Articles and Essays

From Suppression of Feelings to Passive Aggression

2012-05-23T08:44:00.004+05:30

When we feel enthusiastic, we express it immediately but when we feel afraid of doing something, we hide our feelings not to be caught by others. Similarly, we often suppress our angers against more powerful than us, we suppress our sexiness towards our senior ladies, we suppress our annoyance towards others not to displease them, we suppress our feeling of inferiority with respect to others, we suppress our economic problems from public exposure to keep a good image in society, etc. etc. Thus, for many of us, there are more of suppressions of feelings than expressions thereof.

We suppress our feelings from getting exposed before others with an intention of gaining something, making a good impression in most of the cases. Do we really gain by such suppressions, or we lose in overall terms through these suppressions of feelings?.

Disadvantages of Suppression of Feelings

The prime disadvantage of suppression of feelings is intrinsic suffocation the person feels, thus strangulation of his/her real self. This suffocation is directly proportional to the affiliation of the person to a suppressed feeling.

Second, but not less important, is the explosion of feelings after the limit of suppressibility of the person is reached. These explosions may be sad with a suicidal tendency in the worst case, or may lead to thoughtless, angry and revengeful reactions of the person which may lead to violent behaviour of the person. Even if the reactions are light, these hamper performance of the person.

In social relationships, such suppression of feelings may lead to misunderstanding of each other souring the relationship without any solid reason there for. Often, people suppress their feelings with an objective of not hurting the other persons with plain speaking, because the truth is sometimes bitter. The artificial sweetness in the relationship so desired proves short-lived and when the reality comes to surface, both in the social contact feel guilty or blame each other. Plain speaking may look bitter in the beginning but lays a solid foundation for lifelong sweet relationships.

Image of a person in his/her society matters more than the person’s real-time performance. The suppression of feelings creates an image of a character full of falsehoods and the person is not considered reliable and trustworthy by others in his/her contact. Once an image of truthfulness of the person is created, even his/her bitter words are tolerated by others with pleasure. Thus, the truthfulness of one spreads truthfulness in the whole society in the long run.

Passive Aggression

Every person with his/her feelings suppressed wish to be aggressive against the suppression, but dares not to be so, cultivating a passivity in his/her character. This is what is termed as ‘passive aggression’ as a personality trait. Conduct of a person suffering from this syndrome is beyond anticipation not only by anybody else but by the person him/herself too. In all relationships, anticipation of mutual conducts by the two persons works as the foundation of mutual trust and hence the long-term relationship.

Evolution of Human Conduct and Culture

2012-05-19T02:39:00.001+05:30

Low forms of life have a limited intellect good enough to respond to circumstances to fulfil their instinctive demands of survival and procreation with minimization of active efforts for maximizing physical comforts as the third instinct. Humans evolved over thousands of years to have a high level of intellect that infuriated a new instinct of curiosity in them inducing them to probe their surroundings and make the best possible use of these not only for survival and procreation but for comforts and pleasures too. Thus, pleasure is the fourth instinct found in human life only. These new demands on their minds evolved their intellect to much higher level which made them more curious and they developed their civilization with principal elements of languages and sciences. Thus through spiralling effects of curiosity and intellect feeding each other, we reached a stage of being a superset of animal life in the Cosmos with pleasure as the superset of comfort of animal life. Then, it was the turn of evolution of vivid human conducts through development of localized cultures involving various steps outlined below.

Experimentation to Habituation

Habituated yet Free

Story of development of human conduct is textured in experimentation through hits and misses, trials and errors. In these experiments, whatever came to satisfy the fourth instinct of pleasure that was oft repeated to form a habit of individuals in a society. Thus, habituation is the first stage of evolution of a culture.

As humans tried exploitation of all the resources available to them for maximizing their pleasures, some cunning humans did not spare other simplistic humans from exploitation. This classified humans as the rulers and the ruled. The ruled class is ruled for its tolerance to the rule of others over itself for its own compulsions of being weak physically or mentally. This tolerance too became a habit of the ruled class. Thus, habituation is not only for pleasures but for tolerance too.

Genetic Changes to Domestication

Habituated and Dependent

Habituation is the fastest of evolution processes, making genetic changes in habituated individuals in a period of about 1000 years or so. This makes the individuals fully slaved to the habit generations after generations irrespective of circumstantial compulsions, comforts or pleasures of the habit. I call this stage as ‘domestication’ of the individuals to a preset conduct.

Domesticated people lose their sense of right or wrong about their conduct. For the people, this works as their mental lethargy as an extension to the basic instinct of seeking comforts diminishing the application of mind to their own conducts, hence, may be called their mindlessness with respect to the element of conduct for which the individuals are domesticated. Cumulative sum of individual conducts of people in a society is called their ‘culture’. Thus, culture of a people may be right or wrong with respect to the standardized human norms of morality.

Flaring of Immorality

An immoral act often provides more comfort and pleasure to the individual at physical level, but becomes an intolerable burden on his/her conscience. For the conscience, individuals forego their comforts and pleasures through immoral acts of theirs. Since domesticated people, for being under spell of mindlessness, have no conscience of right or wrong with respect to their conducts, they conduct themselves immorally without any burden on their consciences. This flares up immorality in a domesticated society.

The Reversal from Immorality

Domestication to Corruption

Reversal of a domesticated society from its immorality is possible through use of force only by somebody or a group thereof who are not domesticated to immorality. Unfortunately, democracy prohibits such a reversal, making this form of governance unfit to people who are domesticated to immorality, if the objective is to seed and cultivate human values in them.

Whatever be the extent or period of domestication of a people to immorality, there may be some individuals in the society who are free from such a domestication. These are the free thinkers in the society with their minds working through logical reasoning only. Such persons are free from sects and faiths, customs and traditions, religions and spirituality, etc of the society, in general. Only these persons may force a reversal of the society but these are never the people’s chosen authorities in a democracy.

How to Feed the Overpopulated World

2012-05-12T10:27:00.000+05:30

Indian Agriculture

In my last article here about overpopulation, sickness and the solution, I have given an outline on how the problem of feeding the overpopulated world be fed through cutting down individual consumptions particularly of those items which contribute little to human health but need a lot of resources for production. Cereals are one such food item which must be minimized in human consumption for reducing sickness, hence the medical expenses on the population. Accordingly, I myself have resolved to eliminate cereals from my diet. Yesterday had been my last meal with wheat loves as the principal constituent. Here are some more considerations for feeding the world population comfortably with our available resources, yet keeping the people healthy.

The main points I wish to focus here in selecting food items for production and consumption are that the selected items must –

Use minimum of our resources in production, and
Provide maximum nutrition to maintain health

The only consideration we must make in selecting food items for production and consumption is the amount of resources used in production of per unit weight of the food item.

Social and Government Regulations

As a recent negative development in agriculture in my area is that farmers have begun producing rice in their fields irrigated by water bore-wells driven by electric motors. The paddy crop is marked by maximum use of water for growing and providing such a huge quantity of water driven by electricity means huge electricity consumption for a kilogram of rice produced. Logically, production of rice must be limited to areas having abundance of naturally available water through water streams. I have been advocating stoppage of rice production in water-scarce areas but with no ears liking my voice. Such practices must be paid utmost attention by the governments and stopped in some way or the other but the governments, particularly in democratic world, are quite negligent of such things to act upon.

Let the Nature do its Work

A scientific research of mine concludes that the Nature performs its tasks in the most economical ways using minimum possible resources in its processes. Accordingly, I insist that the Earth does not orbit around the Sun but has a to-and-fro simple harmonic motion between two points in space. For this reason, food items produced naturally use minimum of resources, hence all artificially produced foods and their further modifications add to consumption of more resources for the production. Therefore, for feeding the world population with minimum use of resources, we must allow the Nature to produce food items naturally, and use them only when these are provided by the nature in fully ripe conditions. As a general rule, any food item eaten without its reaching the ripe state is harmful to health. Only fruits, seeds, nuts, etc and matured leaves of plants producing no fruits make the best foods for human health.

Non-vegetarian Diet

Production of flesh is one of the costliest processes of nature, making non-vegetarian diet as the costliest diet in terms of resource consumption. For example, a kg of flesh production in a cow’s body needs 8 kg of feed materials. This figure stands at 4 kg and 2 kg for pork and chicken, respectively. This consideration makes meat prohibitive in human diet if we sincerely intend to feed the world population with our available resources.

Vicious cycle of Overpopulation and Sicknesses, and the Solution

2012-05-10T15:05:00.001+05:30

During my childhood about 50 years back, there were no chemical fertilizers, no hybrid seeds, no modern facilities of tilling and irrigating the fields, with the result that wheat production used to be hardly 10 to 15 quintal per hectare of land. I used to see poor people in the village getting undigested wheat bullock dung for feeding their hungry bellies. But those getting their bellies fill with the available food were healthy, hard-working and productive. Times changed to high population density on the earth, chemical fertilizers and hybrid seeds providing a yield of about 50 quintal a hectare of wheat crop, everyone getting belly-full food, but even those having abundance of wealth in their possession are sick with multiple diseases in their bodies. The earth today does not have a vibrant humanity on her surface but heaps of sick bodies scattered all over like dead burdens. Average natural human productivity has gone down drastically which is compensated by mechanization and fast chemical reactions through artificial means.

