Happy New Year

We humans are prone to picking out a particular point in our space-time continuum (read: the New Year) to think about the future and new beginnings, rather than going through this exercis every week or month. Maybe so much introspection and thinking is just too exhausting, so we only do it on an annual basis.

As usual, I spent my last week of last year thinking about the events and achievements of the past year and planning goals and activities for the new year. This year in my long list of goals, to-do’s and wish-list, the one thing that really stood out was my strong desire to spend more time with my son and enjoy his growing up.

I read a poem by Diane Loomans that touched my heart. I can relate totally with what the poet is saying. I believe I still have time to talk about it in present rather than in past, so I would like to welome the year 2012 with this poem.

If I had my child to raise over again

If I had my child to raise all over again,
I’d build self-esteem first, and the house later,
I’d finger-paint more, and point the finger less.
I would do less correcting and more connecting,
I’d take my eyes off my watch, and watch with my eyes.


I would care to know less and know to care more,
I’d take more hikes and fly more kites.
I’d stop playing serious, and seriously play.
I would run through more fileds and gaze at more stars.


I’d do more hugging and less tugging.
I’d see the oak tree in the acorn more often.
I would be firm less often, and affirm much more.
I’d model less about the love of power,
And more about the power of love.

Life after Death

Death is often a taboo topic, atleast to me. A topic that I avoid reading about, talking about and even thinking about. It is morbid. Depressing. In every way. Until I started reading this book called “elsewhere” by “Gabrielle Zevin”. I started this book with lot of scepticism; almost sure that I won’t like it. But pretty soon I changed my opinion. Gabrielle transformed “death” into a fascinating story.

There are two aspects of “death”; one is “loosing someone” and the other is “your own death”. By all means, the first one is most remorsefull that fills you with grief and only grief; nothing but sadness. However, the second one, “death of oneself” is a very intriguing, emotional, scary and fictions concept. I am not talking about suicidal tendencies and that sort. I am talking about natural death – what happens after we die? Do we exist? Do we have any association with the living ones? Do we dissipate into energy and spread in the universe? Or do we have a life after death ? Do we get born again? Nobody knows what happens. All that people do is that theorize about it. It is an eternal topic that every religion tries to address in their own way.

Death makes God a reality! Death makes life a mystery! Death makes the this world insignificant.

In this book, Gabrielle Zevin portrayed life after death in a fascinating way. She talks about a girl Liz who dies prematurely at the age of 15. After she dies, she reaches this place called “elsewhere” which is almost like earth, yet completely different from it. Here in “elsewhere”, everybody ages backward from the day of their death until they become a baby again, when they return back to Earth. Life after Death in “elsewhere” is life aging backward. It is like living with older people journeying backward in age who intersect with your timeline and start aging with you. Interesting concept! Liz finds her grandmother here who has aged backward and almost looks like her mother. Everybody work here but they choose a profession that they like and spend time doing something that they enjoy – it is called avocation. Quoting from the book – “An Avocation is not a job. A job has to do with prestige! Money! An avocation is something a person does to make his or her soul complete!” How we wish that that was the case in earth – we all have an avocation and not a job! Initially, Liz is sad, she wants to age forward, become 16, drive a car, graduate from high school, go to college, fall in love and enjoy life. But she finds herself dead and in “elsewhere” where can not do any of those things. Time is ticking for her. Backwards. Eventually, she adjusts to this new life, makes new friends and accepts her backward advancing life.

It is a novel idea, the idea of living backward. In this backward journey, if people fall sick,they recover from it automatically as and when they grow younger. Sick become healthy. Old become young. You get a second chance to do things, the right way. Experience things in life that you missed out in your forward journey of life.

The author gives a meta-physical definition of human existence. It is perceived as being like a circle and a line at the same time. It is a circle, because everything that was old would be new and everything that was new became old. It is a line because the circle stretches out indefinitely, and the line progresses infinitely. People die; get born; die again and the cycle continues. Each birth and death is a little circle, and the sum of all those little circles is the life and it advances in a line.

This book changed my outlook about “death”. I feel that there is no reason to think so morbid about our own death. Maybe “life after death” would be more interesting than “life” itself!

Or maybe not! We will never know!

Back to School

Summer is not over yet but the summer vacation is.  Just like every year, much before the summer is over, the the summer vacation ends;  school re-opens and a fresh academic year starts.  A new start, a new beginning, new set of expectations, new goals and new hope. Going back to school brings mixed feelings. On one side, filled with sadness that the carefree vacation days are over. Life is again filled with  board-work, studies, homework and tests! But on the other side, filled with joy, pleasure of meeting old friends, playing together at break time, fighting on trivial things,  exchanging kiddie gossips and just being together. There is so much to tell and so much to hear – so much to brag and so much to learn. And of course,  biggest surprise factor on returning back to school is the class teacher – who is the class teacher this year? Is she (or he) a strict one?  What rules does she have? Is she nice? Interesting?  Humorous? Fun?

