Perspective

With all the busy-ness of life, when the occasional lull creates clouds of doubt, tales like this give perspective.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/02/world_press_photo_winners.html

What could have been

We didn't get a chance,
not because I didn't wish for it.
It was just that
there was a lot at stake.
Hopes too few,
and conflicts too many.
And opportunities too inappropriate.

And soon it was too late...

But I hope that
you'll agree
We've got something beautiful.
Something to cherish,
which I do; and hope
that you will too.

Resenting success

Have you ever resented your successes? Those successes that came naturally to you; those that you got by virtue of being who you are. Ever felt that they came at the expense of others which you miss; which you wish were yours?

Why do people lie

1. they don't trust you with the information - that you will give out the information to someone whom they don't want to know
2. they don't trust you with the information - that you will misuse it in some way
3. they are not sure if you are telling the truth, so they play safe not to get on the wrong side of the information transaction
4. they trust you, but they do not want to tell you because they think it somehow puts them in bad light
5. they trust you, but they think the information is irrelevant to you and do not want to say no
6. they are plain mean and want to get the info from you without divulging their cards

Anybody wants to add to the list?

a fleeting image

you so desperately want it to be true, for that image to be a part of your life..and you know you are not asking for more, cause it was already there, in some form.
but since it was there, you know it could only lead to destruction, to a void which you could not fill with all your efforts. and now that it is not there, the void is back, a different one, but still there.
what can you do to get rid of it? the void i mean, cause the image, that you are stuck with. one of the harsh catch-22s of my life

Scared

I am scared and confused; and as has been the trend over the past few months, meloncholy due to the restlessness, due to the feeling of purposelessness.
Reasons are many, nevertheless, I think I have become prone to complaining, and brooding a lot of over perhaps not so important things. And becoming less self-dependent, trusting too much, not taking decisions myself.
And hence the scary feeling, of the feeling of being stupid, being the average joe. This is not who I am, and this is not who I will be. I will bounce back. Not sure how...sigh; but will find a way. Have to, there is no alternative.

Greatness

the problem with greatness is, people tend to associate it with a very few qualities, a few events and anecdotes. No one who has been termed great, ever in the history of humankind, was/is made up of just those few character traits and events. S/he is a complete humain being. The rest need to separate out the heroism from the totality, in order to satisfy their need to look up to something ; something which they strive to become. these are tales, of ordinary people, or may be slightly extraordinary people, converting them into super extraordinary heroes; tales created and spread wide in order to fulfil different objectives at different times. i remember watching a movie, i think it was braveheart, where a common man comes up to the lead character and asks him - i thought you were a gigantic 8 foot tall big muscle guys; but u are just like us; so where did this tale come from , people telling each other about some mythical human who could slaughter enemies like some ancient god-hero. these tales originated because the people needed to believe that someone existed amongst them who could indeed slaughter enemies, so that they, in turn, could garner the courage to stand up against tyranny. thus began the story of a hero. of course a person who has the capacity to be called a hero is also required; but its the need of the hour that creates a hero out of him/her.

confusion

questions of existence
survival vs living
rationality vs idealism vs ground truths
floating aimlessly vs rowing to the island just beyond the horizon
where's the horizon? when? how?
the purpose of it all ; meaning
so many questions; or may be just one, many forms
someone truly said - ignorance is bliss
but what do u do -
the curse of knowledge - of half knowledge -
is already upon u
try to find light in the darkness
without really needing anything,
cause u already have infra red
so wat with that quest of light?
may be just need a direction;
or it already is there..just the knowledge of it...

Liberating

Those who know my daily routine would be aware that I often come back from office after at least 9 in the night; if I am lucky I am back at 8. Today, there was a day of exception. For the first time, in the past 7-8 months I have been working at my current job, I left office at 1815 hrs.
The feeling was so different - kind of liberating.
It was so good to see sun light in the evening; to see people moving around - doing their kitchen shopping at the roadside vegetable market, waiting at bus stops in numbers to get a bus back to home, coming out of offices with their lunch boxes; to see a tempo driver trying to tie a canvas cover-all over his tempo; to get stuck at one of the many traffic signals; to have so much of activity around; to feel life going on; to feel liberated.

tere ishq ki ek boond

तेरे इश्क की एक बूँद
इसमें मिल गई थी
इसलिए मैंने उम्र की
सारी कड़वाहट पी डाली
-- अमृता प्रीतम

found at a comment from rk in http://desitrain।com/2008/03/03/will-you-marry-me/


for those whose screen can't show hindi fonts
tere ishq ki ek boond
ismein mil gayi thi
isliye maine umra ki
saari kadwahat pi daali

A smile is always beautiful

Was just talking with a friend and the discussion turned to smiles; how they are beautiful or how people have to try to get a good smile.
I feel a smile is all about feeling good; if you are feeling good and you have a smile on your face - that's what a beautiful smile is all about.

