It IS...

it is tough to,

be a beginner with humility,
zip your mouth forcibly,


it is a pain when,

past haunts current appraisals,
emotion overpowers rationality,irrationally (!),


it is injustice to,

be a man of double nature,
generalise an event to a life,


it takes courage to,

own responsibility during failure,
say 'No' when need be,
let others develop through you,
stand up for yourself,


it is wise to,

be your own Master,
persuade /justify to only one's own Conscience...
(nothing less, nothing more!)


it is human to,

respect a fellow being for one's own sake,
err, learn and apply in future.

I have answers!

For all the pointing fingers,
for all the blames,
for all the regrets,
for all the hard work,

for all the loss,
for all the sacrifice,
for all the pain,
for all the indifference,

sooner or later,
i will present the answers!
(not to be read as "PROUD")

I will present 'em,
'cause,
in me,
I trust!

Reflections during Vacation 2010!

1. My mood does not change, unless I want it to change.
2. Nothing can get worse, until 'I' expect the worst!
3. Every problem does have solution(s). Various factors affect the type of solution I derive for that problem: my mood, what and how I expect the problem to be resolved, to a certain extent, my wit as well! What I mean is, everyone does find a solution! How applicable is my solution to my situation, I need wit to resolve that! (I use wit to imply intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, and all such words!)
4. At 25, I can still be wondering, what the heck I want out of my life?!
5. When I really want to do a task, I will do it! When I don't want to do a task, no matter how many ever opportunities are given to me for its completion, I will not do it! (Well, I want to emphasize the latter point!!)
6. When I write 'my' reflection, I should use 'I' instead of 'you/your'. (Yes!, I changed all you/your to I/my, from 1 to 5 after I wrote 6!!!)
7. If I don't want to take responsibility, I will not. This is different from 5 because, this is at the cognitive/affective domain level while doing is at the behavioural level.
8. I should take a break, when I feel like. Culmination of the want to take a break, sticks me out and it takes almost half the break-time to stick out that stickiness!
9. Conveying my love to my far-off love is lovely! But, at times, loving and not conveying all of it is bliss! (ooh! A tough one for the first person language! ;) )
10. Becoming friends with a 1.5 yr old is awesome! :D And, the 1.5 yr old can teach you to love, like none! (This is no stats! Just that I am friends with my nephew who is 1.5 yrs old!)
11. Using shorter sentences conveys sweet messages. (I wrote all of them, over and over, again and again to be shorter!!!!)
12. After a point, writing in brief, becomes a habit!
13. Plan the vacation well-ahead for a well-spent vacation. Else, have common sense to follow time's stride and make it favourable for the self!
14. Set the automatic vacation responder! Prevents guilt of indifference-to-emails. Note: Write/Articulate the response so that the receiver understands the reason for it to be on!


Will continue, if any!

PS: Proof reading is a must before publishing (does that tell how updated this reflection note is?!)

The People Pleaser!

How difficult it is to please everyone! At many a time I thought I should try to be ‘nice’ to people around me. I try to do stuff so that I ‘look’ nice to them. However, not many times I am able to do it.

When I break away from my ‘looks’ I get dirty looks back! :( That is fine!

I have grown now to think a lot of about my life and my future plans. Accommodating all pals around is simply becoming impossible. At times it breaks their heart. But I am just not able to help it. I try not to cause it. It happened twice in a row, now. But yeah! I am in a phase where I should set my priorities right!

I also realise that if someone cannot understand the position I am in, and expect only me to be accommodative, it is really not gonna work!

From being a people pleaser, now I have started to stand up for my own needs. I speak that most difficult word, ‘No!’. I say no just because I am seriously not able to. It feels good, when I am able to say a No when I want to!

Stopped being a people pleaser. Lets check out how many people are pleased with this ME! :)

Outdoorsy...Me? Nah..!