As a child whether one realizes or not, but the interesting part of childhood is going to school. Of course school minus homework and tests would have been more fun but well life is not that easy even when you are just a child!  Best part of schooling is that there is this concept of academic year.  Each academic year ends! What a relief!  The school re-opens and a new academic year starts.  Each academic year gives you a new beginning – a new chance – a new start.  Not just that, each academic year, you are evaluated afresh.  You get a new report card. The old marks, grades are gone – at least temporarily gone from the horizon. You surely get a chance to color your report card differently each year. And this is not just for you but for everyone in the class. So you get to have a fresh start in terms of competing with each other.

How I wish we had some similar concept at our corporate world. A clear beginning and clear end of a corporate work year where the performance is evaluated and limited to that year’s work. Well, you can say that yearly performance appraisal is similar to that. But nothing close to what we have at school. In the corporate world, it is so fuzzy – the evaluation process is so complex and convoluted, there is no clear marked beginning, or end. You don’t know who all are you compared with; leave alone how you are compared. It is subjective rather than objective. It is so straight-forward when you are a child – you give a good test, you get a good grade. You keep doing that and you go to the  next grade. Well, how I wish at our corporate world it was so well defined where you work good and you get promoted well! On the contrary, you start believing in fate – you work good and let the destiny take care of you!

Birth-day, My-day, Special-day!

There are certain moments in life when time just stops; the memory never fades; the joy of that moment stays for ever. One such moment is the birth of a child! It is a moment of celebration! Not only for the parents of the newborn, but for the whole extended family. A joyous moment – special indeed – the birthday of the new born.

This special day is celebrated again when the baby turns one. A big milestone for the baby and the parents! Year after year till the child is 3 or 4, parents celebrate this occasion without fail – they are truly happy at their child’s progress and love to share it with everyone. Soon the child turns 4 or maybe 5 when he or she takes over the birthday celebration! The child decides where to celebrate, how to celebrate, whom all to call and becomes his or her own birthday organizer.

We all shared similar feeling about our birthdays when we were young – waited eagerly for our special day to arrive; the day when we get special gifts from our parents, uncles & aunties and friends & families. As soon as the birthday is over, we start wondering when and how we will celebrate our next birthday. We had a special warm feeling about this day, waited eagerly for it to come and celebrated it year after year in our own special way. But not too long. As we became older, we started loosing it – attached lesser and lesser importance to it. Only celebrated the milestone birthday’s – 16, 18, 21 etc. As we entered the adulthood, we lost the spirit of celebration totally; felt that it is just like any other day, so why celebrate it. And slowly the birthday celebration took a complete twist. We started expecting others to keep track of our birthday and create an atmoshpere of celebration. We expected that our loved ones would surprise us with a birthday gift; hoped that friends will throw a surprise birthday party. Instead of “we” celebrating “our” birthday, we wanted “others” to celebrate “our” birthday!

Why do we stop celebrating our birthdays? Have we lost our spirit of celebration? Is it not important to us any more? If “our” existence is not important to “us”, then why should it be any important to anyone else? Why do we throw the responsiblity of remembering and celebrating our birthday to others?

As they say, it takes a long time to grow young – this year, I decided to grow younger. I took upon myself to celebrate my birthday! With joy and happiness! Celebrate that I got a chance to complete one more year in this world! Celebrate that I have got all that I want – enough money to lead a comfortable life, good friends with whom I can share my happiness and most importantly great health to feel and enjoy the pleasure of life. I sincerely want to celebrate the “gift” of “my life”. Happy Birthday to me!

Time vs Commitment

It has been a long time since I wrote a new blog post. I got too busy at work and did not find time to write. Is this a good enough excuse? Of course NOT!

If I have to list the reasons for not writing, it is not just one. It is a culmination of many, the “lack of time”, “inertia to write” topping the list.

I was reading an article in ACM Communications that kindled my thoughts on “time management”. I derived some of the viewpoints from this article and added my thoughts & views as well.

Lack of “time” is a symptom and not the problem. The real problem is “commitment”. It would be incorrect to say that “I don’t have time for this” instead it it would be more appropriate to say that “I don’t find time to do this”. It seems like a subtle change in verbiage but actually it shows the deep-rooted intent. It is not just an issue with time-management, instead it is about commitment-management! Time is one of the resources need for commitment-management. But commitment is one of the pre-requisite for managing time.

