As Dark as My Heart: Story of a Date

"One day she will be a big sexy bomb macha". 

As I rode my bike, these words of Arun, my schoolmate, mixed with evening breeze of BTM layout and kissed my face. I thought why did I always choose to monitor class 6th when I was in 10th? Would that mean she will be 3 years younger to me? How were I and Arun so sure that she would be sexy when she matured? The initial contours had said it all. Didn't it?

"Man.. what is making you this desperate this time? This won't be your first relationship"

"Far from the first" said the speedometer of my bike which seemed stuck at 12 Km/h. "I want to enjoy the  Saturday evening weather, so I am riding slowly" I told myself but I knew it was not true. It was not I riding the bike, but it was the bike mercilessly dragging me towards Jaynagar though I wanted to take Koramanagala's route.

I had a faint hope that she would relent to meet. On the very last night she had denied saying 'it is too soon'.

Like pale orange pre mansoon sun rays were being sucked by my black ray ban glass, Anusha's thoughts again sucked me into fathomless oblivion.

"Unknown people used to send me friend requests on Orkut. So I did not join Facebook" I could never explain that delightful jealousy her SMS reply had ignited in me. I had asked her 'Why linked-in and not Facebook'. Did that inexplicable jealousy meant I was falling in love? "ganta" I had replied to my roommate. "Who wants to marry a babe man. I want a simple homely girl". 

"drrrrr" "drrrr" vibrated my mobile in approval. She finally agreed to meet me at Jaynagar 4th Block CCD.
 
My heart started pounding intensely. Never had it worked so fast. Never. It had only been 4 days since I had accepted her linked in request. Her profile had not carried her picture but had mentioned our school name. Only after I had immediately sent a message "you were my junior right?" had I realized that it would have been difficult for me to recollect all my teachers names.

The place around 4th block CCD was spiritual. 3 huge trees had successfully fought the sun and rendered such a serenity to the place that I only grew more tensed. I had reached the place early.

Only in my work place it could have happened. Using up all 200 free messages in a day was tough, not because I had work in office, but because I had a qwerty keyboard mobile then. But the hope on the other side had promised to be voluptuous enough to take the pain. But it was only after two days of google chatting and texting I had got her upload her picture on gtalk profile. The picture, though too small to be discernible, had said that two days of hard work was worth it.

"Who is the other girl with you in the picture?" I was pondering why she had to put picture of her with a rather unkempt, grotesque girl.

"That's my besssteeest, cuteeee friend :)"

In the next two days messages had became more intimate, intimate to the level of skin. Was she falling in love? "She better not be. Love is like a paste" and I slipped when a sweet voice called out "hey white T shirt and black ray ban!"

I turned back and met with a shock.

That night as I lay on my bed trying desperately to recollect what had happened, I remembered the meeting, or should I say the date, had lasted full 30 minutes, thanks to te waitress who seemed to avenge me by taking ad infinitum to serve two coffees. I was trying my best to be my usual even when I knew it was her fault to put her picture with that "cuteee" friend of hers. But her face, her body and everything had repeatedly needled me that I hadn't noticed that this Anusha had matriculated a year later than the Anusha who had clogged my mind, my brain and moreover my work.

As I was trying to hard to fall asleep, a sweet voice repeatedly kept whispering to my ears "I did not know one had to look like Aishwarya Rai to be someone's friend". It was dark all around, as Dark as my Heart.

The only rule that works in life

If I have learnt something from my experiences over the years, from books I read, from people I met and spoke to, it is this.

Only rule that works in life: there is no single rule that always works. There is no right or wrong. There is no correct way and wrong way. There is so single mantra for success.

Have your own principles. Follow your own heart. Beat your own path.

Two Inspirational Stories that ‘ruined’ my life

There is so much buzz around the word passion these days. ‘Do what you love; love what you do.’ Today I want to write about my affair with the word passion.