The Strategies

Wheat crop

If we adopt the age-old natural methods of food production for keeping the humanity healthy and productive, we fail in filling the ever increasing hungry bellies on the earth forcing them to starve. To save them from starving, we have adopted to mechanization and chemicalization of our production processes with the result that we find alive yet sick bodies scattered on the earth’s surface. Both ways lead to unhappiness all over.

The third way of bridging the two strategies of healthy practices of food production and chemical processes to feed the huge population, as suggested by many experts of the field, we divide the humanity into two segments – rich getting healthy through organic food and poor getting diseases through artificial means of food production. This way, we fill all the bellies with inducing diseases in poor people plus keep on producing healthy foods for the selectively rich people on the earth. Is this right and humanistic?

The Crisis

Keeping a huge population alive through feeding unhealthy food and making them to suffer in front of our eyes is not humanism. Secondly, our experiences show that most of the hard-working, honest, great intellectuals and thinkers on the earth have been suffering under poverty while cunning anti-social elements have been thriving with unbound richness. Therefore, healthy and costly foods would be grabbed by the anti-social elements of the society while the real intellectuals, hard-working and honest persons would be suffering through eating cheap unhealthy food. So, the suggested strategy of keeping a balance through hybridization of healthy and high-yielding process of food production for the two distinct classes on the earth is going to prove suicidal to humanity.

Cereal-rich diet

We are not serving the humanity by producing unhealthy foods, filling all the hungry bellies on the earth and making people sick and suffer through consuming unhealthy food and die ultimately with long life spans. This way, we are only providing longevity to sick humanity. Logically speaking, we must provide healthy foods and lifestyles to maximum number of persons we can, and leave the rest to die of hunger immediately instead of dying after long sufferings and sicknesses. This is a way of ‘mercy-killing’. I understand, no humanist would ever agree to this logic.

The Solution

We have gone wrong on two issues – population rise and unhealthy food production processes. Our strategy has been around dependence on agriculture for production of human food items. These agricultural methods have been producing mainly cereals to fill the hungry bellies. Scientific look at the human diet and nutrition guides us that cereals are not the healthy foods for humanity. Comparatively, Paleolithic foods, sea foods, vegetables, fruits and legumes form the backbone of human health. Except the legumes and a few vegetables, all these foods are produce of non-agricultural processes. Even legumes and vegetables have not been under focus of agricultural production. Therefore, human solution for health lies in switching over the diet pattern from cereal-based to vegan-based.

Cereals are high density foods and are difficult to digest in the quantity these are required to fill a hungry belly. Comparatively, non-cereal foods are easy to digest for their low amount of dry matter needed to fill a hungry belly. From nutritional point of view, non-cereal foods provide a great variety of nutrients including essential substances for human health, while cereals are highly limited in provision of nutrients.

Globally, wheat has become the most dominating cereal in production and consumption while from nutrition point of view it makes a very poor diet constituent. Second place in agricultural produce and human consumption goes to sugar, particularly from sugar cane. This too is an unhealthy food the way humanity is habituated to consume it. Since, sugar is naturally available in abundance in many fruits, vegetables and non-cereal foods, its consumption in refined form is not essential for human health.

If we reorient our production processes from cereals and sugars to fruits, vegetables and legumes, we may find a solution of current crisis of human health and overpopulation. A non-cereal diet reduces human reproductive capability thus solving the problem of overpopulation.

YES, SWITH OVER TO A NON_CEREAL DIET FROM TODAY TO SAVE THE HUMANITY FROM DISASTER.

Engineering and Design, from Concept to Materialization

2012-05-06T12:45:00.002+05:30

For a few days now, I have been on conceptualization of an entrance gate for my village in memory of freedom fighters of the country belonging to the village who were lead by my father in a Gandhian movement from 1940 to 1947. The idea was discussed with others interested and involved in the project but all of these are non-engineering personnel, so it came to my shoulders to do engineering of the project. A idea of the gate design was proposed by me which was unanimously approved by all the others. Though, many small projects of this type are implemented without preparing and drawings, this being a little ticklish and ambitious project involving most of the villagers in different ways, I thought of preparing a drawing of the proposed gate design concept before starting the construction work.

While on the drawing board, I came across many misconceptions we were carrying in our minds about the gate design, and if we were to begin construction based on the mental concept of the design, we would have landed into many pitfalls, thus creating crisis while the construction was in progress. Therefore, I suggest to all those involved in engineering of a new product or building, to prepare a detail drawing of the design before giving the product its actual material form.

Various steps involved in design and development of a new product or constructing a building from concept stage to materialization are as follows -

Product idea

A necessity for an input or output of something is at the root of a new product development, and this necessity itself gives an initial idea of the product if the person has some interest in how things work. It depends on complication of the function performed by the product for how much brain has to struggle to come out with an initial idea of the product.

Functionality concept

Once an idea surfaces, functionality of the product with various possible inputs and under various conditions of its use may be visualized in imagination to further refine the idea.

Mental design

When things are considered in some details about the proposed product, a mental design of the product is made with primary focus on its functionality using inputs and providing various outputs. This mental design takes time and it is worth to spend some weeks on this thinking about the product with a passion for developing it.

Rough sketching

Based on the mental design, preparation of some rough sketches from different angles for its further evaluation becomes necessary. From here, the product gradually moves from taking a concrete form.

Interim design and drawing

The process of sketching gives a good idea of the proposed product, based on which its interim drawing may be prepared to work out broad details of the products, its constituent parts. Here again, the functionality of the product remains in focus of the designer. At this stage, many shortcomings and deficiencies of the mental design come to surface which need be satisfied through gradual improvements in the design and its drawing.

Prototype/model making

With an interim design and its drawing in hand, a prototype of the product is developed. In case of buildings and such other huge products, a scaled model of the product proves highly helpful in studying the design in detail.

Addition of Aesthetics

up to the stage of prototyping/modelling, functionality of the product had been in focus, after which needed aesthetics may be added to the look of the product from different angles to make it eye-catching and pleasing to the mind of a viewer. There is no limit for aesthetic considerations of a product, the cost involved determines the ultimate limit.

Final drawing

This is the time of finalizing the design and preparing its final drawing with all the functional and aesthetic considerations. Here again, some shortcomings of even the prototype may come to surface needing some modifications in the design.

Bill of materials and costing

Though fine cost factor of the product does not remain continuously in the mind of the designer, its broad value becomes apparent at prototyping/modelling stage. Now, based on the final drawing, bill of materials and their costs are computed. Here some cost reduction factors may come to mind which may be implemented if the designer so desires.

Perspective view and Colouring

Particularly for new building designs, three dimensional views with locational background and landscape and colour schemes from different angles are finalized at this stage.

Final construction/development

Then comes the D-day of beginning the construction or producing the product. From the above, it is obvious that for any new product, there are three main considerations - functionality, aesthetics and cost.

Globalization beyond ‘Think Global, Act Local’

2012-05-04T00:58:00.003+05:30

globalization

Various cultures developed on the globe independent of each other, with each one having some plus points above others. Fusion of all these cultures into a human culture is called ‘human civilization’. Since every culture has something to teach others following different cultures, it was to the benefit of humanity segments at different locations to learn from each other and grow in knowledge and beyond own perceptions. For this, thinking globally was necessary.

Since, every culture was a local development depending on localised natural and social circumstances, these could not be imported and implemented in locations with different natural and social circumstances. Hence, acting locally was essential. These two necessities of humanity were put together to make a phrase full of wisdom ‘think global, act local’ and this axiom worked very well until the advent of globalization of humanity through Internet connectivity. Under the new social setup of the world humanity, the age-old axiom ‘think global, act local’ is not enough. And, we need to coin a new phrase, something like ‘Be Global’ beyond cultural boundaries of the past segmented humanity.

Those who fail in being global, will be left behind in the race of humanity towards ‘super-humanism’. A truly global person is a super-human in the present context. However, with change of context over time, the norm of ‘super-humanism’ may also get revised. But one thing is certain that those left behind in the present context of globalization, shall be fit for being considered as ‘sub-humans’ by the rest of the humanity. Whatever way, one considers the issue and impact of globalization, creation of a gradient, if not a differential, is a certainty in the humanity ranging from sub-humanity to humanity, or humanity to super-humanity in the near future. This makes it imperative for the whole humanity to understand what ‘true globalization’ means. Experts in the field of these studies have set three sets of expectations from globalization of an individual. Though the original studies are limited the world of business globalization, I extend those to human globalization through interpolations and extrapolations.