We all experience missed or forgotten commitments every now and then. I committed to myself that I will write at least one post every week. But when my paid-job required more of my time, I could not keep up with my personal commitments and started slipping and forgetting them. When the work piles up, the non-revenue generating commitments are the first one to experience time-cuts.

I think we should run our life like how we would run an organization. Just like an organizations have mission statement, we should have our personal mission statement that includes our profession, heath, hobbies and other interests. Ideally, we should write down our mission statement, map them to activities, allocate time to each activity and track their individual progress. Once we know the mission statement and the set of activities that are important, then we can prioritize our time and focus on important stuff rather than urgent stuff. Many a times, we find ourselves overwhelmed with urgent but unimportant requests that consumes all our time.

Stephen Covey tells an engaging story about a time-management seminar leader who did a demonstration involving placing rocks, then gravel, sand and water into a large glass jar. After his students struggled with getting all these items successfully into the jar, he asked, “What is the point about time management?”. He got answers that there is always more room to fit more things in your schedule if they are small or liquid enough, and you may therefore have more capacity to set things done than you think. He said, “No! The point is that if you don’t put the big rocks in the beginning, you cant get them in at all”.

In essence, we should refer to our goals and aspirations in life, see if our day to day activities are aligned with the mission statement and use that as a guidance to set aside some time for the important tasks.

Siddartha

I recently read the book called “Siddartha” by “Hermann Hess”. It is a thin book of about 152 pages describing the essence of life. It is a story of a brahmin boy “Siddartha” who is seeking the answers to all the profound questions: What is this life about? Why are we here? What is our destiny? and many more. Siddartha internalizes the scriptures at a very young age and is soon ready for higher level of education. He leaves home, goes on his search, thinks, learns, experiences life and continues doing that. In his quest, he takes up different roles, becomes from a brahmin boy to a “samana” (a sanyasi) , from a “samana” to a “samsari”; gets older, wiser, continues his search for the profound questions. Finally, he settles down as a ferryman, rowing boat and helping people cross the river. He spends countless hours listening to the river, thinking and observing the river. Slowly, the mystery of life unfolds to him – he is enlightened.
One day one of his childhood friend, who left Siddarth to join Gotama buddha meets Siddartha after many many years. Both friends spend the whole night talking about their chosen paths to enlightenment and what they learnt in this journey. Their conversation is the basis of this book. Siddartha’s words of wisdom to his friend have great meaning and significance even at this age. It could be interpreted in various ways even in a non-spiritual context. I am quoting few of them and I am trying to interpret them in the context of our life.

Here is a quote from Siddartha:

“When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding is to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. If you are striving just towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.”

My interpretation:

Having a no-goal as goal is an oxymoron. It seems contradictory to what we are all used to in our life. We consider not having a goal is equivalent to straying in life; having no meaning in life. We were taught to have goals in life and we teach the same to our kids. However, Siddartha says that having a specific goal prevents you from seeking the so many un-said goals. Maybe we are missing out so many things when we are so focused on our goals. Maybe when we are engrossed in reaching our goal, we miss out the pleasure of the journey. We do not see and realize the opportunities that we are leaving behind un-explored while we are in the pursuit of our goal. But does that mean that we should not have goal and just wander and be a finder? Maybe not. Maybe we should try to be a finder while we are a seeker!

Another quote:

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. ”

Very true. It happens so many times that when we express a thoughts, it suddenly looses value and seems insignificant. It seems so small than what it was when the thought was in our head. What happened? Did we not express the thoughts well? Yes. The very act of expressing distorted it and conveyed a different meaning.

The golden quote:

“Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish. Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. On can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. ”

So so true. We often confuse between wisdom and knowledge. They are orthogonal. One can have abundance knowledge but still can be foolish in his action. If only our wisdom could be retained, stored and passed on like knowledge, the human civilization would progress at a much higher rate than what it is now.

A Weekday Evening

A friend read my blog postings and commented that I write serious stuff. It was not the first time I got this comment, even my husband said the same thing. Have I become a serious person? Have I started taking life too seriously? Actually not! I take life as it comes without worrying about how’s and what’s of life. Then why am I writing about serious topics only? Maybe I don’t know how to make a topic light, or maybe I do not appreciate myself writing about trivial stuff or maybe I just have not tried it.

So here I am trying to write something light and trivial …

tringa-tringa-tringa-tring…. my phone was ringing….. who was calling me? Oh yeah… It was my 5:00 pm evening alarm! The alarm that sets me free from the corporate world. It was time to change from professional role to the mommy role! I shutdown my computer, hurriedly packed my bags, dashed down the stairs, got into my car, started the engine and was off on the road. It was time to pick up my kid, take him to classes, get his homework done, get food ready for the family, prepare for the next day and finally read a bed time story and put him to sleep. phew… busy … packed schedule.