My goals and ambitions were always crystal clear. Firstly I wanted to become an Engineer and I became one. Then I wanted to become an MBA. Everything was going fine for me to become an MBA. But today I stand at the center of vicious circles of dilemma knowing not, what to do in my life. How did all this happen? It was 2 years ago when I read those two autobiographies which changed direction of my life forever.

The first is the life of Captain Gopinath, the person who revolutionized low fare fight travel in India through Air Deccan. After his role in liberation of Bangladesh, Gopinath gets posted to Kanchenjunga. He undergoes an emotional-spiritual crisis and no longer wishes to continue in army. His father advices him to continue his job quoting Gita: Niyatam kuru karma twam karma jyayo hyakarmanaha. ”Do thou thy allotted task; for action is superior to inaction”.  I was then in a similar situation. I started to relate myself to Gopinath and started to question purpose of my life. Why did I want to become an MBA? I soon realized it was because of others’ opinions and that I had never sought my own voice. My career plan which once seemed like crystal clear water, now looked like unsettled muck. They were most torturous days of my life. I felt sad for having born the most unfortunate on earth because my heart was not speaking to me when I was searching for my life’s calling. The only consolation was an African proverb which said: “only way out of desert is through it”.

Days later, the biggest lesson of my life dawned upon me: Everyone may not be born fortunate to know his passion. In fact most people do not question at all. But a few, who question, will have to bear the torture of discovering their passion themselves, how Gopinath had done. Let us go back to the story. In such despair Captain roams in interior parts of India and USA hoping to discover something. He finally quits army questioning himself why he should live to impress others. Back in his village, after prolonged soul-searching, a dream of becoming a farmer starts to get shaped in him. His failure in initial years of farming, indebtedness, later innovation and success in farming and sericulture, success in motor business, humiliating defeat in assembly election, rise and fall of Air Deccan makes his story a must read. But read it at your own risk.

Coming back, I decided to explore myself too. I got into teaching. Gopinath says God helps them who help themselves. I explored opportunities in many sectors, ideating and researching. I was not able to zero in on one idea for one or other reason. Then I learnt an important lesson from life of Sir Richard Branson: Just Do It. Live life to the full. To quote him, “I am prepared to try anything once”.  I want to tell just one story from his life, which is filled with risky businesses, deadly adventures and surmounting loans. 

One day Branson gets call from Per Lindstrand asking him if he would join Per in trip across Atlantic in the world’s largest hot-air balloon flying at 30,000 feet. Whoever had tried that stunt before had died. By then Branson’s net worth was already a billion pound. Per explains his plans in detail. Branson finally says “I’ll never understand the theory. I will join you if you answer me this question. Do you have any children?” “Yes, I’ve got two”. Branson says “That’s enough for me. I will take the challenge”. That attitude stuck in mind. We Indians think and plan so much. But when it comes to execution, we back out. I decided to just do one thing. The story continues with that balloon trip where Branson comes so close to death that he writes his last letter to his daughter and wife. But he survives because he does not give up. 

My next one year went working tirelessly, round the clock in building a business from an idea. There were moments when I had to beg someone, for over a month for an appointment, got blasted from tax officials for no mistake, shoed away by watch men, roamed in unthinkable places, lost argument with senior managers. But market did not accept my idea. I learnt the difference between what is maverick and what is marketable, the hard way.   

Now I am back to square-1 where I had begun. What do I do in my life? I remember lines Branson had written to his parents when he had decided to drop out from college. “I see a danger of falling between two stools. Of being failure in everything and having to search for priorities again.” Though it did not come true in Branson’s life, it came true in mine.

Am I sounding like I am going to give up? Definitely no. I remember the lines read from these books. It is not the destination but it is the journey that is the real reward. Do not let sorrow and self-pity bring down your energy. I know that I have been ruined for good. I will soon be onto something new. Finally I would like to rename title of this article to “Two Inspirational Stories that changed my life for good.”  I would like to leave you with lines by Rudyard Kipling: “If you can lose and start again at your beginnings; If you can treat triumph and disasters just the same; yours’ will be the earth my son.”