Global Mindset

The first and foremost requirement of a global mindset is to appreciate customs, traditions and cultures of other people and pick up the good things of them and in return exporting local good points to other people if they like them. Indian women are still veiled while the world womanhood has gone much beyond in becoming equal partner of manhood. Women at both the places are suffering for their peculiar circumstances – exploitation in India due to inferiority consideration, and broken relationships due to treatment of equality in the advanced world. But, both have their own merits. What are deficient in both the cultures are understanding and making a proper place for womanhood. The Indian culture treats the womanhood as an object of entertainment, while the advanced cultures treat them as equal partners of manhood. Both have misconceived womanhood. A global mindset would pick up from both the cultures to eliminate exploitation of and competition by womanhood and treat them as ‘complementary partners’ of manhood. This is one crucial area, I have used for exemplification of my view on a global mindset. The concept of complementation ensures that none is complete without the other, thus eliminating both the exploitation for the inferior treatment and competition for the treatment of equality.

Global Endeavouring

Since human skills are no more limited to respective localities for applications in human endeavours due to formation of a virtual world wherein everyone may work everywhere irrespective of his/her location, human endeavours have become location independent. I, for example, work for many friends and corporations worldwide at my own pace while living in a backward Indian village. This provides greater job satisfaction and a great feeling of contentment in life. Online volunteering provides immense opportunities to all those willing to work for the pleasure of working for the poor and needy people all over the globe.

Global Citizenship

Son of a friend of mine is in America while his daughter is in Europe. He himself is a retired Chief Engineer from a state Corporation and has travelled widely with support from his children. During a visit to him, I realized that he, though living in India, has developed a feeling of being a global citizen. Today, he keeps in touch with people all over the globe as he used to do with his next-door neighbours during his youthful days. Such a globalization of thoughts, concerns and lifestyle make drastic changes in outlook too.

Being a global citizen while rooted in one’s locality, paves way for rapid changes in the localities with global dimensions which were earlier limited to local culture, customs and traditions.

Why a Gender bias in hard Sciences and Technologies Persists

2012-05-02T02:37:00.001+05:30

In our class 60 students of Electrical Engineering at University of Roorkee in 1971 batch, there were only 4 girl students. Recently in 1997, when I was teaching at National Institute of Engineering and Technology Jaipur, there were only 7 girl students in a class of 50 students of Electrical Engineering. These were not exceptional cases but represent a general trend of females participation in studies of hard sciences and technologies. Here are my observations why such a vast gender bias exists in these fields of studies.

Modesty

Linguistic Economy and Liberty

I have been interacting with an Executive Engineer of a government department for some clearances from his side to a project of mine. Our talks have never gone beyond one sentence from each side, because both of us just speak to the point. Conversely, my assistant in the project always have long conversations with an assistant in the Executive Engineer’s office. This is a noticeable difference in use of words between technical and non-technical professionals. Sciences and technologies need few words for exact expressions which require an economy in the use of languages. Women being good in talking skills with sweet voices are highly liberal in their use of language for their intended expressions. This puts women away from hard sciences and technologies.

talking machines

Converse to this, women being the best in persuading for their sweet and penetrating accents, therefore perform at their best in psychology. Psychology, like teaching, is the most preferred subject by women for requiring speaking skills and fluency which women possess better than men. In speaking lips play important roles. Lips of men are tougher for their moustaches and beard hairs hence more difficult to manipulate than that for women. In passionate kissing, for the same reason, lips of men play active roles with those of women adjusting themselves to mouldings and curves of men’s lips.

Ruthlessness and Modesty

Hard sciences, such as engineering and technology, deal with facts ruthlessly which only some persons can deal effectively. Women, for their modesty, keep away from ruthless handling of things. They are tender and are happy with being nice to everyone like mothers to their children, sisters to their brothers, wives to their husbands, and daughters to their parents. They will rather tolerate than be ruthless with someone. This feministic attribute is due to chemistry of their bodies having more fluids than those had by male bodies. Comparatively, male bodies have more of solid contents. Physically, solids are more ruthless than fluids which are modest.

Finding Jobs is Easier for Women

Women are more flexible and amenable and are likely to find jobs of their liking easier than men. Softer jobs like teaching, authorship, arts, etc are their preferred places, leaving only a few women for hard sciences and technologies.

Since, seeking physical comforts is an instinctive attribute of living-beings, women prefer staying with comfortable jobs rather than putting them in discomforts of hard sciences and technologies. Men, on the other hand, fail to find such comfortable jobs and so are forced to have discomforts of sciences and technologies. If finding jobs for men were as easy as for women, there won’t be this much gender bias in these fields too.

Logic and Conformism

Logic is the toughest of sciences needing ruthlessness to which women are not suitable. For this reason, women are the weaker in Mathematics than men. Logical weakness of women makes them inclined towards theology, Gods and religions more than men. Analytical thinking is essential for counter-viewing generally social conformism of theism, etc.

Physical Strength

Physical strength also matters in gender bias in engineering, particularly those involving field work like civil engineering, physical stamina like mechanical engineering and higher risk to life like electrical engineering. Women on their own keep away from such fields and prefer softer fields like electronics and communication.

Real studies in courses in hard sciences begin later than other courses, providing more time for students to go to other courses, only the remaining students or those with tough minds with inclinations for these tough courses are available to these hard science and technology fields.

Organizing a Work Place

2012-04-29T23:18:00.000+05:30

Purpose of a work place design is to avoid a clutter. A work may be done by a person singly, by many persons being together, or by many persons collectively, put in order of increasing complexity of the work place design. This makes the first consideration that determines design and organization of a work place.

It is found that 82 percent of working people at any place need to collaborate with others formally or informally, really or virtually. This makes almost every work of almost every person to be a collaborative work. Work in special circumstances like that done at home, however, may be a single-person’s work.

Clutter

Placement of Things

A work-place is often a place used by many or being related to work of many. So, its first requirement is to keep things at their pre-decided places with information to all persons concerned. This ensures that every user gets the thing whenever needed. Dependence for a thing of use on someone else adversely affects working. Even for a thing of use by a single person, keeping it at a preset place, eliminates time of searching it whenever needed. Therefore, at a work place, everything of use must have a fixed place for its placement when not in use. This place should be well-designed to retain the thing safely and should be easily accessible by the user.

Since, things of use at a workplace may be many, everything can’t be placed at the easiest accessible place. Their order with respect to accessibility must be in accordance to their respective numbers of uses per unit time.

Audio and Video Privacy

Second requirement of the work place is non-disturbance of working persons with each other. Two sensors of human body – eyes and ears, bring in maximum disturbing issues to the person. Therefore, these need be focused on the work rather than other things. For example, for two persons having independent jobs, if need be set close to each other, they must be sitting side by side rather than facing each other, so that each is out of view of the other.

Other persons not directly related to a person’s job but passing through the same place may cause greatest distraction if they pass through front of the working person. If someone passes through the backside of the person, the person gets curious to know who is passing and quenching this curiosity needs turning back by the workman, thus causing a severe disturbance . So, such persons must pass through a side of the working person not to fall in his/her view, and if he/she has some interest in the passer-by, just turning to the side is enough.

Reserved Space

This is the most important aspect of a work space design. A reserved space provides opportunities for leaving an unfinished task of the day on the work station itself to continue on the next day. Such a reserved space is needed to individuals as well to teams. The leftover signs of previous day orient the mind of the person to continue thinking of the past occasion. Dismissing everything of an unfinished task on a day and then reassembling things on the next day creates a disturbing discontinuity of work causing wastage of time and effort.

Such continuity is often observed at a workstation at home wherein many pending papers and other indications of pending tasks remain lying undisturbed for many days until a particular task is finished. Such an environment of continued tasks is needed at official work stations too needing reserved spaces.

In a team work, size and purpose of a team may vary depending on the mission in hand, therefore a work space for a team must have flexibility to accommodate all in a team which often varies from 3 to 12 depending on the project size. Having a team larger than 12 creates confusion and becomes unmanageable. This requires that large tasks be fragmented to smaller ones to limit the size of the teams at work.

Collaborative Working and Conferencing

Virtual connectivity has added a new dimension to work space design wherein online collaborations, consultations, references and discussions have become important tools of expanding an individual’s knowledge base and work environment. Such collaborations are needed at physical levels too in working of an organization with every team member needing online connectivity too while conferencing physically. Therefore, every organization is required to have a shared working hall with facilities to individuals for online contacts as and when they need these.

Socializing Space

Humans are not just functional mechanisms but social elements too. This attribute of humans demand that they get enough of socializing space for relaxing in between hectic work sessions apart from their individual reserved spaces. Introverts like to relax in their individual spaces while extroverts feel at home in socializing spaces. Also, none is fully introvert or an extrovert, but are so in varying proportions.