I drove down the busy highway slowly making my way through the crawling evening traffic that was moving at an average speed of 15 miles an hour. It took almost an hour to drive the 20 miles distance to reach my son’s school. I tried to make the best use of the time by calling my local friends who were all crawling in different highways to pick up their young ones. I dialed a number, got my friend on phone and happily started chatting about life and everything. Finally, reached school at 5:58, , just in time to avoid dollar-a-minute fine charged on picking after 6:00 pm. I entered his classroom and instead of getting a welcoming smile, I saw his sad and upset face. When I asked him what was the matter, I got a serious answer “I will tell you later”. Being an understanding mom, I kept quiet, made small conversation with the teacher and went to the car. Not able to hold my curiosity, I asked in the most caring way what was troubling him. He started with “I don’t like what the teacher said”, “Everybody is mean to me”, “Nobody likes me”, “This is a bad school”, “I don’t want to go here anymore”, “Nobody is my friend”, “I want to go to a different school”, “This is the worst day of my school” and on and on. The flood gates opened and tears started rolling down. I almost felt like crying seeing him so upset. Then I reminded myself that my son is a drama king. He probably was exaggerating his bad day. So asked him to tell me the incidents that upset him.

Apparently, he was the TA (Teacher’s Assistant) this week – a role that each student got a chance to be on a rotation basis. He was initially very excited with the opportunity to control the class, help the teacher and boss over his classmates. But two days in the role, he realized that this role had some major limitations. He was expected to be the role model and was not supposed to talk, shout or make mischief; instead control, warn and tell on other kids who did that. He realized that it was not an exciting role. But since it was supposed to be a privilege to be a TA, he continued without expressing his displeasure. That day he just controlled the class half-heartedly sitting in his place. The teacher sensed his low enthusiasm and told him that if he did not do his job right, she would change the TA for the week. It was the beginning of his bad day. I asked him that if he did not like the TA role, then how does it matter if he was not the TA. But then he explained that if the teacher replaces him as TA, then it is supposedly a “punishment” ; although in his mind it was a “reward”! Wow! What a clarity of thought for an 8 year old child! Well, then I told him that it was one incident that happened in the morning and so why he was so upset now. He continued that it was just the beginning. As the day progressed, one of his classmate with whom he shared a love-hate relationship started his usual bully tactics. This classmate of his (let me call him John as I don’t want to mention the real name) started recruiting his bodyguards today. John is an interesting child – he is very polite when he talks to elders, parents and teachers. But he is a bully when it comes to his classmates. He is a natural leader – he knows when to plead and beg and when to bully and threaten. So John self appointed himself as the leader, recruited his own bodyguards and was ready to put down anyone who was not in his team. My little son did not want to be his bodyguard; he wanted to have his own team but unfortunately, most of the class kids were already recruited by John. Another cause for a bad day. I totally sympatheized with him and wanted to help him. But there are certain things that the kids need to figure out themselves. They need to figure out when to “accept” and when to “fight”.

I asked him whether it was all or was there something else. Of course, it was not all. The last straw to his bad day was that he got into trouble with the extended care teacher. John and my son go to after school extended care. Irrespective of their differences during the school time, they become great buddies in the extended care when they are put up together with kids from other classes. Both realize that they can have more fun doing mischief together. He and John were spraying some room perfume. They were warned repeatedly. But after a while, the teacher spotted my son spraying the perfume again. He got into trouble – she put down his name to be given to his class teacher the next day to face the consequences for his actions. Apparently, John was the master-mind behind this activity, but unfortunately only my son was caught. So, he asked John to “own up” his fault or else he was going to “tell” on him. John, in his carefree manner told the teacher that he too was spraying the perfume. The teacher instead of punishing him, thanked him for his “honesty” and sent him back. My son just could not take that. Again tears started rolling over cheeks and he started wining “how can the teacher ‘thank’ him and ‘punish’ me for the same action”. John gets praise and I get punishment – that was not fair!

I just could not hold my amusement. I wanted to say “my dear, so is life”!. But looking at the situation, I wanted to be sensitive; actually, I wanted to be cautious as I was very well aware that anytime his anger and frustration could turn around and I could become the target. I first sympathized with him, explained to him that such things happen; consoled him and promised him that we would find a better school next year that has better students and un-biased teachers. He was not convinced but was satisfied for the moment.

No One Killed Jessica

I just returned from the movie theater after watching the movie “No One Killed Jessica”. A well taken movie with a good plot. Great acting and fast paced. The story started with a serious scene – a murder! The first half of the movie was heavy – it had a serious tone. In the second half, the plot thickened but the movie suddenly changed tone. It became lighter and at the same time did not loose focus.

