When hope wins an election - and what AAP should watch out for

Cynicism is the nemesis of hope. And hope is never a bad thing. But great hopes bring the risk of great disillusionment; and an overhead too.  In addition to crushing our hope - it brings down our ability to hope further. The hope that AAP has brought to the masses is in itself their greatest gift. But we have seen our hopes crash earlier, when we hoped for a corruption-free India in 2011 - courtesy Anna's Jan Lokpal movement. It did not work out despite Anna and co's greatest intentions. Will AAP learn from those mistakes? Avoid the same now? 

Is there room for Compassion in heinous crimes?

A friend's response on Facebook got me thinking. And led to this blog. Here's the response. Extremely fundamental and logical points. And then my take on sin, morality, compassion and other repeated stuff :)

Authors Note: You might have read something similar before. Even agreed or disagreed with it - and therefore closed your mind to it. There will be no difference if you simply 'read' this article with the same set of beliefs. Openness demands sensitivity. And sensitivity demands experience. Hence I request you to feel each situation, and not just logically understand it - so as to bring out the subtle differences within them. Do not try to guess ahead, or think ahead, or get the right answer. Just feel. 

Imagine a dead organism. Rotten. Smelly. Infested with fleas. At risk of infecting the surroundings. How do you feel? Eeky? Disgusted? Hateful? Angry - its just lying around. Nobody's cleaned it up yet. What do you suggest we do with it? Burn it? Discard it? Somehow get rid of it - before it does further harm? Would it make things better? 

Participatory Democracy' is not an excuse for inability to take decisions

I find these debates around what's 'natural' and what's 'unnatural' funny. If something EXISTS, that makes it natural. It might be uncommon, in minority, not as per the majority convention, difficult to accept, bitter to digest, hateful for some, disgusting for others - but it's still natural!! If we can see that, perhaps we will also get curious around how it came about to be - rather than trying to 'censor' it from our lives. Reality is not subject to our censorship, only our minds are. Its like closing our eyes to something and believing its gone!!

What we accept as right, is usually just a majority opinion

"Sometimes we know what everybody should do, but not what we ourselves want to do…"

The same person who "completes you" now, might eventually become a reminder that you are incomplete

Maybe professing REAL love is like performing an art(like a song or a dance) from the heart. The real joy lies in the expression itself. The words or moves are just a means to express, not demand. To share, not transact. Transactions are the mind's domain. The heart is already grounded in joy - unconditionally. So abundant - that it wants to express, to tell, to share - for free. Not grounded in fear of what it will get in return; that just becomes a triviality. You invite them to dance, but you dance anyway. Not because they think its great, but cos it makes you happy. If they dance - its for their sake, not your's. Joy and abundance. Not fear and scarcity.

"Truth always wins" is misleading. Truth can never lose to begin with. Truth is. A fact is a fact. Battles are fought to 'prove' that WE are on its side. And of course everyone believes truth is on their side. :) But that's just a belief. We can fight only over beliefs - and the most popular one usually wins. But one belief is as good as the other - popularity aside. But knowing the truth is another story. It is the end of conflict, not the cause

A leader is not the one who just represents the voice of the majority, but has the clarity, courage and ability to correct it

Its all for the best...or for the worst. Depending on how long you wait before drawing the conclusion. The better option is of course to stop concluding, sit back and enjoy the roller coaster ride.

The most difficult conversation I have witnessed is the one between the two voices in my head....when the alarm goes off on Monday morning

An argument is like 2 expert rowers trying to row a boat in opposite directions. A lot of sincere effort is put in, but it still takes them nowhere

The problem is not in having a belief, but in treating it like a fact

Trying to "encourage" a child to learn something is a euphimism for manipulation. the best we can do is to help it FIND what it wants to learn, WITHOUT "needing our encouragement". And then get out of its way. Simply cos we might know squat about that way, slow down, break the flow of the wonderous journey

Blaming is a great way to reduce the pain, but it aggravates the disease.

Relying on someone to bring in good change, is like dropping the oars in a storm and (sincerely)praying to God for the storm to stop

When we are blind, the sad thing is there is no way to find out that the other person might not be. So its easy to assume he is blind.... It's still treatable, until the focus moves from 'How do I see?' to 'Who is blind?'

Everybody wants to quit the rat race....after we have found a good shortcut to win it.

Fear is a strange thing. It exists when we won't face it, and disappears when we do!

Can something be Unnatural?