This is what I found out in the recent trip I had! I went out for a one day trip with my colleagues. We visited Gaganachukki-Barachukki falls and Thalakkad! Though I was so hyped about the whole trip, towards the end of the day, I just said, Oh! God, when will I return home?!

I don't say the trip was bad. It was really good. Especially the boating that we did at Barachukki was simply awesome! The boat-rider took us as close to the falls as possible! We were enjoying the soft refreshing shower from the waterfall... below us was Cauvery, 70ft deep and four of us, entrusted our lives to the boat-rider!!

It was awesome, in its true sense! Get the glimpse of the falls here... We went to the tip of the waterfall and I captured this image on the way back! I enjoyed every moment of it!

Then we went to Thalakkad.. to explore Alamelamma's curse! I was fully prepared for the trip. I searched the whole of internet and learnt the story of Curse of Thalakkad. However exciting and masal(a)enious the story was, I could not really believe such thing. The skeptic inside me posed a question as to how this could happen and what is the science behind this? The question was kind of answered when I read this post on the internet. In this sense, you could see how well-prepared I was for the trip! Apparently, I missed out to learn that my fellow members were not as informed as I was!

Whatever I had learnt, I kept to myself and I expedited to uncover more tales and to see how much of what I read from various posts and the quoted article is true! While my colleagues were busy enjoying the nature's beauty and bathing forever(!), I was waiting, waiting and waiting to see the temples. My long wait came to an end when we visited the first temple.


While the local person has told us that we could cover 7 temples in the forest on foot, we were really running out of time! So we decided that we will see one temple and get back! So we went to this temple and came back. Many had said that the sand uncovers itself once a year for the pilgrims and pooja happens! Only later I discovered that people are in constant effort to dig the sand out of the temples. This is one such group who kept the temple premises free of sand!



I learnt that the temples have been built at a very low level and Cauvery while growing fatter, throws the sand onto the Thalakkad region. The wind plays its role to take the sand towards the living area and hence the whole of Thalakkad is filled with sand and sand and sand!

Ok! I had no intention to explain you people the (hi)story of Thalakkad.. But I hope you didn't mind reading it!

So, coming to the point, apart from the sadness of not visiting the other temples, I learnt that I am actually not an outdoorsy type! I am quite happy with my room, the bed assigned to me and my lappy!

Future trips, I have decided that I would take it provided I have the ONE person I want to roam with and not with a group! No Offense Meant! Just that it has become a revelation to me that I don't enjoy a crowd that much! I like to hang around with the one who is quite like me in many ways, for a shorter duration of time and living every moment of it together!

So I shall po st a happier post about my trip when I get a chance to go around the way I want to ;-)

Bore Bore and bore!

Life has never been so boring…damn boring as it is now. I am just running out of ideas and mind has become so idle. And as you know, an idle mind is devil’s workshop and I hate myself being a workshop for devil.

I have never written any stuff like this before. This is also another proof to the extent I am pissed off with stuff going around and in me!

I really want to do something that is exciting, rejuvenating, path breaking, creative. I am sure I can spice up the current life. But I just have no intention to!

The only thing I wanted to do now was to put these crap up on the blog and fret about it.

Relationships

"Hatred is love without facts. Can our minds be changed if we knew a few facts about the things we hate?"

I want to write about relationships today. How much value does a human being place on this thing called relationship! All of us want to be a part of one thing or the other. The sense of belongingness to a certain group, community and owning something or somebody... these I think are the reasons that we seek relationships.

Strangely for some of us relationship does not necessarily be with human beings... we also tend to make relationships with inanimate things. And we strive very hard to hold onto something and get the feeling of belongingness.

This stage of our life (for people of my age), usually is characterised by the establishment of family-especially the spouse. And not all of us have had good love relationships. It has always been a period of stress, sadness, pain and gloom.