The son of a politician kills Jessica in a Delhi pub. There are strong evidence and a number of eye-witness. There is no real case. The killer is evident, the procedure seems simple, the justice seems inevitable. Jessica’s sister Sabrina, a determined girl, takes it upon her to make the killer pay for his action. She is strong, determined and a fighter. She supports her parents, talks with the witness and fights the case not for days or months but for years. Finally, the verdict is declared – the killer is declared “not guilty”. The murderer is let scot free. The killer just gets away with the murder. How? The father uses his money and political clout to break the evidence, one by one, all of them.

Intermission! Indian movies always stop suddenly in the middle when the plot really thickens up. A forced moment for the viewers to take a break, go to restroom and buy more soda. Sometimes, these intermissions are blessing in disguise – gives a chance to escape from the rest of the movie if it is a bad one.

The movie continues. Sabrina, looses hope. Her faith is crushed. She gives up, accepts life with all the injustice and continues life. However, Meera, a journalist in NDTV reads the court verdict and boils with rage. She uses her wit and media to fight the case. She stirs up the public opinion, starts up a movement that finally forces the powerful and influential ones in the society to buckle down to justice.

This story was based on a real story, I believe. The movie did make an impact on me.

We read all the time in the news about murders and trials. Somebody killed somebody. We never find out if the killer got punished. We never really think what if the murderer was let free? How are the victims family fighting the case ? It is just a headline for us. Jessica could be anyone of us and so could be Sabrina. What did Sabrina lack? She was brave and determined. She was focused and did what she could do in her power to bring her sister’s murderer to justice. She failed. She gave up. She lost hope. She accepted defeat. We all do that. Many a times we see system broken and injustice around us. We fight and if we fail, we give up. We become Sabrina.

It is sad but true that most of the times we need a Meera to fight for us. Meera is an aggressive, smart and influential journalist. She was clever and knew the name of the game. She took over the case. Media was her tool. Public opinion was her power. She stirred up the case, uncovered the broken evidence and produced them in front of the public and opened up the phone lines to hear the voice of common man. The case got reopened in high court. Murderer got punished and Jessica got justice.

Sabrina got Meera to fight her case. Do we wait for a Meera to come and fight our cases? How long do we wait? Well, what did Meera do? Her success was in changing a mere “murder case” into a public movement. This is the message behind the story! In order to get success in anything that involves people and society, it is required to start a movement. Involve common man into the cause. Include more people to fight for the case or cause. Build up the case till, a tipping point happens. Things then start turning around. The case moves by itself and victory seems much in horizon.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

A new beginning – a new start – a new set of resolutions – another fresh chance to set life in order! It is a special day if you want it to be; else it is just another day!

A New Year gives a chance to think about how we spent the last year; good times, bad times, happy moments, big achievements, friends made, friends lost, books read, music enjoyed, art experienced, thoughts emerged and spirituality expanded! The holiday season prior to New Years gives us some time to ponder about these things and do some introspection! It gives us a chance to look at our everyday lifestyle and see ways to improve it. Habits that gave happiness and success needs to be continued to the next year; habits leading to misery, waste of time and energy needs to be weeded off. A New Year Resolution is a vehicle to start off this process. Making a New Year resolution is a ritual – it gives us another chance to declare our goals for the year and our plan to achieve them; a chance to make new habits, connect back with old friends and adopt ways to live a happy and prosperous life.

Do I have New Years Resolutions? Of course I have. Not just one but a list of resolutions – some public and rest personal. It is more than a ritual to me – it is time to look into my life, accept faults in my existing life style, identify ways to improve it and adopt changes to make it better.

One Thought at a Time

The beginning of the digital world started with a simple concept – ability to break down an analog signal to digital form. A wave can be encoded into digital form (with 1s and 0s) at one end and can be decoded at the other end to get back the original wave form. Understanding this simple technique opened up our minds for innovations in the field of science and technology.

Our thought process is like a wave form. Just like a wave form can be broken down to digital data, the thought process can be broken down into individual thoughts. It is scientifically proved by tracking brain activity using sensors and other devices, that at any given point of time there is only a single thought that occupies our mind. Just like we need the series of digitized bits (i.e. 101010) to recreate the wave form, we need the series of related individual thoughts to construct a meaningful thought or idea. Our individual thoughts manifest themselves in our speeches, our writings and in our day to day activities. The evolution of human race hinges on the fact that we can think unlike so many other species. Medical advances has helped us understand the function of brain but still we are far from understanding how the thoughts originate, how they progress and how we can control them. Just like our understanding of the digital world opened up our mind for new inventions and discoveries, our understanding of human thought process will open up the possibility of improving, controlling and handling what we think and how we think, which in turn will change the future of human race.