The hyperbole

Why so much importance to 'extinction of tiger' alone? Why not crows? I think they, along with many other species like sparrows, are also on the verge of extinction.

Over million years on this earth, thousands of species have gone extinct. 'Survival of the fittest' is the name of the game. If earth can survive some more million years, even humans may go extinct. If so, why so much fuss about extinction of tiger alone. Save tigers and 1399.5 of them left and so on?

We are making a drama out of this without looking inwards the overall behavioral changes needed. All this hyperbole of 'save tiger' is being enacted by shameless publicity mongers trying to advertise themselves to become celebrities. Let us not give attention to just one species(We anyway have many pictures of them already). So many have become extinct so far and many others will. Let us stop acting 'humane' towards tigers because we need to learn to be humane towards fellow humans first.

Happiness and misunderstood Pursuit of Happiness

I was startled to know that many dictionaries define pursuit as to “chase with hostility”.  Do we pursue happiness with hostility? I was amused by this. This led me to do a small research on happiness and pursuit of happiness. No credit has to be given to me for this article. I only aggregated the relevant data so that readers would be benefitted by the content.

The Father of psychology Sigmund Freud said “Pursuit of happiness is a doomed quest. The intention that man should be happy was not included in the plan of creation.”  J

Come on it can’t be like that. We all want happiness. We do not want to be like some French intellectuals who think that happiness is not at all interesting. J It seems they raised a controversy over an essay on happiness written by Matthie Ricard, a Buddhist Monk, sometimes called ‘happiest man in the world”. They asked him not to impose dirty work of happiness. They said, “We don’t care about being happy. We like ups and downs of life. We like suffering because it’s so good when it ceases for a while” J

I hope none of us think that way. I am sure none of us here wakes up in the morning thinking, “I want to suffer the whole day”. Consciously or not, whatever we do somehow is related to a deep, profound desire for well-being or happiness. Every man wants to be happy, but in order to be so he needs first to understand what happiness is.

If you look at literature, you will find different definitions of happiness. Some people say happiness is right now; it’s the quality of the freshness of present moment. Some say happiness is state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment. And all this led someone to say that scholars intentionally left the definition of happiness vague so that each individual could interpret it in his own way. It could be right and we all define happiness the way we find happiness.

Initially the psychologists thought happiness and unhappiness were end points of a single continuum. That made Freud say that, as one becomes less miserable, one gets happier. Only recent developments of science of happiness in the west deduce that Happiness and unhappiness are not the end points of a single continuum. When you get less miserable, you get less miserable. And that happiness is a whole other end of equation.

Our Indian spiritual definition of happiness always accommodated this fact. Just consider one definition: ‘happiness is deep sense of serenity and fulfillment, a state actually pervades and underlies all emotional states and all the joys and sorrows that come one’s way.’

Is it surprising? Can we have this kind of well-being feeling even in the midst of misery? If we give deep thought to his definition of happiness, we will realize that it is not about finding happiness but it is about feeling happiness. And that we can feel happiness in any state of mind if we change the ways we ‘pursue happiness’. 

The issue at the heart of misconception about ‘pursuit of happiness’ is that, we often focus on the pursuit of happiness as if happiness is something that we have to go out and get, an object we are supposed to get. We think that if we could gather this and that we will be happy. We say ‘everything to be happy – to have everything to be happy’. That very sentence already reveals the doom of destruction of happiness. If we miss something, it collapses. And also, when things go wrong we try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often illusory.

We can think of our pursuit of happiness to be following 'if-then model'. If I can get 40 % hike, I will be happy.  If my Boss gets heart attack, I will be happy. The ‘If’ we were focusing 10 years ago might have got fulfilled. But now we will have another set of ‘If’s for us to postpone feeling happiness.

If you call happiness equation as Happiness = (wanting what you have) divided by (having what you want) most of us here spend more of our time in the bottom half of this equation.