A self-serving cafeteria with tables for accommodating varying number of parsons from 1 to 12 works best for working people to relax and socialize as and when they need it.

Ensuring Wellness of Personal Economy

2012-04-28T13:13:00.001+05:30

In the present tough days of competition for a few opportunities by a huge number of aspirants, planning plays important role in life of even an individual. A well-planned personal economy ensures two things – having a smooth sailing and then working to avoid any crisis. Can we reverse this order? I think ‘no’, because only smooth sailing can ensure working for avoiding an unanticipated crisis. There are three key steps for achieving these.

Happiness

Learn from the Past

Every event of the past having a failure or success has to teach something, and it is one’s duty to take these lessons and why and how a success was achieved or a failure was caused to repeat the success story and to avoid pitfalls of failures. Apart from these lessons, the past has no other importance in one’s life. Very particularly, a person should never repent for what happened in the past but look forward for taking the next steps.

Look after the Present

Every time, I begin writing on personal wellness, an idea strikes my mind – ‘only happy persons succeed’, while the general connotation is that success brings happiness which I beg to differ. Every success or failure is just a stepping stone on a journey of life, because each of these leads to the next step. Since, no success is an end of endeavours of life, a failure too must not be an end of the endeavour.

Bondage of Cooperation

This takes us to the point that we must seek happiness first in our today and everyday and through every small thing – like smile of a child, beauty of a flower, cool feeling after sweating, a relaxed sleep, etc. Once, the mood is set towards happiness, successes begin pouring in adding to happiness. Thus, our mindset about the present is the most important for our overall wellness including that of personal economy.

Whether it is past, present or future, the golden rule of life for anybody is to live within one’s means. Today, there are a lot of money lenders – private and government, to provide you money for misspending beyond your means, and it seems attractive to enjoy life at other’s cost. But it is always a burden on the future, putting the person in a vicious cycle of borrowings, interests and worries from the lenders.

Invest in the Future

Every human endeavour needs an investment of one or more of time, thoughts, planning, contacts, money, etc. and all these investments affect our future. Therefore, an investment done with wisdom is that that brightens one’s future life, and the greatest of the brightness is happiness, that leads to success, the principle ingredient of economic gains.

Investing money leads to financial gains in the future, but for a person with just enough income, investing in portfolios with uncertain returns is not advisable. It is always better to invest for sure returns even though the gains may be low.

Saving for Contingencies

A contingency mean an unforeseen adverse situation which may come up for natural or social circumstances and calamities, such as a road accident, a famine for a dry spell, etc. To remain prepared to deal financially with such contingencies, one should have some savings in ready in his/her hands reserved for such purposes. This saving is different from an investment in the sense that it need be readily available at a short notice, while an investment may not be that liquid.

Family Planning

This point is highly relevant to areas of the globe suffering for overpopulation, like India, but is not irrelevant to anybody for consideration. Most of the current problems of humanity are population problems and the only axiom that applies is - smaller the family, better the family economy and happier the family members. Logically speaking, no couple has a moral right to produce more than two children under the present situation of the world.

Environmental Religion or Environmentalism

2012-04-23T10:56:00.002+05:30

Earth day 2012 passed away on 22^nd April once more with some catchy headlines in the media, some processions and seminars on the issue. Everybody involved in these customary events might have felt contented about his/her role in the awakening of the sleeping humanity over the issue of non-proliferation of environmental degradation. Most of the people are misguided by the media hype of ‘environmental protection’ as if some external forces are spoiling it and we must defend it. While the fact is that we ourselves are spoiling it which must be stopped.

Some media barons suggested that environmental protection must be preached and adopted in life as a religion, which I strongly beg to differ. Religion means external imposition on humanity which it is not naturally designed to adopt. For this external imposition, billions of dollars are being put to use to deviate the humanity from its natural path of humanism, essence of which is earning to live by and living through own earning. This means non-exploitation of anybody else’s hard work ensuring that none would misspend money on superfluous consumptions and health-deteriorating physical comforts. Today, religious preachers are the most dangerous exploiters of humanity, thus proliferating general exploitation of ordinary masses by extraordinarily cunning people. On a cursory look all around, I find that about 50 percent of human population is living by exploiting others, misspending money, and hence causing environmental degradation through their superfluous consumptions. Therefore, for environmental non-proliferation, the first step should be to bring to book all those involved in superfluous consumptions in the names of comforts, progress and development. This derives us to the point that by adopting environmentalism as a religion, we would be adopting another unnatural thing in our lifestyles.

Three things we should be doing but not doing not to proliferate on natural environmental seem to be very simple and natural.

Control on Population

Every environmental problem emanates from overpopulation which is caused by the nation’s own high birth rate like that in India or immigrations like that in USA. Many governments, like those of India instead of taking measures of controlling birth rate try to solve the problem of overpopulation through encouraging exodus of people to other nations, thus proliferating the own problem to other areas. In present situations, overpopulation remains a problem wherever people go and live. Strict legal measures to control the population like those adopted by China are a must for countries highly suffering for overpopulation. But the democracy’s quantitative approach at the cost of quality doesn’t allow narrow-minded politicians to take such corrective measures. Hard decisions are the only way to strike at the root of overpopulation.

Control of Consumption

Overpopulation is a curse because it directly causes more of consumption thus overloading the natural resources leading to their over-exploitation. In some countries, though population is not large, but consumption of each person is too high to be allowable from environmental degradation point of view. Controlling consumption helps overpopulated nations too.

The simplest one point program for controlling consumption is to minimise consumption of energy – fuels, electricity, etc. A small step of encouraging people to bicycle instead of using automobiles may go a long way in controlling energy consumption. In poor overpopulated countries, purchases of bicycles may be subsidised by the government.

Disciplining one’s own lifestyle covers every aspect of environmental health leading to personal health. Avoiding processed foods cuts energy consumption in processing and refrigeration of these foods, apart from providing health benefits to people.

Control on Urbanization

Processed foods and other so-called comforts of life are generally gifts of urbanization of humanity leading to concentration of people in fewer pockets instead of distribute uniformly over the land as far as possible. This leads to accumulation of filth or expenditure in cleaning it, more energy consumption per head due to population congestion. The simplest remedy lies in creating employment opportunities and other life-supporting facilities in rural areas, so that people are not forced to move to urban areas for survival or comforts.

Modern Garbage Producing Practices of Humanity

2012-04-21T04:39:00.001+05:30

Humanity all over the globe is producing so much of garbage every day that it finds itself lying on a pile of garbage. Our habits, commercial interests, carelessness, technologies being used, etc. are working to produce more garbage than human convenience and comforts. This garbage producing humanity is, thus, working against its own economic interests.

Poor Quality of Products

Whatever we possess becomes a loss if it becomes useless or unserviceable to us, and faster a thing becomes useless, higher is the loss by it and the speed of becoming useless of a thing is inversely proportional to its quality. This is not only a loss to the individual possessing the thing, but a loss to the nation as well as to the whole humanity. Every loss counts when it comes to economy of an individual, nation or humanity. Therefore, every low-quality production becomes a loss sooner or later.

Micro-level Technologies

Modern micro-level technologies produce things which can’t be repaired and have to be thrown away once something goes wrong with them. In anything, something going wrong does not mean that everything of that becomes bad or useless, but the assembly of thousands of things has to be thrown away. Thus, every such rejection has only one thousandth part bad with all the rest – 999 still remaining healthy. Throwing away such a thing adds to an unwarranted loss to the individual, nation and the humanity. Therefore, a little compromise on production quality becomes the cause of a great loss of even healthy things. This clears significance of maintenance of healthy things and repairs of things gone defective. Modern technologies are against repairs, hence perilous to humanity.

For example, mother boards of modern personal computers used to need mounting of all peripheral cards for their functionality in a computer assembly of about 20 years back. Today, motherboards have all the peripheral functions in-built, thus are very exhaustive and intricate. Any small component out of many thousand components of it going defective makes the unit fit for throwing away to garbage while all other components remaining healthy.

Obsolescence

Commercial interests of computer manufacturing industry have been working for fast obsolescence of its products immediately after their reaching users, making their replacements essential even when these are in good health. New software are designed to make hardware obsolete, while new hardware make software incompatible. This is true for peripheral hardware assemblies too. This works in favour of the industry but perilous to users. During my personal working using a computer in the last 18 years, I have created a truckload of garbage of computer hardware, and an equivalent quantity of intangible software.

Infrastructural facilities

Most of the modern gadgets and equipment used by humanity even in routine life are electricity driven, hence, quality of electricity with respect to its voltage stability and continuous availability has become critical to convenience and comforts of humans and healthy working of gadgets and equipment. Poor quality of electricity in India, for example, is one of the greatest causes of converting garbage out of healthy gadgets and equipment used by people.

Similarly heat, dust, insects and smoke in the environment work against healthy working of modern gadgets and equipment fast converting them into garbage.