We all aim to have a happy life. Worry and tension prevents us from having a good life. We often experience that we worry about matters that are beyond our control and our sphere of influence; worry can cause sleepless nights and unexplained headaches, but still we are not able to control the thoughts that causes the worry. Our worries are mostly due to those individual pessimistic thoughts of things going bad in our life, thoughts about losing things that we possess or thoughts about not able to get things that we aim for. All in all, thoughts that are destructive to our happy life. If only we have the power of digitizing these thoughts, power to replace the bad thoughts with good ones (just like they do error correction in the digital world), we probably can control how we think and hence how we lead our life. If only we can program our mind with an algorithm to replace a single or group of bad thoughts with good ones (something like using a regex pattern match filter), we can shape our life with out thoughts. It will be a world where our ambition will govern our thoughts and vice versa. We can think, plan and control what we are going to think in future; improve this process continuously till we get what we want and continue to aspire for more and think towards it. Maybe this will bring us close to a robot – an ability to control our actions with our thoughts. Well, if such a thing becomes a possibility, we will also require the advancement of security technology wherein only one can program his or her own thoughts and not others. There would be a need to prevent others doing selective thinking for us. There would be a strong need to protect our Right to Think!

Medically controlling our thoughts seems like Science Fiction. Don’t know if science can take us that far in near future. For now, we can only try manually to control our individual thoughts. Manually replace any bad thought that catches our attention in our thought continum with a good one. Remove the cause of worry by removing the thought that is the root cause for that. Slowly but surely, developing the ability to control our thoughts will definitely give us the ability to live a happy life!

Thinking aloud

Everyday we are presented with various situations that we hear about or live through. We analyze these situations, think about various options, make choices and live those choices. It is interesting to see how people think through these situations. There are some who like to talk about it, discuss it, analyze it with a friend or family member and make choices based on inputs they get from them. There are others who like to think and analyze it alone and come up with options, and then, validate these options with their close ones. The first kind need company to think through the situation, they need to verbalize their thoughts, they need a vocal discussion to feed in to their thought process. On the other hand, the other kind need some private time, some silence and alone time to dissect the situation, process their thoughts, ponder over the options before they open up and discuss it with others. Just a different personality.

I was having a conversation with my husband – we were talking about this couple where the husband and wife think aloud. They think in each other’s company. They are constantly talking either in person or over the phone whenever they are processing or analyzing a situation. They verbalize as they think and are in synch with each other about the situation in hand. If they have a difference of opinion, they are aware of each others point of view. They don’t have their perspective about anything – it is shared information, shared experience, shared data and shared analysis. They don’t have a personal thought-space. It sounded wow! What a perfect husband-wife relationship! How romantic! Well, my husband was perturbed by this fact – he found it a drab! According to him, they can not sustain this relationship without getting utterly bored with each other. After 10 years, they will just know everything about every situation that they faced in life and they won’t have their side of the story. It becomes a single story.

As we talked more about it, I realized that maybe it is not such a great idea to think aloud. We need our own space. We need to give ourselves the time an space to ponder about things. We need to give ourselves a chance to think freely without any reservations. We need to give ourselves a chance to revert our thoughts before we externalize it. Actually, it is not such a good idea to verbalize the thought as and when they come to our mind. Thinking and analyzing is a complex process – the human vocabulary is not adept to express this process in its complete form. It is very restrictive if we tie up the thinking to talking. Thoughts can fly from one topic to another and lead us from real world to imaginary world. On the other hand, speech needs a flow, a connection, a relation between the words. If we try to talk as we think, then firstly, we are going to slow down the thinking process and secondly, we are going to restrict ourselves going berserk with our imaginations.

Yes, I am convinced, we do need some thinking-space!

Imitation precedes creation

One day, my 8 year old son came and showed me a cartoon that he drew. I was impressed at the budding cartoonist. I asked him how he got this idea and he said that he copied from his favorite book. Um.. , I was disappointed but did not show it. Why? Because it was not his original work. It was imitation. I was expecting original work from my kid! Nothing wrong in my expectation but nothing wrong in imitation too. After all, he drew it – the proportion, the shading and everything that was black on that paper.

Recently, I was reading a book “On Wrting” by Stephen King. Interesting memoir. He wrote about his childhood days when he used to painfully copy the stories and show to his mom! He explained the act by saying “Imitation precedes Creation”. This hit a cord and started me thinking on this subject.