While human beings are empowered to achieve things which never existed, love has been something that is still a mystery! Man finds it too difficult to understand it, possess it, and enjoy it. No matter what, a slip in love life makes a man feel deprived, powerless, incomplete, unhappy and lifeless! While lag in other relationships are made up for through perks, wealth, power or other things, love relationship leaves behind a deep scar which is irreversible, irrevocable, and irreplaceable. While these are the best part of love, they are also the sad part of it. Those who are able to conquer their love feel elated and the others are left with the scar as an accident.

While this has been something I get so upset about-the love failures-I attempt to understand what this love is all about. In a sense this can be extended to the concept of relationships as well. I see that every single thing that you and I do is for utmost selfishness – just and just for my (your) sake. It is just because I want to be happy, I want to be secure, I want to have support, I want to live, I want to be comforted, that I get into love and hence relationships. May be that is the reason ‘I’ get smashed when the person I love dump me! My hope, my dream, my sense of security, my wishes, everything that I have bestowed upon that ONE person, is destroyed in no time just because the ONE did not reciprocate.

Also, how difficult it becomes for each of us to accept the other person unconditionally, just as they are. Though at one level we all seek to belong to someone, there is internal discord which is difficult to set right and does not give the sense of belongingness. Establishing relationship is a challenge but more than that maintaining a relationship becomes yet more difficult.

I have read somewhere about spirituality where the different human forms are perceived as different manifestations of a Single Soul. So there in reality lives just one Being. A naive illustration to explain the point: While ‘I’ represent the exercise of will to experience Love, ‘you’ might represent the exercise of will to attain Success. All ‘forms’, work towards the goal of the Single being. This seems to be a comfortable Philosophy to follow for me: maintaining relationships become much easier when I see you as the manifestation of a different me!

It also gives me the ability to empathise with you. See it from your point of view. Stand in your shoes. Now I am holding onto Spirituality to support me!

Relationships: they define them all! What more to say?!

Love yourself!

It has been really a long time since I posted anything on the blog. Now, I make time to make blogging more regular.

Today's post is a bit interesting and close to my heart!

How happy do I become if I make or attempt to make someone else happy, someone else smile?!

Nothing else pleases me or delights me as much as making someone feel good about themselves. In this sense, I really appreciate my decision of shifting to a discipline where I have got to interact with people!

To further this expedition, towards a logical conclusion, I have decided that I would put all my ramblings about psychology in the blog. I intend to post learnings of psychological concepts in this blog. So any psychologist out there is going to visit my blog, kindly forgive the errors and correct my errands. My attempt is to assimilte my learnings and channelise my future efforts.

Hope I stick to this commitment.

Well to justify the headline of my post, Love yourself! is such a phrase which I love to share with people I know. It is when I started to love myself, that my outlook of the whole world changed.

I have learnt that when I start to love myself, I can easily empathise with anyone else. It is so important due to the following reasons. I know all my fallacies, dark secrets, positives, strengths, weakness, many unsaid, not-demonstrated, aspects of myself. When I develop the ability to love myself, inspite of all these minuses, nothing seems imperfect outside!

Everything looks lovelier, charming, better, in one way or the other. I am sure to find wrongs outside; but I have grown to see beyond those negatives, beyond appearances, more than what is explicit.

I bet it comes after a huge effort! Loving myself has empowered me to empathise with others easily. To get into the shoes of other person and view the situation from their point of view. It becomes much more easier to realise and accept that people are no all-perfect! It helps build relationships, keep them and appreciate them as well!

It helps me connect with other human being. While earlier it needed a lot of effort, the more I grew in touch with myself, the more natural it became to understand the other person.

I forgive myself when I wrong, so forgiving someone else is lot more easier!

I Love myself so that I can live love!

Happy! :)

Corruption exists! But, what do we do except complain?

Apart from the ramblings we make about corruption and all malpractices going on in our society and blaming the politicians for that, as citizens of India what plan have we devised to avoid corruption repeating itself in history? Do we have the courage to return our identity cards back to government expressing our distrust in the people taking up the power? Do we have the slightest intention of molding and dedicating one qualified politician per family? We choose one among the lot; the lot being filled with dirty-minded, -handed candidates! If we don’t like anyone in the nominees’ list, do we come back not-voting?