All the above factors, viz. poor quality, poor maintenance, non-reparability, micro technologies, obsolescence, etc are directed towards producing huge quantities of garbage which could be avoided if the manufacturing industries look at interests of the whole humanity along with commercial interests of their own.

The Great Collision of individual Interests

2012-04-18T06:26:00.001+05:30

We all live in a market place, called the world, for exchanging what we have with what we need and others have. It is also true, in most of the instances, that whatever we need is available with someone or the other and we may get it in exchange of what we possess. Still, we are not getting everything we need and want to have. This gap between needs and acquisitions is because we are not willing to pay the price for what we want to have. The greatest form of this price is work. Thus, we are not inclined to work enough for meeting all our needs. This boils out to that we don’t conduct ourselves in accordance to our desires. This gap is the cause of inner conflicts and contradictions of each of us, as well as inter-person conflicts in the world.

Intra-person Conflict

The inner conflict within a person is reflected by difference in what he/she believes, says and does, leading to fragmentation of personality and mistrust on oneself. Self-confidence and self-esteem of the person are imperilled marring his/her performance in whatever he/she does.

This leads him/her to find ways to cover-up his/her performance deficiency through lies and manipulations, leading to more inner conflicts. Thus, the person finds him/herself in a vicious cycle of inner conflicts. Loss of human values in the world is the ultimate result of these inner conflicts for which the humanity is suffering.

Inter-person conflicts

Nobody is willing to curtail on his/her desires to suit his/her performance deficiencies, thus, efforts of acquisitions through hook or crook has become essence of life of most of us. This leads to less generation of wealth than the aggregate demand of it. This gap is filled through false transactions of wealth from one person to the other and back. A person acquires wealth through all possible means and without any relationship of it to his/her actual performance. This wealth is grabbed by others around him/her in terms of medical bills, children’s education, luxurious life offerings through bombardment of commercial advertisements, etc. To compensate for these losses, the person acquires more and then gives it away as before. The ultimate result is that there are huge incomes and expenditures of most of the individuals but none having the joys of life for which he/she is here in the world. The basic reason for this is that we are concentrating on our respective incomes, not on earnings through our productive performances.

The real value of an earning is measured in terms of joys of life, while that of an income is measured in terms of expenditures. A small earning may provide a lot of joys while a huge income provides nothing but restlessness to have more income to meet the spiralling expenditures. Since, everyone wants a high income without earning it, it has to come from work of someone else, leading to inter-person conflicts in the society devoid of joys of human life.

The Solution

Discussing a problem without making efforts for finding the solution is of no consequence or value. Therefore, a debate of resolving the collision of individual interests has to be seeded in human minds towards establishing a human life with peace of mind joys of living. I have raised two issues above – intra-person conflicts and inter-person conflicts. Though each one is providing nourishment to the other creating a vicious cycle of huge dimensions engulfing the whole humanity, seeds of the second type of conflicts lie in the first type of conflicts. Therefore, the cure of the human malady lies in resolving intra-person conflicts – conflicts of one’s beliefs, words and deeds. In a single word, this resolution may be put as self-discipline at the individual level which inter-alia dictates ‘living within one’s means’. This is very well put in a Hindi two-line poetic creation –

‘रूखी-सूखी खाएके ठंडा पानी पीव,

देख पराई चुपड़ी, मत ललचावे जीव .’

Which translates to –

Enjoy whatever little you have and feel contented,

Seeing other’s luxuries, don’t get allured.

Organization versus Individual

2012-04-16T22:50:00.000+05:30

A colleague of mine, affiliated to a communist outfit, once insisted that in their organization individuals are not given much importance as compared to the organization, which is considered to be above all. In my opinion, this is a misconception. Every organization has to have a soul and a spirit to continue working. The soul is often an ideology or an objective but the spirit has to be of some individuals driving the organization towards its goals. Therefore, at the center of every organization, there has to be one or more individuals with drive and initiative to run the organization.

An organization is not a living entity, though legally it is considered so, to move on its own. One or more persons get together to work with some set objective, they may form an organization to attract more persons towards their objective. Thus, the organization is only a media of arranging things towards the objective, present the objective outwards and attract more persons dedicated to the objective.

After the friend’s insistence, I conducted a thorough and minute study on the subject through working on a current project taken up by a few individuals, including me, without organizing ourselves into a formal organization. Though hundreds of villagers were directly or indirectly involved in the project, but only three of us formed the core group to look after routine affairs as well as plans for the future. Our set objective is to improve quality of life in Indian villages through developing infrastructures, awakening people to understand their social responsibilities and rights as citizens of the country, seek cooperation of people in general to bind all the villagers in a cohesive group, attracting those villagers back to the village who have gone away to seek employment and live in better urban comforts of life after getting educated using resources of the village, and attracting external investment into the village to generate some employment opportunities in the village. This experiment started from a single village will be spread to the other villages nearby and then to the whole area and the nation.

With these objectives, three of us joined hands to provide spirit to the informal organization, and then more and more people were attracted towards the objectives. My observations on the working confirm that only those schemes are given material form that use spirits of the three of us at the core.

Climbing Up the Immortality Mountain

2012-04-15T14:07:00.004+05:30

Intellect of a person residing in his/her brain is his/her most precious faculty as the cognitive agent and whatever is beyond its capabilities, may be questioned with ease. Nobody can see death of the self, and what is impossible to be realized in practice, or is cognitively non-existent, may be ignored from perception without much of hitch. Death of the self is both inevitable as well as unfathomable. This provides full freedom to the person how he/she perceives his/her own death.

Therefore, death of the self is ignorable up to the last breath of the person. This perception leads us to conclude the paradox that a person is immortal until he/she is alive since death of the self is non-realizable by him/her. So, if you are not afraid of your own death, you are on top of the immortality mount. Apart from this way of achieving immortality, there is yet another powerful way for achieving immortality.

From the point of view of progression of human civilization, whole humanity may be put in two divisions – those who are dead while alive, and those who are alive even after their deaths.

The Dead while Alive

A person not having an effective individual identity in his/her own society is as good as a dead body lying in a heap of others with the same characteristics. Such a life may be just a number of living-beings. If such a person is married to another person with the same characteristics, good chances are that even their descendents shall be the same. This chain of clinically alive forms of life has no value as far as human civilization is concerned. Such persons don’t deserve to be individuals but they form a crowd and have only a mob-value. Technically, such persons are termed ‘conformists’. Similarly, those who remain alive under shade of fear of their own deaths are also as good as dead bodies.

The Alive even after Death

Immortals are those who remain alive even after their physical deaths. This immortality may be achieved through three means – genes, experiences and ideals.

Immortality of Genes

Life is in continuous flow passing from one body to another through its conveyance in the form of sperms of males and ova of females without any gap in between the life in the two bodies. Not only this, it leads to multiplicity of life with retention of life in the original bodies (parents) and those in the reproduced bodies. Through descendency, only genetic information flow from parent to the child.

What about descendents of those who are dead while alive, the conformists? Such individuals provide their genetic information to the next genre, thus, producing more persons of the dead type, as aforesaid.

Immortality of Experiences

Progress of human civilization gets a boost through transfer of experiential knowledge from one generation to the other, else every new generation would begin the game from the primary level and the progress would have been limited to achievements of a single generation only. Coexistence of the former and descending bodies simultaneously for some time has the purpose of transmitting experiential knowledge from the former to the latter to expedite the progress. This makes experiences of humans of thousands of years back immortal.

Immortality of Ideals

Jagdish Agrawal of Lucknow city in India was only 11 when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. That day, he wept bitterly and changed his name from Jagdish Agrawal to jagdish Gandhi to take over ideals of Mahatma to his life to keep them alive and carry them forward. Today at 76, he is Dr Jagdish Gandhi, founder-manager of City Montessori School, Lucknow, the world’s largest single-city school which he had started with a borrowed capital of Rs 300. Thus, the Mahatma is alive even today in the form of Dr Jagdish Gandhi, as far as ideals of life are concerned.

Ideals of life are represented by synergy of three elements – thoughts, words and deeds, therefore carrying forward of the ideals means carrying forward the synergy of the thoughts, words and deeds of the parent of the ideals. The greatest cause of this immortality of ideals is carried forward through inspirations the children get from lives of their seniors. Such inspirations too are not without any reason, but the social gravity the seniors earn for themselves.

Why Nature denies Physical Immortality

The Nature follows its most fundamental principle of renewals through which everything is under transition with a thing of previous moment being replaced by another of the next moment. The death is also a part of this renewal process like the birth. Imagine, what would have been the state of your family if all your ancestors were alive today. On global basis, this would have left no space on the earth for anybody born new to keep his/her foot on long-long ago. Thus, the ‘principle of renewals’ is working of intellect of the Nature.