As a child, I used to draw and paint well – but always an imitation, always by looking at another painting! As I grew old, I did not feel that it is an artwork, rather it was a copy work and stopped it. Did not nurture it further to change it from copy work to art work. It does not happen in one day. I now realize that if I had stayed in that path, then over a period of time, I would have become an artist! A real one! But I never gave myself that opportunity. I expected creativity out of me when I was ready. Creativity takes time and effort. It does not happen in one day. Till then you have to be satisfied with imitation. You have to be happy that you are doing a good job of imitating; thriving to be better and better at imitating the great works of others. You have to be happy when you take the baby step of making few modifications while copying to give a personal touch. This eventually develops into more personal touch and finally to a original piece of work. I missed that opportunity. It is sad. The sadder part is that I am repeating the same mistake. My son did not come to show me his next art work for long long time. He probably read my expression and felt that it is not his cup of tea to come up with creativity and so he is not going to try that at all. Thanks to Stephen King, I am going to set this right now.

Creativity comes from within! Yes, I agree. But only after you have enough substance built within you. An artist doesn’t become an artist from the first day. He works through numerous throw a away art before he makes the first good piece. He probably starts with scribbling art work in the corners of his school notebooks and slowly develops into a good one. Ideas come only if you feed yourself with enough material. A writer probably has numerous unpublished stories before he becomes a best seller novelist. How do we start anyways? Most of them start with copying at some level. May it be art work copied while you were kid or a story written based on your book report when you were a kid. We all imitate good work because we thrive to get there. Our inner wish is to write as good as them but we can not and so we try copying. Looking at copying with a scorn is probably not the right thing. I think it is a good idea to start with imitating, improvise the copied version and slowly progress to the creativity level. Look at education. A physicist doesn’t become one just after reading basic physics. He spends years understanding Newton’s laws before he progresses to Einstein’s relativity theory and then string theory. He goes through the process of understanding all his precedors work, and then builds upon that. Why do we scorn when the same thing happens in art or writing! We need to change the way we think about imitation. If we imitate enough, we will reach a point when we think that “I can do better than this” and from there embark on the journey of creativity.

Moments

Moments come and go. Life is sum total of these passing moments. Most of the times, I don’t even realize these moments. It just comes and goes and becomes a moment of past. If only I know the passage of these moments, I will know my life, how I spend it, how I shape it and how it shapes me. But unfortunately, I breathe, see, hear and live each day, each hour and each moment without really being alive! I am like those automated machine doing things as programmed. Get up in the morning and brush teeth, take bath and do morning chores to get ready for the day, drive to work, work till evening, rush back home, do the evening chores and get to bed. How many times do I really notice the morning fog slowly lifting from the mountains while driving to work? How many times do I notice the cars parked in the parking lot or the smell of the freshly cut grass in the lawn in front of the office. Rarely! All those moments that I don’t notice slipping away are moments wasted. I remember nothing about those moments.

Being alive is more than just breathing fresh air and doing chores. It is about realizing the passage of moment, feeling it, absorbing it and living it completely. It seems like a simple task but believe me, if only I can do it fifty precent of times, I would be more than happy. If there is one thing that I want to work on – it is to appreciate my life’s precious moments.

I want to acknowledge each moment, appreciate it, experience it, remember it and live it!

Expectations

Uncertainty and Expectations are continuos joys of life! We live every moment expecting something from the people surrounding us. It could be as small as a glass of water, as abstract as love and compassion or just as simple as courtesy and politeness. But certainly we do expect something, small or big, tangible or abstract from our spouses, kids, parents, siblings, friends, colleagues, grocery-story-guy and in fact from anyone and everyone we meet in our daily life.

Expectation varies from time to time, situation to situation and from person to person. I may expect my spouse to greet me with a warm cup of coffee and a loving hug when I am suffering from migraine whereas I may just expect a caring concern and a friendly advice to visit a doctor, from my neighbor across the street. Surprisingly, if I get the reverse, I get disappointed, maybe even angry at the fact that my neighbor is more caring than my spouse! How can my spouse not know that the only thing that I really need now is a tylonol, warm cup of coffee and some peace and quite time and not a doctor or advice to visit a doctor!

Our life shapes on how we manage our expectations. If we expect less from people, we are happy. But then how can we not expect – we are humans! If we allow the car in front of us to merge into our lane in a traffic jam, we expect a thank you wave, even though we don’t know the person driving the car. We humans have a built-in algorithm of mapping our actions to expectations. As soon as we do something for someone, the algorithm kicks in and adds an expectation star against the person. More you do something for someone, more you automatically start expecting from the person. What you expect may vary based on the person, personality and relationship but definitely an entry gets added in the expectation book!

Disappointment and anger comes from frustrated expectations. One of the key factors of success and happiness is to learn to expect the right things from the right people at the right time. If you don’t have any expectation from anyone, then indeed you are an evolved soul! As Stephen Hawking put it “When ones expectations are reduced to zero, then one really appreciates what one does have”. You start looking at life beyond actions and expectations and embrace what comes your way however unknown it is.

