Life

We interact with many people in this world. When we talk to someone, we share our likes and dislikes, what we have done in our lives so far, our occupation, where we live, and our family. Generally, that's all. Sometimes, in deeper talks, we discuss our belief systems and understanding of life. But generally, these discussions stay at a very surface level. As if it's a fixed image talking to another fixed image. If the other person has a different belief system than we do, our brain simply rejects it as alien. Suppose I am worried about the marriage of my child, and the other person says that marriage is the decision of the child and he has nothing to do with it; I may simply reject that idea as alien. If I am worried about my bad health, running from one hospital to the other, and the other person advises me to try naturopathy, I simply reject that as being alien. Our brain has made an image of every person and thing. We generally don't interact with people, but we interac...

I am really surprised to see how so many intelligent people become so narrow-minded as they grow. So sure of the completeness of their narrow frame of life. Every intelligent person knows the Earth is not even a particle of dust on the cosmic scale, and we know so little about this cosmos. Then how can these intelligent people be so sure of what they do in their lives? Why would they not like to understand the meaning of life? Why would they believe the social narrative and spend the whole of their lives in pursuit of what this world considers happiness, while knowing very well that it's a very minuscule part of reality? That looks so stupid: spending our entire lives believing something we are not sure about. Like somebody living his entire life believing two people to be his parents and getting to know towards the end of his life that they are not. But intelligent people aren't that stupid. Why would they do so? If they know that "what we know" is very minuscule com...

Yesterday, I was discussing with my daughters why people keep tolerating mindlessness in public places. A few people don't do the work they are supposed to do, and it affects so many people's lives. A poorly designed road, someone parking on the side of the road and causing a 15-minute traffic jam, a poorly designed website by an organisation, the unresponsiveness of someone in an important position. Why do people tolerate all this? They responded that, since the beginning, students are asked to be compliant in the classroom. For everything, they have to take permission. That independence of mind is never inculcated. In fact, whenever somebody takes a stand against injustice, people try to make him understand that he should not get into all these things and should concentrate on his career. I agree with them, and the impact of this attitude is quite evident everywhere. The son does not take a stand when his parents ask him to take dowry; employees do not take a stand when their...

When we take up employment in an organisation, we are expected to carry out certain tasks and handle different responsibilities. We keep playing these roles and fulfilling the responsibilities, and sometimes get fed up and want an escape. A pleasure trip, a sabbatical, a few days of leave, a home visit, and so on. After the escape, we are back at work and go through the same frustration every day. Some people are more intelligent. They make their workplace and their lives enjoyable. If you can't run away from dirt, enjoy it. People enjoy office politics, bickering, sycophancy, talking rubbish about their colleagues, and poking into the personal lives of others. Very few like to explore and create new possibilities.  Life is what it is. It has a lot to offer in every situation, and yet it may be quite frustrating. We take up certain roles, both consciously and unconsciously. The moment we are born into a family, we assume certain roles. The role of a son, daughter, sister, brother, ...

The brain's conditioning is so deep that it takes years to feel comfortable with a language other than our mother tongue. That's why, when we travel to a different country, have to speak English all day, and meet an Indian, the first thing we do is speak in our native language. When we come back after touring for a week, the first thing we want to do is have tea with ginger and milk and eat home-cooked food.  We are born and brought up in a society where almost everybody shares common beliefs about life. Different societies have different meanings of life. Family members, relatives, and neighbours pass these meanings on to children, consciously or unconsciously. For example, people of my generation, who were born and brought up in North India, would have heard of all these things: "Padho ge Likho ge to Banoge Nawab, Khelo ge Kudo ge to Bano ge Kharab", such a bad social narrative about sports; "Jaldi se settle ho ja", as if the purpose of life is to get ...

It's interesting to see how we behave when both lifts in the building are out of order. Everybody is in a hurry to go to the office. The lifts are not working. Somebody on the 12th floor gets ready to go down and suddenly realises the lifts aren't working. He curses the RWA, the office, and the entire setup, takes the stairs, reaches the office, and forgets it until evening. By the time he gets back, one lift is repaired, and he follows the same old routine until the next time, when both lifts are out of order again. Why don't we make an effort to put the systems in the right place? Some of us make an effort and then give up after a few years. They realise that it's very difficult to bring change. Change is hard to bring about because very few people think about it and make the effort. Otherwise, most people are happy with some Jugaad. That's why the few who work to bring change get exhausted. If everybody tries to do their best in whatever position they are in, cha...