So what could be the right way to pursue happiness? I must admit that I do not have authority to prescribe how exactly one should go about finding happiness. I am just putting forward what I think could possibly be the right way. May be some of us would have experienced deep happiness when we relaxed beside a wonderful, serene lake. Had we thought if the color of water was bluish, we would never have experienced the same happiness. So key to happiness lies in discarding our ‘if-then’ model and accepting and enjoying the present. I am not advocating that one must not dream and have ambitions. All I am saying is that one need not postpone happiness waiting for their fulfillment.

Rabbi Hyman Schachtel in his book “The real enjoyment of Living” suggested that Happiness is not about having what you want. Instead it is about wanting what you have. I shall not speak more on this line for two reasons. 1. I have already given clue as to what could be more appropriate way. 2.  May be it is better left vague so that people find their own way to find happiness, equipped with right basics. I will leave you all with a story I came across in this pursuit of mine, which made a deep impression on me.

It is said when Dalai Lama was once in Portugal and got amused by all the big construction of buildings that was going everywhere. One evening he said “Look, you are doing all these things, but isn’t it nice, also, to build something within? “. And he said, “unless that you even if you get high-tech flat on the 100^th floor of a super-modern and comfortable building, if you are deeply unhappy within, all you are going to look for is a window from which you can jump out.”  

A critical look at Indian Value system

This article is HIGHLY borrowed from a speech of NRN. My role here is only 'information/knowledge' dissemination. 

I am ready to be born a thousand times over if only, said a chauvinistically patriotic friend of mine, beating his chest, if only I am born an Indian every time. If not to that extent, I am sure all of us are proud Indians. Of course we should be. David Abraham in his The Rough Guide to India says “It is impossible not to be astonished by India. Nowhere else on Earth does humanity present itself in such a creative burst of cultures and religions, races and tongues.”  We all have umpteen reasons why we are proud to be an Indian. It could be our rich culture, history, variety and Indian Value system or Indian philosophy.

We all know how rich and unique is Indian value system and how it makes us different. But today let us take a critical look at our Value system.

What is a value system? It is the protocol for behavior that enhances the trust, confidence and commitment of the members of a community. It goes beyond the domain of legality. It translates to putting the community’s interest ahead of your own. Even Vedas say ‘Man can live individually but can survive collectively.’

Two pillars of the value system are loyalty to the family and loyalty to the community. One should not be in isolation of the other and successful societies are those which combine both harmoniously. However, Indian society has, for over a thousand years put loyalty to the family ahead of loyalty to society. We can see thousand examples of behavioral manifestations of this nature. Let us consider a few.

We Indians have tremendous loyalty to the family. Parents make sacrifices for children. At the same time children consider it their duty to take care of aged parents. We believe in ‘matru devo bhava’, ‘pitru devo bhava’. We believe in making sacrifices for our siblings. Marriage is regarded to be a sacred union. And the examples go on. And of course I am proud to be part of such a culture.

Unfortunately, our attitude towards family is not reflected in our attitude towards community. We do not think twice before littering streets and parks, though we are very fastidious in our house. Bribing is considered an art and has become a part of ‘jugaad’.  We are apathetic to community good.  We have very bad traffic sense. This list too goes on.

Apathy in addressing community matters is also very abundant. We see serious problem around us behave as if the problems do not exist or as if they belong to someone else. What could be the reason for our apathy? We were ruled by foreigners for over a thousand years. So, we have always believed that public or societal issues belong to some foreign ruler and that we have no responsibility to solve them. ‘We are what we repeatedly do’ said Aristotle. Having waited for some foreigner tell us what to do, over thousand  years, our decision makers still look to somebody else  to make their decision when there is nobody to look up to.

Intellectual arrogance is also very evident in us. We boast so much about our past though our current accomplishment is less. This does not seem to be a new phenomenon anyway.  In ‘Alberuni’s India, where the author Alberuni, a middle Eastern Traveller in India in 8^th century makes an interesting remark. He says, during his visit, most Indian pundits considered it below their dignity to even hold arguments with him. And on a few occasions when he did get a chance to discuss and made a lot of sound arguments, they asked him which Indian pundit had taught him these smart things!