That said, I would say that it is impossible to live without expectations! You have to expect certain behavior from anyone and anything, may it be a dog, a cat or a human. Yes, you can have a reasonable expectation from a fellow human being. The question is how does it effect you when your expectations are not met? Does it make you sad? How much? In what way? If you can manage your expectations so that it does not disappoint you, make you sad, give you misery then definitely you have found a way to lead a happy life! Always remember that the best things in life are unexpected – because there were no expectations!

Why do I need to write?

I started reading the book on writing by Nathalia GoldBerg called “Writing Down The Bones”. She writes about writing from your heart, write what comes to your mind, totally raw, unpolished, the way you think, the way you perceive the world. Writing makes you write more. It is a habit that grows on you and you start enjoying it especially when you write from heart. I totally agree with her. So I have decided to write more often about anything and everything.

Why do I want to write? What is the big deal in putting thoughts into words? Why do I want to express in the writing form? Well, here is the answer that I gave to myself. I have got an opinion about everything, I have this strong urge to express my view, opinion, advice and suggestion about anything and everything. It could be a view on anything, starting from how to raise a kid to how to run the country. I don’t think anyone needs to hear my opinion or view. I just want to think about it and express it. Writing is a good form of expression. I can speak out my mind and give myself a complete chance to explore a particular topic to the depth that I desire to go. It is an outlet that gives a great pleasure, invokes the creativity part in it. It gives me a chance to look at my thoughts after a while and evaluate my values and ideas.

Thanks Nathalia for inspiring me to write.

Value of career, people and time.

We all think we know the value of things that we possess, may it be worldly possessions, riches or abstract things like time, relationship etc. Yes, of course we know what we have and how valuable they are. But the fact is that we realize the real worth of the things only after we loose it.

I am a software engineer, have been working for dog days and I love my job. I always considered myself as a career person and thought that I knew exactly what career meant to me. But wrong, I actually did not know the real value of it. I valued it for the wrong reasons – I wanted a job because I thought I can not be at home without one. I did not value my “software profession” and did not think that I was really excited by it. I thought that I don’t care for the money I make because I didn’t even know what I was making. All these so called facts became a myth once I lost my job. I got a chance to evaluate the values that I attached to my profession, my commitment, my involvement, my passion.. in essence my real reason for working.Once I lost my job, I got a chance to spend time at home and do whatever I wanted to do. I did not get crazy. It was opposite of that. I had more things to do at any given point of time. I got a chance to explore and experiment and I loved it. So my fear that I will go crazy being out of work proved to be a myth. However, I missed not doing the stuff that I used to do when I was working, missed meeting the people and have technical discussions, missed reading badly written code and twisted logics. I missed the day to day activities that I used to complain of. I missed rushing out of home in the morning, sipping coffee while driving to work, missed listening to NPR’s morning edition. I tried to adopt some other career – but no, I couldn’t – I was attached to “software profession” . I felt real pain leaving it and doing something else for a living. It was okay to do anything else as a hobby but not as a career. I could not let go the money that I make in my software engineering profession. I valued the money I make more than I thought I did. Yes, it is a profession dominated by guys, boring and monotonous at times and is restricted to 8×8 space. But still, I liked it. I wanted it. This I found only after I lost it. In some sense, loosing my job made me realize the real importance of my job. I thought if I stay home, I can give quality as well as quantity time to my kid. I can be a parent and a teacher. But no, when I lost my job, I became more irritable, my quantity of time increased but quality definitely took a dip. I kinda knew about this but did not know the degree of it. That I found only when I lost my job.

On a different note, I lost a friendship. I got hurt by one of my good friends. I used to talk to her everyday for hours together about anything and everything. I valued her friendship and thought I can not loose it on any cost. But then, one fine day for no big real reason, I lost it. I was hurt, really hurt but then I slowly got over it. I stopped talking to her. I missed it initially but with time, missed her lesser and lesser. Now I am revaluating the years of friendship that I had with her. It was total waste of time. I had put more value onto that relationship than it deserved to have. Loosing the relationship made me realize this fact. Now I am now evaluating the real value of all my relationships in life.

“Time” is another thing I took it for granted till I realized that I don’t have much of it left. When I was young, just like all kids, I took time for granted – postponed doing so many things. I did not value the passage of time. Did not stop and think about the moment and how I was spending it. Soon, days went of.. years went off. .and now I find myself old . .. old to realize that the time to do so many things are gone. I realize that I wasted so much time doing things that are worthless, things that did not give me pleasures, time wasted in complaining and crying, time wasted in living in grief, time wasted in fear and worry. Time gone is gone for ever. Now, I am teaching myself to value time. Value each moment as it passes because once it is gone it will never come back. It will be a different moment! A different valuable moment to treasure!