When a bunch of crows landed in the land of peacocks, they looked strange...to the peacocks. Their hoarse sound, their ability to fly, their small size - it was all just so.....perverted...to the peacocks. Unnatural. The peacocks declared all crows as "unnatural". Any crow would now be imprisoned. If they wanted to live, they better be a peacock. The crows had no option but to try and become a peacock. Some stopped flying, others stopped crowing because they dared not use their real voice, while others stuck peacock feathers and pranced around....that's when the actual perversion started. In 10 years, everybody forgot what a peacock really looked like and nobody knew what a crow was....all that was left is majority always accusing the minority of being wrong, and the majority winning. Because they are the majority.

AAP ka decision or aap ka decision?

They accused governments of being indecisive. Now they need a special SMS campaign to decide whether THEY themselves want to form a govt or not? Are they afraid to take a decision themselves - even if the constitution allows them to? They will receive flak no matter what decision they take. But isn't that what being a leader is all about? And if they cannot take this decision - how will they take other tough decisions later? Conduct a poll for everything? People elected them to be leaders, not polling machines. And they are proving people were wrong....TAKE a decision guys!! A majority only conveys the majority perception. Not the right action. Leaders are the ones who hopefully have the wisdom, courage, discrimination and ability to take the right action

 

An ideal world

What would an ideal world look like? No fear, no division, no conflict, no pain, no struggle, no cause to fight for, hence nothing to win, nothing to give us a sense of achievement, nothing worth killing for, nothing to envy, nothing to compare ourselves with, no evil, no one to punish, or to condemn or to blame, no 'They' to hate and feel better, no enemy to unite against, nothing to overcome, no victory of good over evil.....Nothing to 'prove' the greatness of the 'human spirit'. If we have nothing left to prove, we might be proven as nothing. And perhaps that is exactly what we fear. And with fear, the division begins.....

The abandoned Bhagvad Gita

Interesting thing happened....Noticed a copy of the Gita in a book donation box at office. Then noticed it was in a sealed cover...not even opened once! Obtained and abandoned. My petty mind was just about to start drawing judgmental conclusions about the owner...but then paused to consider the bigger picture. One thing was certain now. The book had surely made it its way out of hands that would not have used it. Now there was a chance it might find its way to hands that would. I guess nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything eventually finds its best fit. The best we can do is to keep the flow going. Not block it with our ideas of right and wrong. Seen this way, even the owner needs to be thanked for letting go...and not blocking the flow....out of fear of doing 'wrong'

The Little girl

Maybe four years old, hops rather than walks on the pavement, doing a twist one in a while, her golden curls jumping along. She has a blue balloon which she tries to blow up occasionally, but finds it more appealing to stretch it across her face like a moustache and giggle mischievously. I can see her from window up the hilly road as her little feet try to negotiate the mountain. It's hard, but she's happy. Its chilly but she's smiling. What a joy it would be to be closer to this sight of joy. Her mom is. But she is busy texting furiously. an intense expression on her face. Luckily the little antithesis on her right doesn't care anyway. She's too busy making the best out of what she has.

What we usually call 'Success' is a temporary relief during our run from the fear of failure. Happiness starts when the running stops.

"Higher the mountain, sweeter the victory. Does a walk in the garden mean anything anymore?

"It is difficult to do the things we want, as long as we prefer doing the things that make us feel wanted...

"Time can be the best healer...if we let it

Judgmental people are often very forgiving. They keep forgiving you for mistakes you never comitted!

"Blaming is when we start paying attention to other people's problems over our own....

""Knowledge is the learning through a process of gaining Wisdom is the learning gained through the process of losing... Right knowledge is learning about what all we need to lose...

"Rare are the people who engage in action. Most of our actions are a reaction to other people's actions...

"We often dream of achieving something big....but forget about doing something big...

If there were something called 'Identity', it would not be in what we do, but how we do it. Simply because only the latter depends only on us

"The ego says 'I am a lot more than this. How can I do this?'. The self says 'I am a lot less than this. I have nothing to lose. I can do a lot more'"

Who am I to give?

If I give you, I lose something - what fun is that?
Who am I to give?

If you give me, you lose something - why should you be sad?
Who am I to take?

ISRO Mars Mission - Good or bad?

So as usual, we have been talking a lot and Arnab Goswami is tearing his hair about the Mars mission, its usefulness, its frugality, whether its ok to spend 460cr when millions are starving etc.This applies in taking any decision having a far reaching impact. So thought of jotting down my thoughts:

Veil of fear

Sometimes we don't communicate out of fear of confirming our positive perceptions to be false...
Sometimes we don't communicate out of fear of confirming our negative perceptions to be true...
But we do not communicate.