This morning, a thought suddenly came to my mind. Mathematics has great lessons for living life. Take, for example, zero. If you add zero to some other number, there is no change. Similarly, if you have a discussion with someone with zero ability, nothing will be added. We may spend our whole lives at zero, and at the end of life, nothing will have been added. What if we multiply some number by zero? The outcome is zero. Otherwise, multiplication increases the value significantly. Many combinations and permutations are created. Suppose a person knows two subjects: History and Economics. The second person knows two different subjects: Psychology and Philosophy. When they come together and form an alliance, they get four different skills. They can blend History with Psychology, History with Philosophy, Economics with Psychology, and Economics with Philosophy. Thus, they both acquire four different skills. Their individual skills multiply. On the contrary, if we blend with a zero, a perso...

Water's journey is so interesting. While it forms a part of the big ocean, a few molecules come into contact with the Sun. Full of energy and motivation, they rise above the surface of the ocean and take the form of clouds roaming free across the globe. They interact freely with the winds, having no fixed destination; they travel from one place to the next till they fall in love with a landscape and fall on that place in the form of rain. Sometimes, they fall in love with the heights of the mountains and fall as snow, taking the form of glaciers. After years of solidity in these glaciers, the water realises its abode and sets out on its journey to merge again with the source, taking the form of a river. Because of their greed, humans have not left even the rivers. They have blocked the natural flow of rivers and built dams. How would the water trapped in the dams feel? As if a lover is desperate to meet his beloved, and some villain stops him from meeting the beloved and confines h...

Love, freedom and exploration are fundamental attributes of life. When we fear nothing, we feel full, and we have no ambition or target to achieve; we all connect to these fundamental attributes. When we go to a hill station and do not have a target to cover the tourist points in our minds, and the mind is relaxed, we experience a strange connection with nature, the mountains and trees. It seems as if we can talk to each other. We feel connected to the birds and butterflies. We experience freedom. No social obligation to perform, no office target, and no financial decision to make. We feel free to live in the moment. In that state of freedom and with that connection with the valleys and the mountains, we feel like exploring them. We feel like trekking. We feel like breathing the air. I believe we've all had similar experiences. That means we all have a natural capacity to connect with others, including trees, birds, mountains, and valleys. We all love freedom, and we all want to ex...

The same battle of Kurukshetra is being fought by many. Every warrior shares the same target: to win the battle. Yet the locus is so different. With the same purpose, how can the locus be so different? Duryodhana fights for the greed of the kingdom, Karna to prove himself a better warrior than Arjuna, Bhishma to honour with a bow, Shikhandi to take revenge, and the Pandavas against injustice and unfairness. The same battle, and so many different loci.  What decides our locus? The answer to the question "Who am I?" If you ask the same question to Duryodhana, he would say, "I am the king of Hastinapur, and I am fighting the battle to protect my interests". Karna would say, "I am an outstanding warrior, and this world has not recognised my bravery just because I was born in the family of a charioteer; I am here to prove my bravery and to prove that I am better than Arjuna in archery." Bhishma would say, "I am true to my words and have a responsibility to...

Whatever we do in life, there is a source of motivation. Along with that, we set a purpose or target. When we prepare for a competitive examination, we have a purpose: to gain admission to a good university, and with the same goal, different students may have different loci: to earn money or explore new subjects. Somebody wants to bring reform to society. With the same purpose, different people may have different loci: somebody may do it to gain popularity, while another may do it out of love for humanity. When somebody works hard in the office to achieve the task at hand, this drive to do good work may again have its locus in a desire for personal excellence or love for the organisation. We keep setting different targets in our lives. These targets keep changing as we grow. Even the targets of nations and organisations keep changing with changes in management and ruling parties. Some political parties may focus more on inclusive growth, while others may focus more on the latest techno...

I watched the movie Namkeen, starring Sanjeev Kumar, Sharmila Tagore, and Shabana Azmi. Suddenly, something struck my mind. Most of us live life in the name of family. To provide our children with the best education, to get them married, and to get them settled. Whenever a crisis hits the family, all members stay rock solid. Family members share happiness and sorrow. No other relationship compares well with family. Almost all parents have made their share of sacrifices for their families.  On the other hand, a question is quite evident: "Is the purpose of human life limited to taking care of family and getting the children settled? Even if we assume it is, for a moment, it naturally implies that our children's purpose in life will also be restricted to getting their children settled. Do we really believe so? So we think our children's purpose in life is confined to raising their children and getting them married. What if they decide not to get married or not to have kids? ...