From Data Mining and Predictive Analytics to Super-humanism

2012-04-12T20:22:00.000+05:30

Information technology coupled with internet connectivity has flooded each connected human mind with information galore, apparently unmanageable by any person, thus, forcing everybody to remain limited to dealing with information of his/her particular interest. Even this information base is so much multifarious and multifaceted that the person is required to manage and categorize it intelligently to avoid an information chaos around him/herself.

Before this advent of information galore, most of the persons were involved in their ordinary professions, like engineering, authorship, artist, farming, etc requiring their unidirectional attention, skills and expertise. Though, skills in these professions are still important but fewer persons can manage their lives well with such unitary skills in the age of information flooding. Human brains need to be retrained to face the new challenges of information age.

Data Mining

Searching, selecting, storing data and putting it in an ordered way with respect to some particular usage is called ‘data mining’. Information serves no useful purpose unless it is made use of, else it works burden on a donkey’s back serving not purpose of the donkey. Therefore, every data mining activity need be directed towards a particular application of the person’s interest.

A basic information base may be ordered in different ways to serve different purposes

Predictive Analytics

One important application of information base is to find out the trend of changes taking place in the subject environment and predicting what is going to be the shape of things in the near, middle and far futures. This usage is called ‘predictive analytics’. Now, most of the professionals need such analytical skills to remain updated and competitive in the modern age of information galore. This analytics proves highly useful in making future plans to make them feasible, implementable and successful.

Through predictive analysis, even a plan could be assessed for what the outcome of implementing the plan shall be in different time-frames and with different circumstantial factors. These operations inform the analyst whether a certain plan be implemented or not, and if yes, with what changes and circumstantial factors.

Towards Super-humanism

Though human life was running smoothly even without multiplexed skills as are needed by the today’s information age, these skills are not superfluous. These add new dimensions to human life as its progress to a higher level than before. This higher level may be called super-humanism in its own right for its being a superset of earlier humanism of unitary skills.

But this does not mean that all human-beings having multifarious skills needed by the information age shall be super-humans. Another primary constraint of reaching this higher level of humanism is of being a humanist first, which means the person to be bound by humane morality and social discipline. The path to super-humanism is open to all.

Differences in Creativity and Productivity

2012-04-08T21:32:00.002+05:30

Though population explosion has increased importance of mass scale production over manually created unique products, the latter still retain their indispensability to life because no mass scale production is possible unless it is manually prototyped as the primary design and tested for utility and applicability. This manual prototyping of something proposed to be produced at mass scale using machines is also the result of human creativity, apart from art objects created by artists and crafts-persons.

Natural Creations

Discretionary versus Predetermined

While creativity and productivity are at work, the differences lie in tolerances. The creator has full discretion of using his/her intellect and wisdom to give out his/her best to the product, while the production machinery and their operators have to comply rigidly within given tolerances of what is prescribed to them. Thus, created things are outcomes of human brain while produced items are outcomes of unanimated machines or persons working like robots without use of brains. Even humans involved in production processes have their intellect and wisdom blocked through preset instructions to them for compliance.

Growth all around versus Unidirectional

Creative Growth

Each creation or production process is based on growth of the item in gradual steps. But the growth dimensions of a created item are different from those of the produced items. Most often, the creative process uses parallel channels working in multifarious dimensions for the growth of the outcome while all production processes are linearly designed to move in unidirectional ways. During growth of a cotton flower, its fibers, seeds, shell etc keep growing and altering in properties simultaneously as the growth process continues. The cloth making process is designed to first finalize the yarn then the cloth is weaved from the yarn.

Two growth processes involved in creation and production have impacts on the respective shapes too. Created things tend to have circular or spherical shapes while produced things have linear, planar or rectangular shapes.

Artistic versus Artificial

Artistic Hands

Both words ‘artistic’ and ‘artificial’ have the same root ‘art’ and many persons treat them to mean the same thing while there is a huge difference in senses of the two. An artwork has the attribute of being artistic, thus it is the outcome of the person’s creativity. A creative work is as good as a creation of nature, for its being created by hands, the most precious gift of nature to humanity.

An artificial thing is just opposite to a natural thing. It may also be the outcome of hand-work, but it is an imitation of something natural. It similarity to the compatible natural thing is only superficial in its outlook without any intrinsic value. Such artificial things are often produced on mass scale and machines may be used to produce such things.

Generate your Social Gravity as an Individual

2012-04-07T02:59:00.000+05:30

Concept of social gravity is akin to the gravities of celestial bodies in the Cosmos through which these bodies exert pulls on other bodies. Thus, social gravity of an individual is measured in terms of number and quality of persons he/she pulls towards his/her influence. It is just opposite of pushing oneself towards others for socializing. The process of generating a social gravity of oneself involves concentration on own attributes for making them of so much value to others that others feel attracted towards him/her. Modern marketing strategists generate such gravitational fields of organizations so that people gat attracted towards them to become their business associates or customers, replacing the age-old practice of marketing involving pushing of products towards people for creating demand for the products for selling.

A recent acquaintance of mine is a person with some agricultural wealth in a nearby village providing him enough for his family’s survival without toiling in the fields. His job is to project himself as a progressive farmer in government circles to get appointed on committees looking after interests of agricultural community. For this, he spends all his time in visiting government officials and other influential persons to please them and request them to help him in getting nominated to various committees of the government. Our state of U.P. in India has a plan to establish a Farmer’s Commission to look after interests of farmers in the state. He met me with the purpose that I help him in building his image as a progressive farmer of the state so that he may be considered for Chairmanship of the proposed Commission. In three meetings over a month, I assessed him and found him worthless, but did not want to be rude to him or discouraging him from nurturing his ambition. I simply pushed him to elsewhere with a false promise that I would do my best to help him to build the image.

This type of marketing of the self is just opposite to my view of generating gravity in the self to naturally pull others towards oneself. In the last one decade of my staying in the village after leaving my engineering profession, I have been experimenting with the idea of generating my own gravity with the objective of changing the way people think about personal versus societal interests, religious faith versus scientific logic, past traditions versus futuristic outlooks, individual’s responsibilities versus rights, etc. to usher in a better quality of life to rural people. My father Shree Karan Lal’s life long services and leadership of people of the area through the nation’s freedom struggle against British Empire and socialist movement in the independent India, have been of great help to me in establishing myself in the area as a radical thinker and idealistic person.

The social gravity concept of mine is not dominating people through wealth possession but being of value to them as a friend and guide in their needs without biases and prejudices with having life-long meaningful relationships with them and gradually transform their ways of thinking and living from orthodox, superstitious and dependent lifestyle to scientific, progressive and independent ways of thinking and living. I can’t claim much success in my endeavor but surely I can say that I have been able to sow seeds of a new wave thinking in the people’s minds.

Through my experiments in this field what I call as Social Engineering during the last decade, I have developed a three way approach for generating personal gravity by a person. Mahatma Gandhi is my role model for life. These three ways are –

Service to People

A service is a function you perform to help others. Though, some services may be deemed as selfless services but, in reality, there is nothing selfless with every little service having a motive behind. The best of these motives is the satisfaction of providing a service to a needy person. Quality of a service improves if you don’t allow the person in need to realize that he/she is inferior to you. Treat everyone as a friend first, anything else later. .

Each one of us needs and likes services provided by others particularly in moments of distress. This essentially and most importantly needs investment of time by the person interested in generating his/her social gravity. Some persons think that they can win hearts of people through possessing, displaying and investing their wealth on people. The wealth works but its impact is short-lived, while that of standing with a person in distress has long-lasting impact. Through this, not only those you stand with are pulled towards you, but even those having trust in finding you with them when needed also get attracted towards you.

For serving others, you should not expect others to approach you for a helping hand but you must reach the persons needing your services. For this, you must take a round in the locality just to say a hello to all those familiar to you to find out if anybody needs your services. Since, every service needs certain capabilities, choose your fields of services and let everybody know you as an expert in those services. These fields should cover a maximum number of persons in your locality.

Living as One of Them, Doing none Does

Being an easily approachable friend to people is the best social relationship for generating a social gravity. For this, one must do his/her best to live like others, with your individuality and uniqueness naturally making you stand apart from others. Remember, stronger your individuality and identity, stronger will be your gravitational pull on others and easier your accessibility, more popular you would be. A simple living and high thinking works best to generate social gravity.

The strength of your identity and individuality must be displayed through your deeds without you uttering a word about these by you. You must be known as a performer rather than a speaker for earning social gravity. Speak very little but when you speak, say it with force and through very accurate words and support your words by your deeds. People highly appreciate a person capable of doing what they are incapable of doing. For this, the person seeking social gravity must have some rare skills.