Beliefs

The pain is always real, the belief that causes it might not be.
But we deny the pain, and cling on to the beliefs.
Choosing pain over the death of our pet illusions.

What is the nature of Evil?

Every time evil incidents like the Mumbai Rape case happen, we start rambling about our rich past, "preserving Indian culture", about how great we once were, about how great we can be. That allows us to procrastinate. 

Culture is what is happening NOW, not 3000 years back. What is happening now is what we ARE. This is not a brief detour from the past. We ARE sick right now. That is the only reality - the rest is imagination. 

Indo/Pak issue: Is War ever an option?

It is. But it is meaningless and futile if we make it the ends. As a means to a 'victory', rather than peace. If we forget to ask the aforementioned question: "Will it reduce the overall conflict?", and unless we know exactly HOW. It is choosing the lesser evil.

Indo/Pak issue: War or Peace?

Is the Pakistan/India situation really that complex? Or have we made it that way? Can we try to simply clear our vision, brush off some dust and see if we can reduce the complexity from a million units to a dozen?

War or peace?

I often hear this message going around "Enough of peace, now it's time for war!". But do we realize that  we can only give war a chance, not peace. Peace is not an entity that you can choose. It is simply the absence of violence.  Like health is simply a absence of disease.

The eternal question: Which side do I choose?

This article was written as a response to an opinion I read on Facebook. Which talked about how NOT taking any side was even worse than taking the 'wrong' side. That a lot of misery in the world was wrought by people who did not take any side, who chose indifference, who chose not to act. Is this true? 

The most common struggles have been around 'which side to take?', or should we be 'detached'. Does that mean 'indifference' - inaction? How can inaction in face of a problem be the answer? This does merit some investigation.

If Lord Krishna was reborn in a Western household...

An interesting thought experiment that came to mind. We all hail the Gita as the sacred song, but very few can even understand Sanskrit, leave alone the underlying meaning. So there are people who will happily interpret them for us. There are so many interpretations available, many as per the person's convenience! Many of these are termed as 'Masters', their word turning into God's word, which seekers follow. Some we agree with, some we don't. But what are we judging here exactly? Is it just the interpretation? How do we know its true? Who says we will LIKE it if we knew the truth? What we like, dislike is our own UNDERSTANDING - which is yet another layer away from the INTERPRETATION!

Let us imagine that Lord Krishna was reborn in a Western household as 'John Pedro'- brought up in a totally different family, culture, language, style of writing. We can of course assume that the truth he knows is still the same, the message is still the same. What if he even writes a book on it, in English, which is called anything but the Gita, or the song of God? Maybe it is called 'Sharing the truth'. Now this message is FIRST-HAND, cannot be debated.

Stress: Don't manage it, cure it!

Everybody complains about stress nowadays. The unlimited techniques offered for "Stress Management" are enough to stress one out! We also try to justify stress by using phrases like "Jobs are much more stressful nowadays", "Life is much more stressful nowadays", "A rapidly changing business environment makes stress inevitable" What is stress really? Are we over-complicating it and making it worse? Is 'managing' it useful in anyway? Are we just scratching the surface instead of trying to cure it? Can we dare to take a closer look at this ugly problem, understand, and hence cure it?

Can boundaries and intimacy go together?

Words are often misleading. 'Boundaries' is one such word. The message seems to be “Closeness is OK, but too much closeness can get harmful. Learn to draw the line and say ‘back off!’”  But in close relationships, how close is too close? In fact, is there a limit to being ‘close’? What about unconditional acceptance, complete trust or genuine intimacy? Can boundaries and intimacy go together? Let us investigate together. Not what I think ‘boundaries’ mean, but what a healthy, harmonious definition of the word can be, how it gets distorted and also how we can prevent it

The kid who sought the Truth

The tribal church was aghast - What sacrilege!!
This insolent kid had dared challenge the holy message
Oh - why had it happened in their age?
"How dare he challenge the ultimate truth!!!"
"Why blame him? Blame the parents!!!"
"Does he think he knows better than everyone else?"
"And we wonder how does evil come into being!!"
The kid shivered a little, all of eight
As he stared at the golden board, a text with six ancient characters
An ancient language, the ultimate truth, decked in gems - and meekly said
"I did not mean to insult, I just wondered 'How do we know its true?'"