run the Govt loses more taxes if there are lesser transactions. If the gaming increased the rates marginally, then the property would be affordable though the number of buyers start dwindling as it goes higher and higher again leading to lesser transactions. Am not a economist, but I believe that gaming the system might prove more detrimental than beneficial.

Movie Theater Tickets
You've seen touts at some point in time selling movie tickets. I saw a recent press release that Ek Tha Tiger's first day tickets were sold at 700Rs for a 100 Rs. ticket. It's become a way of life that it's being reported as a matter of fact. Do you know why touts exist? It's really simple. Think hard. No? Think again. Give up? It's really simple. No?
Have you ever wondered why the ticket counters selling the movie tickets are outside? Ok forget it, now think of the airport - how would one go through immigration? You walk up to a person who checks your papers and then allows you through past that person. All one needs is a similar system for movie theaters and the tout problem is gone, for ever. What we need are "theater toll booths". Have you ever seen touts selling the passes for the toll booths on the highways? Exactly. All we need is to change the design of the God damn building!

These solutions are of course not perfect (nothing on the first try ever is), but I believe the focus really needs to be more on preventing the generation of black money.

Existential Crisis

I am going through an existential crisis. I know it. Not that am able to do much about it, though. Today when I walked out, the weather was dreamy. I thought it would be rather pleasant to look upwards and not have to bear the brunt of the Sun. The sky was gray and like seeing through a 3-D stereo-gram, when I tried to look beyond it, I thought of the Rover on Mars. When you are able to visualize things from a perspective so high, it draws the fact of one's own miniscule nature so lucidly that there's just no escaping it. What the heck was I doing here on Earth anyway?

So it was in this mood, I asked a friend what the purpose of life was yet again. This friend has always had an air of a philosophy about him and he gave me a response that I really liked to hear.

"The purpose of life is to lead a life where you don't have to ask such a question."

For some reason that really resonated with me. There was one tiny problem with it though - I have no clue what such a life would consist of. I have tried immersing myself in activities am passionate about, opening myself to experiences I wouldn't have dreamt about, questioning beliefs I hold strongly in my heart and yet invariably after some time, I wind up at the same point again and forced to confront the forbidden question again and again.

So I turned to this friend again and asked him and his response was that I was a very inquisitive analytical person and that I would figure it out eventually. As if I wasn't weighed down enough by the question, I now have to bear the burden of expectations too.

Where does one start?