One other issue is of punctuality. Our Indian Standard time seems to be always running late. Here we take coming late to meeting or gathering is a sign of importance. The higher you are in the hierarchy, the later you are supposed to come to any meeting.

We become intimate even without being friendly.  It won’t take more than 5 minutes of conversation with a new acquaintance before we are ready to ask favors from them. Rudyard Kipling once said, ‘A westerner can be friendly without being intimate while an easterner tends to be intimate without being friendly’.  

So what do we have to do now? We should first remind ourselves that arrogance breeds hypocrisy. ‘It is easy to dodge our responsibilities but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities’. If we have to make progress, we have to change our attitude, learn from people who have performed better than us and perform better than them. With regards this we have a lot to learn from so called ‘the West’.  Some of the things we have learn and improve upon are accountability of our actions, professionalism, punctuality and putting society’s interest at least at the same level as self-interest.  We have to remember that most of our fundamental problems grow out of lack of commitment to the common good. Culture is that which helps us to work for the betterment of all.

I whole heartedly do believe that we are citizens of a great country. But as Winston Churchill said, ‘Responsibility is the price of greatness.’ Let us make our country a great place to live. Let us work towards maximum welfare of maximum people.

‘Samasta jananam sukhino bhavantu’

The Habit of Reading

I was late to catch on the habit of reading. But as the saying goes, ‘Better late than never.’ I have, to some extent, covered up for the lost years, by reading very good books in last couple of years. My intention here is not to share my experiences of reading but to highlight why it is high time for Youth to revive the fading habit of reading.  

It does not take much effort to convince that book reading is no longer a pass-time activity of many. It is grave to learn that today’s children regard book reading as ‘un-cool’. Ever increasing habit of watching TV and playing games in today’s youth and children leave them with no time for reading. Though I am not an advocate of complete abandoning TV and Video Games, and very much appreciate their reach and utility, I believe today’s generation has to make time to read.

I think this problem is partly because people (especially youth and children) have not realized the experience and benefits of reading. At first consider fictions. The best thing about reading fictions is that your imagination is not captivated by any exact characterizations as in case of movies or TV serials. You can simply run wild with your mental imagination and savor the beauty of your imagined world. Who ever watched ‘Twilight’ movie after reading the novel told me that the movie was not up to the mark when compared to the novel. I felt the same when I watched the movie Godfather. Even with modern day technologies including recent 3D movies, the movies cannot have narrations as beautiful as what it can be in well-written novels. Crime plots as complex as my favorite Orhan Pamuk’s ‘My Name is Red’ can’t just be made by movies.  Video games may, to good extent, give more live experience but have their own limitations.

I do not need to much emphasize the importance of reading non-fictions. Any person with sound reasoning power should be able to appreciate it. One of the best ways to learn beyond realms of your own experiences is reading books. That’s how you can learn from other’s experiences and mistakes. One can sharpen one’s reasoning and thinking power by reading books of influential thinkers like Amartya Sen, Thomas Friedman to name only a few. I feel we are lucky to still have treatises like Sun Tzu’s ‘Art Of War’.  Let me stop here because I am sure I cannot make justice to this point.

I think one only needs to just drop into a good book stall, say like Bookworm in Bangalore, pick a random book and complete it. It will not take much time for you to appreciate my point and become ‘addicted’. I think it is my duty here to elaborate on Bookworm because its proprietor Krishna’s recommendations made me read many great books.    

To elaborate, Bookworm is situated in Shringar Complex on M.G.Road; Bangalore has one of the best collections of books in Bangalore. It has great collection of both fictions and non fictions - both used and unused, and you get very good discount unlike most other shops. You will never get disappointed with personal recommendations done to you and will surely cherish their hospitality to customers. I personally regard it to be the best bookstore in Bangalore.

My request for everyone not to buy pirated books. If you are a true fan of reading, you will appreciate my request.

All you need to do now is to visit and buy the book that catches your attention. You will slowly recognize the wonders it does to you.

Happy Reading J