Passion for own Principles in Thoughts, Words and Deeds

The magic formula of establishing synergy of thoughts, words and deeds is to depend on own convictions rather than going by others views and opinions. A person, working through his/her own convictions, feels no hesitation in openly admitting his/her ignorance of something he/she really is in dark about. Admitting an ignorance is not a weakness but strength of character and honesty. Thoughts, words and deeds of a person strengthen each other if these are in synergy with each other and this synergy generates passion in the person for performing at his/her best. This synergy provides strength of character to the person preparing him/her to make sacrifices to serve his/her convictions and principle of living.

Prioritization of Individual Living

2012-04-05T19:20:00.002+05:30

What is generally called a balance in living is not an absolute thing but has different meanings to different persons. A complete balance in living about self-improvement, work, games and sports, entertainment and recreation, rest and sleep, family and society, etc is for those only who are not passionate about anything. The scale of balance tilts for persons with passion for some specific thing. Or in other words, we may say that definitions of balance in living are different for those with and without passion for something or the other. A passion for a specific activity essentially makes the person to abstain from some other thing.

A passion means devotion of more attention and time for the thing of passion, this extra attention and time has to come from abstaining from something else. Thus, abstaining from a thing may be an indication of passion for something else. This makes prioritization at different story for different persons. For a non-passionate person, all major things of life in a day may be put under six account heads with average involvement durations shown against each head for an average person.

Studies - 2 hours
Work and Economy – 6 hours
Games and sports – 2 hours
Entertainment and recreation – 2 hours
Family and society – 3 hours
Rest and sleep – 9 hours

In case of passion for any of these except the rest and sleep, the duration may go up to double of the normal at the cost of one or more of other items. But the rest and sleep get more than the indicated duration rarely. Of course, I know a rare person who is passionate about rest and sleep and he stays on his bed for the whole day except when he goes to teach in a school for about 6 hours, thus spending about 18 hours on his bed taking rest or sleeping. In this readjustment, there works another item as part of the person’s value system that keeps on getting its due share of attention and duration while others may be compromised for the passion. This puts the above 6 involvement heads in to three categories –

The person is passionate about – duration may go up,
The person’s value system – duration is maintained, and
Compromised fully or partially – duration may be reduced

Some persons may consider this readjustment as an imbalance in routine but I would like to call it a prioritization in living - essential as part of expression to freedom and individuality of the person. This prioritization makes the person extraordinary, unusual or abnormal out of ordinary, usual and a normal person. This may be considered as the person’s living by his/her choices, thus providing him/her a higher level of well-being feel than those not prioritizing their living.

The World of Fiction and Reality of Life

2012-04-02T17:09:00.000+05:30

There was a time when life was too simple to have much of interesting drama and thrills thereof. Since, human brain has evolved to seek pleasures and thrills, old time literature was filled with fiction, imaginary stories of whatever was thought to be possible and thrilling to the human brain. Things have changed a lot over time, and real life stories of most of the persons have become more interesting and thrilling than those of earlier people, needing no imaginary stories to satisfy the brain’s lust for thrills and pleasures. And for certain, real stories are always more natural hence powerful than the fiction created by even the greatest author.

A great way of getting educated is through experiences of life. But this way of education proves costly to the learner with uncertain outcomes. Often failures provide a good education but these cost disappointments to the person under experience. Purpose of every literary creation is to provide the reader with benefits of new experiences of other characters – fictitious or real, without the reader directly experiencing and learning from those. Thus, these experiences without experiencing work as education to readers/audiences/viewers of written/audio/video creations.

There are three popular ways used by literary creators to impress their readers.

Drama

What fiction creators do to empower their creations with real life feel with thrills is to dramatize the story into unexpected ways, to keep the curiosity of the reader on with the work. Such thrills are rarely felt in real life experiences, not because they are non-existent but because we fail to pay our attention to minute details.

For example, choose a person sitting in front of you, and watch very carefully everything on his/her face – skin texture, moles and marks, aging influences, expressions, etc. Although, you might have seen that face before hundreds of times earlier, still you will be amazed to see the same face with attention. It looks entirely different from what you might have realized so far. This is to prove that even real-life experiences too have thrills provided due attention is provided to them.

World of Quotations

Another type of literary fantasy is created through crafting quotable words, often considered ‘words of wisdom’ by people. Every person, ordinary or extra-ordinary, says and acts to suit him/herself under his/her own circumstances at that particular time. In such sayings, some persons are able to frame their thoughts in nice attractive words. But nice and attractive words expressing a thought by a particular person at a particular time under particular circumstances do not make the thought universally applicable, generally.

On reading or listening to nice and attractive words, people tend to get influenced intensely, and have a tendency to remember and treat such words as universally applicable quotations. The commercial world makes a good business out of such words, by spreading them without any references to the particular time, place and circumstances of saying the fantastic words. Such words become easily tradable quotations among people thus, creating fantasies in the minds of people about these words, their influences and their applicability. Many of such quotations become ideologies and get ideological respect from people.

Anybody looking for quotations for telling them to others gradually reconciles him/herself to believe them to be true to real life. Thus, they begin living in a world of ideological fantasies far away from realities of life. Indeed, there is no straight-cut formula for resolving problems of life as preached by quotations created by so-called wise brains of the world.

World of Ideologies

Ideologies had been popular creations of philosophers for creating standards of morality for humanity. These are not derived from real life but wedged in to life through theoretical development of ideas as ultimate aim for standard of living.

Ideologies are purely theoretical derivations with assumption of perfection all around, therefore deal with problems under perfect conditions that exist nowhere in real life situations. These are just good enough for targeting at in endeavors of life as perfect solutions, which the life can do even without.

Phases for Succeeding in a Project

2012-03-31T12:59:00.001+05:30

There has been a widespread misconception that only successes in a project bring happiness to the performers, therefore, one must work for succeeding by hook or crook. The reality is that only happy persons succeed, and the real happiness is accumulation of small pleasures while working through on something a person loves to do.

Joy of Working

First of all, always have a project in hand if you want to be habitual in succeeding. This won’t leave your resources like physique, intellect, wealth, etc. superfluous at any time. Secondly, for each project in hand, go through the four phases of it –

1. Assessment

Assess your own situation vis-à-vis the project in hand, particularly your weaknesses wherein you need to gear up and augment your resources. Nobody knows the performer better than the performer him/herself. Therefore, personal assessment works the best, however, suggestions from some professionals or close friends may be sought with an open mind and without feeling any constraints of going by other’s advice.

2. Commitment

Commit yourself for succeeding in the project. In this connection, three points are noteworthy –

A person gets easily committed if the project is his/her own brain-child,
The project is considered morally right, and
The project involves activities which you love to do.

This means that you should have your own projects which are morally right and align with objectives of your life, and you really like to perform for the project. Conversely, projects thrust upon a person by others lack commitment of the person.

Readjustments through feedbacks

No plan or design can be made absolutely right, hence every plan or design needs readjustments based on experience and feedback while implementing the project. Be prepared for such readjustments and don’t feel hurt or guilty about the lapses in the plan or the design.

Here, it is noteworthy that the final result of a project is not as important as the pleasure of working on the project. Therefore, feedbacks must be evaluated with respect to the joy performers may be finding while working on the project.

Some in-between failures should not be reasons for disappointments but as lessons on where a mistake is committed in the performance. No task is defective or unworthy as reason for a failure, it is the performance that may be defective.

Pursuance

Pursue each project in hand earnest but without reaching the breakdown level of your health or performance. A few points are noteworthy in this connection –

For optimal working of human brain on an intellectual exercise, an average of 90 minute’s continuous working is adequate. Thereafter, a rest or recreation is desirable.
In case of a physical activity, an average person can work for 4 hour 30 minute only at a stretch. In such an activity, the person should not reach the limit of exhaustion of all his working energy.

Take things easy, yet for passion for doing them. Adding humor to the work environment makes things easier for the performer.

Living by Choices with Decisions through Priorities

2012-03-30T15:43:00.000+05:30

Life is Beautiful

Human mind works at its best when it is able to implement its own discretion free from external constraints. Maximum and the most critical use of discretion is in decision making which we need to do at each and every step of our lives - in business, in profession, in relationships, in home or while shopping at a market place. Recent researches have established that an average person makes on an average, 217 decisions everyday as regards to his/her foods.
For reaching the best possible decision in any matter, therefore, the first and the foremost requirement is freedom from constraints. These constraints include personal biases and prejudices.

We make decisions in four ways –

An autonomous development through thoughts,
Driven by a habit,
For meeting an external demand, and
As reaction to some external action

These are ordered with decreasing quality of decisions, with the worst decision triggered by a negative emotion against someone or something else. With such a trigger, stress hormone is released in the body to fight or flight, and the decision is far from being sound.

Slave of Habit

We all are incessantly bombarded from demands of living and livelihood and we are constrained to respond to them to the best of our abilities. In this case, though we are not charged with negative emotions but the constraint of acting vitiate our decisions to varying degrees depending on an individual’s circumstances.