A few weeks ago I was coming back from somewhere and saw a kid, around 10 years old, hanging out his head from the back window of a car. His face looked a combination of sadness, curiosity and boredom. And something made me wave at him; and he waved back with a big smile; and that made me smile. Not as big as his; but it was a smile; and it made me feel good. From my understanding of the world, and for my sake, that is a beautiful smile.

As I told my friend, "a smile is in itself, by definition, amongst the best beautiful things in the world".

So my friends, if you find that you have not genuinely smiled lately, do all of us a favour and look around you, I am pretty sure you will find something which will make you feel good and make you smile.

Sleepless

Lying in the bed, light years away from sleep, what is the one thing you desire, one small thing, that would make the past day so much better, that will expel the insomnia out of you...or maybe make you even more sleepless? What is that one small thing that you are looking for?

life

Just a random thought after reading about Darfur, Rwandaand genocide in general and remembering Rajshekhar Purandare's Haiku

life
you are so fragile
running after don't know what
ending in a jiffy, by death
never ending, in pain

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hope

this one is my creation again and i am putting here courtesy of Amit Sinha



the difference between humans and other animals is that we have the concept of hope; we realise it when it is there and it makes us do things which are otherwise impossible

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a discussion about wishes, utopia and karma

this is an excerpt from a chat i had with a friend of mine; i don't know how to put it more presentably, so just copied and pasted from my gmail chats section. And of course, I took permission from Neeraj before posting this.













me: waise agar free hai to mera abhi wala status message pad aur comments



My status message at that time was:

heart: why do wishes rarely come true?

mind: because most of the times they are stupid.

heart: but they are wishes, they have all the rights to be stupid.

Neeraj: okies

kyun deewana ho jata hai koi?

kyun armaan uthte hain kahin?

maalum nahin,

yeh dil aakhir chahta kya hai?

me: hehe

achhe poet ho tum bhi

Neeraj: nahin nahin

yeh shayari gadar the movie mein thi

me: koi is sawaal ka jawaab de de to jindagi bhar gulami karein

Neeraj: :)

hahaha

well wishes have every right to be stupid

me: yup, u r correct

see this is the good thing about u

Neeraj: but not every stupidity has the right to be fulfilled

or else, where would intelligence go??

down the memory lane

:P

me: yea thats correct, but why the hell do we need intelligence

to devise ways to fulfill our wishes only, right?

Neeraj: no dude

world is not only about wishes

intelligence has to be thr to maintain a balance

imagine if the world was filled with stupidity

also its difficult to imagine a world, if everyone was intelligent

me: i am not saying stupidity

i am just saying what about a world where everyone's all wishes were fulfilled, irrespective of their stupidity or brilliance

but then again my mind says: there is no such thing as utopia

Neeraj: wouldn't that be boring??

a world full of satisfaction

no motive or reason to keep going

me: so u dont want it to be boring, that would be just another wish, it will also be fulfilled

Neeraj: it already is fulfilled

me: tahts the problem with utopia

it keeps contradicting itself

Neeraj: i dont say, none of my wishes be fulilled

me: thats why it doesnt exist

Neeraj: i am saying, some of them shud and some shud not

me: why wish if u dont want it to be fulfilled

?

Neeraj: utopia is a foolish design of a pervert mind

i want it to be fulfilled

the best part is the ignorance about these things

we want 100 things, and out of these only 10 are to be fulfilled

me: utopia is an utopian creation of a high (by use of drugs) mind

Neeraj: but the best part is, we dont know which 10

me: what if i just want ten things

Neeraj: so, we work towards fulfillment of all

me: or maybe just a couple of things

Neeraj: then only 1 will be fulfilled, if 10% rule exists

me: why cant we get them

why has this nature to be so cruel

Neeraj: nature is not cruel

just because ur mom adds pepper to ur food doesn't make her cruel

me: then why are we not intelligent enough to think of some 9 wishes which we dont want to be fulfiled

Neeraj: its the balance netween spices of life that makes it interesting

me: and tht brings us back to the question why wish a wish u dont want ot be fulfilled