We always pour our words out when the election dates are out. From nowhere the media publicizes the corruption of all the politicians and their links with mafias. Where did we all go when these so called leaders were ruling us? How many of us have the patience to follow the frustrating formalities of the government offices and hold on to the conviction of not bribing? Why did we shut our mouths and pay the bribe? Why did not the media let out the corrupt practices into the light when these leaders are still on power? Why does it spring up in the light when these leaders have win-lose probability?

Frankly speaking none of us have the patience to fight the battle through every day practices; even if we have patience we are afraid of the political power these politicians have. Extensive hate words flowing across pages of newspapers about the ruling party and the opposition, blogs springing up during the election times are no near to the panacea.

It’s basically an inner discipline that every citizen of India needs to develop and pass onto his / her family members to curb malpractice from the society. May we have one or two convictions and hold on to it no matter how much it is tested by the times. Unless and until we develop such an inner courage, we cannot fight the battle against corruption. We will all be complaining and sulking over the pitiable state of Indian politics and let it penetrate deeper into our veins.

The land of culture seems to be deteriorating in its value system and everything is taken for granted. There is such a lack of commitment and integrity in today’s young people that they just do not care about their fellow beings. The so-called collectivist land of India is becoming very much individualistic in that even the family members become outsiders. It’s only I, Me and Myself that is ruling our minds. “Until the ditch touches my flat I do not mind!” – We have developed this tendency subconsciously. The only way to take our country forward is developing an inner discipline and integrity. Talk, preach and do what you would want others to do unto you! If the self fails to raise upto the cause, there won’t be a change! No more Gods will come as Saviours! We have got to be our own Saviours and mean what we say! Also, be an alert citizen in everyday life and question every injustice happening to us and our fellow beings. This is the only way to tell the politicians that we are monitoring them. Only this would ensure that they ought to perform their duties to hold onto their positions!

Be alert and awake, my fellow Indians! Stop complaining and rambling; ACT!

Letting it go…

It is very hard… letting things go…

Especially when one feels bonded to the thing, it’s extremely hard to let it go…

One can quote, ‘you carry nothing when you come to the world; nor you carry anything with you when you leave the world’, but, the period of stay in this world makes it hard to let things go.

It is a pain when things don’t happen the way you expect to…

Rather is it the ego that is hurt when what ‘I’ think doesn’t happen, when ‘I’ am not given prime importance, when people can’t see what ‘I’ feel?

When ‘I’ am not important why am I living in this world?

Ok. I understand that when you expect there is a high probability of disappointment!

It is hard to implement in day-to-day life! It aches to let things go off your hand! Something that you felt as yours, that you possess, you ‘own!’ solely yours…

Yet, I’ll say, “Nothing in this world is impossible!”

Whom am I cheating?

Nothing Is Impossible....

Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin - to say that you are weak, or others are weak.

~ Swami Vivekananda

A trip to Vivekanandar Illam

Last week I had an opportunity to visit Vivekanandar Illam with my Best Friend.

An ardent admirer of Swami Vivekananda, I feel so proud and happy for having visited this place.

Once an Ice House, Vivekanadar Illam now is a repository of the rich Cultural and Spiritual Heritage of India. Swamiji had stayed there for a full week and meditated on the future of India.

I wanted to explain about this Illam but now I feel everyone should visit this place to understand it better.

As soon as we enter we find this big statue of Swamiji.

From here we turn to our left and enter this historical place. The ground floor portrays the history of the place and how it was changed to Vivekanadar Illam from an Ice House.

The path to the next floor includes a huge stall for books, CDs, Photos of the Ramakrishna Ashram with unique collections. The next floor is full of paintings. Visual depictions of various ideas and facts is a treat for the eyes.