When we look back, some of our childhood reactions seem so stupid. That crush on a friend at school and thinking about that crush for hours, that competition with friends to come first in the class, grief when another student comes first and we feel that he has been favoured by the teachers, the anxiety about scoring well in the examination, worry about the career, what will happen in future, will we be able to get a job, the apprehensions about a life partner, how will we live without friends, and so on. We had thousands of apprehensions and worries, and when we recall them, we just laugh at ourselves and our immaturity. What if our present worries and anxieties are also equally laughable? During childhood, all the worries appeared very real. But as we gained exposure, most of those became meaningless. Maybe, as we get more exposure, our present worries will also become meaningless. But how do we know? Health crises, office politics, job uncertainty, uncertainty about the future of th...

A newborn child, until around 6 months of age, cannot talk or walk. Then magic unfolds. The child learns to say maa or paa. He starts rolling, and soon starts crawling. Where does he get these skills? Do the parents train him to walk and talk? No. He picks them up on his own. In the language of neurology, his brain mirrors what he sees, and that's how his brain picks up the language, and he starts talking. These mirror neurons are quite magical, and they help us understand how to live in society. We learn so many responses naturally through these mirror neurons. We learn how to communicate, how to live in a society, how to take care of our bodies, how to behave in relationships and many more such things. Once we mirror something, that becomes part of "me". A child picks Hindi, for example, while being in Delhi, and then he goes to China. What will be his first reaction? He will feel that Chinese is a foreign language, but for him, when he was 6 months old, even Hindi was ...

 Who am I? The sum total of my thought process and my body. Tall or short, fat or thin, intelligent or dumb, extrovert or introvert, helpful or not- all these attributes define us. We are the sum total of our physical and mental attributes. We keep getting exposed to so many different people and circumstances in life. We react to the situations based on our past conditioning. But how does this conditioning commence? A baby has no preference for food and is happy eating a banana or some Daliya. He hasn't made stories about the food yet. As the child grows, he attends birthday parties where everybody is mad about the cake. His brain puts a premium on cake, and as he attends more and more birthday parties, those mental stories keep getting strengthened. Our generation, people who did not make such stories and where birthdays used to be celebrated with "Gajar Ka Halwa" or some "Milkcake", have never been able to give so much premium to cake.  As the child grows, he ...

All of us have three predominant emotions: fear, the pursuit of pleasure, and ambition. Fear is the strongest emotion. If we are afraid, we can't think of pleasure or ambition. If a doctor tells us that we have a terminal disease, or the lawyer tells us that the court is going to announce imprisonment very soon, the mind becomes full of fear. In those moments, thoughts of pleasure and ambition drop. There is a sort of competition between seeking pleasure and our ambition. Some choose pleasure, while some defer pleasure and follow their ambitions. They delay sensual gratification. Basically, these three fundamental emotions drive the whole of the world. All of us are motivated in different ways by these three fundamental emotions. Where is the place for love, creation, and exploration? When fear, the pursuit of pleasure, or ambition takes over, is there any scope for love? Yes, maybe. In pre-independence India, almost every Indian feared the cruelty of imperial rulers. Yet many of t...

"I Love You" is one of the most frequently spoken sentences. I wonder, between "I" and "You", where love comes from. If "I" and "You" are like two solid rocks, love is like air. How will the two solid rocks float in the air? But the human mind is full of ingenuity. It will invent something or another to cover the rocks' solidity and make them look as if they are actually floating in the air. It will create different kinds of romantic stories and convince itself, and others, that rocks are floating in the air. It will write book after book to prove that rocks can float in the air. But the rocks also know the reality. Reality is felt almost every moment. Sometimes the sentences spoken by the beloved feel like arrows, when we feel hurt, when we feel jealous, when we feel let down, when we feel like controlling. Where are all these reactions coming from? Are they coming from love or from ego? Definitely ego. We have made thousands of st...

When we see something profound, what is the first thing that comes to mind? When we see somebody devoting his life to the well-being of the children on the street; when we see somebody giving away his life while saving an unknown person; when we see an astronaut walking on the Moon; when we see a scientist unravelling the secrets of the cosmos; when we see a movie like The Shawshank Redemption? What is the first reaction? Some feel "wow," and that's it. These people are great. They are different. Some feel "wow"; I wish I could have done that, too. That wish remains all through life. Some say What foolishness. Why did he die for an unknown person? What is there in walking on the Moon? What is there in wasting life looking for the stupid secrets of nature? Life is all about fun and pleasure. How and when does that profundity evoke action? Why don't we get motivated to carry out our own experiments with truth after reading the book by Mahatma Gandhi, "My ...