Neeraj: i want all my wishes to be fulfilled

and i wud work towards them

me: why do we want interesting? why dont we want satisfying

Neeraj: but the result is not in my hands

me: mayp be that is why we are humans and not dolphins

Neeraj: coz a satisfied soul doesnot exist

me: chal bahut bore kar liya tere ko

Neeraj: maybe

me: tu jaa , pad le

Neeraj: nahin nahin

me: yea may be

Neeraj: load nahin hai

i can go on this topic for hours

have thought over it a lot

when u have an unfulfilled dream u tend to think over it

me:
i guess the important thing is that u just need an indication that u
are going in the right direction, even in the knowledge that u wont
ever reach the destination (that is complete satisfaction) or may be
that the destination doesnt even exist, even in that knowledge, the
belief that u are moving towards the right direction, the belief that
hope exists ...may be that is what is important

Neeraj: karmanye vaadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachanah

this is one shloka that has been mis-interpreted many times

or mis-understood

me:
but then what do u do when u dont know what ur karma is...u have some
ethics , beliefs which tell u dont do that...and some desires which
tell u do that, and those desires are not against ur ethics
either...its just conflict of ur basic nature, u pitted against urself,
and u cannot even isolate the jekyll and the hyde, they are one...what
do u do then

Neeraj: thats the problem, i know there can be confusion sometimes but confrontation seldom occurs

being a jekyll and a hyde is seldom in our control

so i think we should do what our karma asks us to do when u are in whichever form

me: then atleast why dont we turn into one ...just delete the other part

it wont be painful then

Neeraj: but thats not in our hand

we created them

me: yea, but if both forms are together, how do u know what ur karma is

Neeraj: but destruction lies somewhere else

every moment we are supposed to take a decision

and this decision depends on the circustances faced by a person

me:
saala i feel helpless when i realise that we can go on discussing this
and even then, in all probability, i wont ever reach a conclusion

the only solace lies in the fact that time heals









have u ever faced such a time? or have views on this? if u hv ever thought in this direction, ur comments are more than welcome

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proof of God

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC



source:http://www.rense.com/general69/vonnegutsblues.htm

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A Parent's Worst Nightmare

Thats the first page of Reader's Digest India March issue. The article at page 56 "A Parent's Worst Nightmare" is a must read. The caption below the title made me read it as soon as i saw it. I wont tell the complete story here; one needs to read it firsthand to understand what a real nightmare this couple went through. In short, this couple's baby was taken away from them because the authorities thought the father was abusing her; without listening to their side of the story completely and without doing necessary tests. The baby is put in foster care where her health deteriorates considerably. Thankfully, in the end she is restored to her parents.

I kept thinking about this after reading. The US has supposedly a very good foster care / support system for children who don't have families or are better off away from their families. But this story shows a very ugly side of it.

I agree, no doubts, that a child must be removed from his family if its dangerous for him there; but the question is who determines it and how. Thinking in the Indian context; it is still very far fetched that there will be a law and a system in place for this. The proposed "paalna" system by the union government might be a first step towards that; but it itself is ages from being enacted and put in practice.

Nevertheless, I still have belief in the Indian family and social values that they are strong enough to prevent such a nightmare.

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Quantification of sadness

We all have bad times; some simple enough, with negligible magnitude and very small timespan - they just pass by; some significant enough to make us think and act; and some are those which force us - to think why?
Us humans, specially the breed called IITians, have a tendency to analyze everything logically. So, when faced with a difficult situation, we generally think of the reasons behind it and ways to cope with the situation. But sometimes the situation is such that it defies any normal logical thinking and then the only resort (again logic determines that it is the only remaining viable option; ironic, isn't it) is to ask why?
Like Joey said, "Why God, Why me?".
And then the left half of the mind takes over from the right, suppressing the pain in the way, and thinks whether pain is quantifiable? Whether a physically greater loss or more difficult problem would have caused more pain (and by pain I mean the emotional one, the one which is in our brain; or our hearts, to say more romantically) ; and then it thinks how could you measure that pain? After all, you have already resigned yourself to it; just asking questions; knocking on God's doors to pray; can there be more helplessness?
sadly, after a lot of deliberation, you reach just one conclusion, and as always a logical one, that you can not gauge this unless you face such a situation.

And they said that we were an intelligent lot...

Steve Jobs at Stanford

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Thats what i am doing, looking for what i love to do. Thanks to this speech, i now understand that its not easy to find it; but keep looking , u will get it.
And the death concept is awesome, got to try it.

Also what i have realised in past few days is that even if i am not doing the thing i like, i should keep doing it for some time, at least. Only then will i know if i really like it or not.I guess thats what he means by keep looking.