Various avatars of Vishnu, extract from a few Tamil Literary works, Indian evolution in spirituality, great spiritual leaders of India are a few of the varied paintings depicted.

The second floor is where we find a gallery of pictures on Swami Vivekananda right from his birth, his travel across the globe, his famous speech in The Parliament of Religions, his friends and disciples, etc quickly talking about the life history of Swamiji.

Now we move to the Third Floor. Entry to the third flooor opens up a big hall, to the right of which is a photograph of Swamiji. Or is it really just a photograph? I could see Swmiji looking into my eyes. This floor is still full of charge and vibrations and is calm and enlightening that you could feel the presence of Swmiji there. Its a blissful experience up there. You could feel a current pass all over your body, charge you with nothing but positive thoughts and from nowhere your heart rejoices with joy and happiness. This is no exaggeration. After so many years, after so many renovation work happening there, its an amazing fact that you feel all kinds of experiences up there.

You turn to your left. There is a dimly lit room, mats spread out, fresh flowers decorating the photograph of meditating Swamiji. I sat there for about 20 minutes or so. No thinking, no expectation, just a peaceful 20 minutes enjoying the place, its calmness, its peace, its vibrations, and experiencing a distant voice lecturing like bombs of fire. May be it was my imagination too...but this dream was also a pleasant one... Imagining as if Swamiji is talking to me, though I didnt pay attention to what was being said. Feeling that I am hearing his voice itself drowned me into the ocean of happiness.

Please take time off to visit this place.

Purity, patience and perseverance!

Bliss!

Just wondering!

Why do people do things that they know they should not or when they know it will cost something of theirs?

I don't understand!

Like,

People who don’t study for their exams and instead watch films; even worse people planning for an escape route like bits to clear it off…

People who say, “I wanna try things out!” and do things that cannot be confronted to anyone else…

People who indulge in habits they know will cost their health…

Then

I realized…

It may be that,

For the ones who didn’t study for the exams, exams and scores were worthless?!

For people who try out things, the pleasure in trying things out is more important than the pains that those things will cause…

For people indulging in destructive habits, best price they would offer for that pleasurable indulgence is their health…

Well!

Its all in the mind?!

But,

I really don’t understand why people have or show double standardness….????

Talk something but do other thing,
Preach one thing and practice the opposite,

Crisply, a life of an oxymoron…

I can’t understand them!

Take home from PD class at RKM

Today I attended the Personality Development workshop at RKM Ashram. We discussed about Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body.

I had been attending this workshop on and off since 2003 I guess. The moral strength, the spiritual strength that is there in me is solely out of the association with the ashrama and I owe a great deal to the Holy Trinity!

But a mother will always be a mother! Mother is dear to me.
I draw strength, immense mental strength only from her. Its not the scriptures or writings or words that transpired me. Its just the thought of the Mother and her continual presence I feel within me pours and fills me with love! I learnt to love people and almost everything in this world only because I saw the love in her eyes. Mere sight of Mother turns you into a kid yearning for love!

I learnt to be confident, bold, stand for my conviction and principle from the regular whips and blows of Swami Vivekananda's words.

By saying this I don't attribute love and courage to Mother and Swamiji respectively. I just mean to say that I need a Mother to fill me with love and care, I need a Swami Maharaj to whip me whenever I commit a mistake. Its my way of relating to the Holy Trinity.

And,

Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa...
Its only Bhakthi to Him. I don't feel like asking him anything. Meditating on him gives Peace, Calmness and loads of Bhakthi Bhava in the child.
I had always wanted to express the experiences at RKM. Only today I had the courage to throw the laziness and key it down.

Coming to the one thing I inscribed in my mind from today's class is this:

Three things are highly essential to have a healthy mind.

I heard it like this "Trikarna Shudhi"

1. Purity in Thought

When there is purity in thought, the words that come out will also be pure.