I wonder why the most intelligent, as well as the most ordinary, brains get trapped in the play of ego? Intelligent people outsmart those around them. Since childhood, they get special treatment. Somehow they want to retain that "special treatment" wherever they go. An intelligent student outsmarts his friends and classmates in school. He gets VIP treatment from the teachers and even his friends. When he enters college, he finds many more intelligent students like him. By this time, he has already become so attached to the self-image of being intelligent and a topper that he is not able to bear the pain of being second. He joins the race and, depending on his capacity, develops a winning formula. If he has the capacity to defeat everybody around him in the competition, he will do that. Otherwise, he either grudgingly accepts defeat or uses cheap methods like the "Silencer" of 3-Idiots. Competition doesn't stop there; it carries over to the organisation, family, ...

Watched " The Last Man on Tower " today. A wonderful movie and equally beautiful acting by Manoj Bajpayee. The film shows human relationships in their most naked form. It shows how greed takes over years of relationships and how ambition turns people into demons. What has propaganda done to society? I don't think human societies have ever been founded on love. We have seen it since time immemorial. If that were the case, Kaikeyi would not have asked for 14 years of Vanvaas for Rama. Had it been so, the Kauravas would not have conspired to kill the Pandavas in Lakshagraha. When greed and ambitions take over, relationships become meaningless. I also don't know how an old person gathers the courage to stand alone. Probably he has nothing to lose. But what do we have to lose? The mental stories we have built around something or the other? The hollow materialism, or meaningless relationships, or the fake self-image? We hold them tightly to our chest.  I somehow actually do...

I don't know why, but I was down memory lane today. While looking at the horoscopes, I tried to figure out why past memories feel so strong. In our daily lives, we operate on two different levels. First, we experience whatever happens in the present moment. We eat food and enjoy the taste through the taste buds. We wear clothes and enjoy the comfort through our skin. We use some perfume and enjoy the fragrance through the nose. We get burned and feel the burning sensation on our skin. We get a cut and feel the pain. Similarly, we have different psychological feelings. For example, we feel the comfort of being home. We feel safe in the presence of somebody while jittery in the presence of another person. All these experiences take place in real time. Second, we keep thinking about the past and the future. A student sees the DM of the city, how people fear him, how toll-tax people roll out a red carpet for the DM's vehicle, and how people envy his status. He creates a story about...

Once I presented a paper on Vipassana at Delhi University, and someone asked me, "Who is the observer?" "Who is doing Vipassana?" and "When the instructions are being given by Goenka ji, who is listening to them and doing what is to be done?" If it is the mind, then how can we go beyond our perceptions? The mind receives certain instructions. The instructions are that whatever is happening in the body and mind is temporary. When we receive these instructions constantly, won't the brain project some reality? Isn't that temporariness also a projection of the mind? An imagination and nothing beyond that. I recalled this incident while watching a YouTube video on the debate between Shankaracharya and Mandan Mishra. https://youtu.be/UdZCBWN0HCw?si=sNvn17_t5q8hSFZX While Mandan Mishra said karma is primary, Shankaracharya argued that karma is useless without awareness. Mandan Mishra argued that one may believe he knows when he actually knows nothing, and...

I watched the movie Grah Pravesh, starring accomplished actors like Sharmila Tagore and Sanjeev Kumar, a few days ago. They have a son, and the husband goes to the office every day. It so happens that at the office he has to share his cabin with a lady, and he becomes attracted to her and wants to marry her. The first part of the movie focuses on his inner conflict. The second part focuses on his wife's reaction.  It's very predictable. We all know how anybody will react in such a situation. The husband committed to the relationship, and that commitment was breached; therefore, the wife should be very upset. She should feel insecure as well. Feelings of hurt, jealousy and anger should be dominant. Anybody would expect all these reactions.  I listened to Satipatthana Pravachan by Goenka ji some time back, and he says that even if we control our reactions by strengthening our mind, the unconscious mind carries deep-rooted samskaras that surface when we face any adverse situation...

When we drive on a road, where at any moment somebody may come from the opposite side in a tractor or bullock cart at very high speed; what safety precautions can one really take except singing Hanuman Chalisa? When we are living among friends and colleagues who can stab in our back, what safety precautions can somebody take? When someone is walking on the road, and a teenager or untrained driver hits them while driving at very high speed, what precautions can they take? Where trains and metros are full of snatchers, what safety precautions will somebody take? Living in such a spoiled system has a great cost on our mental health because we have to undergo stress almost the whole day. Often, worries do not leave us even at night. Even when we visit the hospital, we are not sure whether the tests the doctor prescribes are meant to maximise the hospital's profit or to diagnose the disease. You are not sure whether the medicines you buy at a high price are genuine. You are not sure whe...