2. Purity in Words

When the thoughts are pure, the words let out are pure, automatically the action that we do will be pure too.

3. Purity in Action.

I really believe that if a person could follow this, he should succeed in every endeavor of his.

Purity, Patience, and Perseverance!

Give me light,

Asathoma Sadhgamaya,
Thamasoma Jyothirgamaya,
Mrtihyoma Amrithamgamaya,
Om Shanti Shanti Shantihi.


From the unreal lead me to the real,
from shadows lead me to the light,
from death lead me to immortality,
let there be peace everywhere.

Random thoughts

I just wanted to make a note of couple of thoughts absorbed from two different people I met.

First,

I heard one of my friend say, "When you don't like a quality in a person you see, that means, you possess that quality and since you want to get rid of it in yourself, you dislike its presence in the other person"

Second,

"Relationships, in any form, are mirrors to reflect the individual. To reflect the child in you, you have got a mother; to reflect the most secretive part of you, there is a soul mate for you; like this it goes."

Both these ideas are interpreted differently each time it is thought about.

LOVE

LOVE

Love is the only way to stop all bad and corrupt things happening in the world.

Its only through love that we can attain anything.

Love everyone equally and nothing will stop you from respecting others. When your heart is filled with love, you will not need an external push to do anything.

Love a person truly, you will resist any external pressure that tries to split you!
Love a sport, you will play it, however tight your schedule be!

Similarly apply this to everything.
When everyone applies this, complaints in all forms will come to an end.

I would like to include a quote of Swami Vivekananda, “MY nature is love Him. And therefore I love. I do not pray for any-thing. I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love’s sake. I can not trade in love.”

Complaints complaints complaints

“Do you own house? Have you bought a land for yourself?……”

I have heard this many times.

When I walk past the streets last week I started to think, we all build houses, protect it with walls and claim that it is our land. The land that we own now comes from our ancestors but did the people who lived in the past bought it from anyone?

I think.

People should have lived for a very long time in sync with nature and only when they were in need of some other thing they would have traded this land and thus this should have started.

But who are we to claim that this piece of land is ours?

Leave the land form.

In India people fight for rivers!!!
They say that the river belongs to their state and that they can’t lend it to their neighboring state. Sounds stupid! The rivers have their own way to flow on the land. Who are we to stop that? Why does man wants to dominate and rule the nature? After all we all came from the nature and still we depend solely on nature to survive. Why should then we fight among ourselves and try to do the impossible?

Now I feel, if we would have all lived in a common place, if we would have shared our resources with one another, if we had respected the laws of nature, this state that the world is facing could be avoided. It is the community living that could restructure the society and build some values in people.

I also understand that I might sound absurd in thinking this way. But I will still believe that if we respect the nature’s law we will live in peace!

I know I complain too much. But, this complaint follows my previous one. Leave respecting nature. Do we at least respect our fellow humans? We don’t. There is no respect that we show for another person’s existence!

Let us respect nature or at least our fellow beings and make this world a happy place to be!

Vivekananda

"Arise, awake and stop not till the goal is reached"

~ Swami Vivekananda

The Great Master

[Taken from, “My Master” - a lecture on Sri Ramakrishna by Swami Vivekananda]

In the presence of my Master, I found out that man could be perfect, even in this body. Those lips never cursed anyone, never even criticized anyone. Those eyes were beyond the possibility of seeing evil, that mind had lost the power of thinking evil. He saw nothing but good. That tremendous purity, that tremendous renunciation is the one secret of spirituality.

"Neither through wealth, nor through progeny, but through renunciation alone, is immortality to be reached", say the Vedas. "Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and follow me", says the Christ. So all great saints and Prophets have expressed it, and have carried it out in their lives. How can great spirituality come without that renunciation? Renunciation is the background of all religious thought wherever it be, and you will always find that as this idea of renunciation lessens, the more will the senses creep into that field of religion, and spirituality will decrease in the same ratio.

That man was the embodiment of renunciation.