Most of us are slaves of habits which keep on triggering our actions – good or bad. Need not to say that under control of bad habits, we surely take wrong decisions to act. Habit of smoking is one such habit spoiling health of many of use all over the globe, particularly in thickly populated countries like India. In fact, habitual actions are results of our conscious decisions but emanate from subconscious level of mind. These involve no decisions.

The most valuable decisions of a person are those which come out of the brain without much of conscious efforts and without any external compulsions but still have their causes. These are unlike habitual acts involving no decisions, but are really decisions as prelude to some prospective actions. These are results of thoughts developed and matured over time. These are the decisions caused by the person’s choices.

Bare Natural Life

In my lone yet free lifestyle of the past two decades, I stayed in different cities of India for the physical comforts and conveniences available in urban areas. I enjoyed that period in ways full of pleasures and comforts. Still the contentment, I was searching for, was missing. Gradually, a thought developed in my mind to move to my native backward village and contribute my mite to the development of the area. On arrival, I found most of the people behaving in thoughtless ways, seeking official mercies instead of asking for their legitimate rights. Electricity was available through badly damaged overhead lines with frequent breakdowns and at 50 to 100 volts against a normal of 230 volts. People were happy with it because they were using it in unauthorized way without any legal connections and bills to them. A few telephones in the village used to be out of order for weeks without any complaints by the subscribers. My computer failed to boot up in the village. I began my fight for improvements. In these 10 years of my stay here, some critical things have improved but a lot of things are yet to be improved. Most importantly, ways of thinking of people, not only in my village but of the area, have changed. I think moving to the village has been the wisest decision of my life so far.

Such decisions are recognized by the following attributes –

Cool Priorities of Life

Every person has some priorities for his/her life, and more a person is thoughtful, better are his/her priorities. These priorities keep on struggling with routine compulsions of the person’s life, and thus keep on pushing the person to decide in favor of themselves leaving behind routine ways of life. Such decisions of the person originate from the choices of the person, are without any compulsions, and hence lead to the best ways of leading a life.

Futuristic

Human brain has no considerations of future but remains driven by the past experiences stored in its memory. Human wisdom concentrates on future through learning from the past experiences. The good decisions are those which focus on future of the person’s life. These futuristic decisions prove to be of life-changing types for the person.

Add Long-term Value to Life

All good decisions qualify to add value to life and these could not be those taken under compulsions or for short-term pleasures of life, but seek long-term happiness, underlined by a feeling of contentment rather than routine satisfactions.

Differentiating Aiming from Targeting

2012-03-26T17:21:00.000+05:30

The two words 'aiming' and 'targeting' are often treated as synonyms and these are alternatively used without understanding the difference. Here, I would like to point out that no language has two or more identical synonym words. If similar meaning words are there, they mean differently.

'Aim' is a subjective word which means it is with respect to the person involved in the process of aiming. 'Target' is an objective oriented word. A terrorist may target to terrorize people through his/her indiscriminate shooting in a crowded place. For this, the terrorist need not to involve him/herself in the process of aiming. But if some particular person is to be killed by the terrorist, he/she need to aim at the person only.

A target is a large canvas which may include an aimed object. Thus aim is a precise element needing a precise operation and this may be included in a target. Another way of differentiation comes to my mind. A person may shoot thousands of bullets to kill a person or he/she may do so by using just one bullet. The former process shall be called 'targeting' needing no precision while the latter is 'aiming' precisely.

The process of aiming comes into effect after the target is identified. This way, 'aim' is a verb while 'target' is a noun. A target may be there without or irrespective of the subject but an aim can not exist without reference to the subject person.

Sorry State of Body Image

2012-03-23T19:28:00.001+05:30

Social norms of a good body are highly distorted by advertising media for serving their commercial interests through misguiding people about what real beauty is. There is a need of developing parallel reality forces to counter the media attack on humanity.
Sorry State of Body Image:

'via Blog this'

Three Levels of Capability – Competence, Conduct and Creativity

2012-03-22T20:12:00.000+05:30

Capability

Word ‘capability’ is a composition of ‘capacity’ and ‘ability’. Out of these, the capacity of the person is in-built into his/her body and mind at the time of its assessment of capacity, while ‘ability’ is acquired by it for enabling itself for an assigned task. So, for acquiring a capability, the person has to be fit in body and mind and has ability to learn.

Before coming to the main topic of capability, there is one aspect of personality that needs a due consideration, and that aspect is ‘potential’ of the person. It is a prospective word related to what the person may become in future, if moves on a right path with focus on the objective, with the constraint that the objective be set to fall within boundary of the potential of the person. Thus, potential is the maximum a person may achieve.

Competence

Competence

Capability of a person is a mix of intellect, competence and skill. The intellect is an intrinsic capability of the person to sense a situation accurately and understand it, competence of the person is his/her capability to deal with a given problem, while the third component of capability – skill, is the person’s capability of physical handling the problem. In a broad way, competence includes both intellect and skill of the person to deal with a certain assignment. Therefore, competence is the first level of capability of a person subject to an assignment. It neither related to the person’s talent in general nor his delivering results for which still higher level capabilities are desirable.

Character and Conduct

Competence may only be used at work to deliver results if the person has a high level of character to understand his/her responsibilities and duties related to his/her position in the situation and conducts him/herself accordingly. An example of its elucidation may be working of administrative officials of governments in India. There is no doubt about competence of most of them to deal with their responsibilities effectively. But for want of morality in their characters and conducts, they remain negligent to what they are expected of and prove ineffective as far as people are concerned.

Therefore, competence without a good character of a person is of little value to his/her society. This makes me to put character as the second level of capability of the person. The character of the person makes him passionate about performance on the task in his/her hand. His/her passion for the job works as an intrinsic motivation for him/her to work.

Creativity

Third capability of a person is his/her creativity which arouses him/her to be innovative at work, solving problems or in new developments. It is a rare yet precious talent, working as the hub of developing human civilization. Yet, creative persons are less productive for their lack of interest in routine jobs while key to productivity are routine and repetitive operations on materials with application of pre-programmed mind but without application of the person’s brain.

How to Ask for a favour – Art and Science of Persuading

2012-03-19T18:58:00.000+05:30

Today morning, I saw a beggar woman at a public place. She is handicapped too, and begging is her source of livelihood. For an article, I wanted to take a photograph of her while she was at work of begging. To show my decency, I asked her whether I could take a photo of hers. She asked me why I wanted to do that, to which I told her that I want to show to the world what people do for survival. She did not allow me to take the photograph. I was hurt at that, and tried to find out why she refused.

Beggar

I decided to take a photograph of a person under similar conditions of living, and I searched around. In India, there are plenty of beggars and handicapped persons, so I found another handicapped person soon. I approached him and asked for his permission for a photograph. He also asked me the reason. I told him that I want to show to the world what types of problems are faced by people in their survival. He agreed to be photographed.

Then I analyzed the difference in two approaches of mine in the two cases. In the first case, I said to project her solution for survival, while in the second case, it was the problems he has been facing. The first beggar was not sure whether her solution for survival was right or not and she was fully responsible for what she has been doing. She may be blamed for choosing a wrong way, so she refused to be photographed. Indeed, there may be many alternative ways for a survival. In the second case, I had mentioned that I wanted to project his problems, for which he was not responsible. So, none can blame him for the problem.

These instances derive a way of persuading a person. A person may be easily persuaded to do a favor if he/she has no fear of getting blamed for his/her. A solution is always subjective to the person inventing and trying the solution, while a problem may be objective without reference to the person concerned. So, the technique of persuading a person for agreeing to something is to eliminate possibility of making him/her accountable. This is important in the art of business management. To elucidate my point, I take another fictitious example.

For a team leader to ask for an active participation from one of his/her team member in solving a problem, he/she must ask the latter if he/she has any problem in being more actively involved, instead of asking him/her direct why he/she is not active as expected. In the first case, the leader seems to be extending his/her helping hand for solving the latter’s problems if any while in the second case the member is accused of being inactive.

Self-confidence

Attitude of a person to an inducement depends on his/her self-confidence also. A self-confident person is harder to deviate from his/her line of action than those devoid of self-confidence. A self-confident person needs a boost to his/her confidence to persuade him/her while others look for guidance.

Self-confident

There may be two ways of winning favour of a self-confident person against his/her wishes. The first one is to kill his self-confidence and make him docile. This way is highly damaging to humanity as self-confidence is always a precious asset of a person, are rare persons have in enough quantity. Concept of God and religions was evolved for this nasty purpose and is still in use for a huge majority.

The second way of winning favour of a self-confident person is to display to him/her that his/her self-confidence is much appreciated and it would be better utilized with some readjustment. And the persuader may tell his wish in this desired readjustment in the use of the self-confidence. Say, for example, a person is busy in reading a book and you want him to accompany you to the market on a shopping spree. If you ask him/her directly for leaving the book reading and giving you a company, most probably, he/she would refuse. But if you tell him that his book-reading is very valuable for enhancing his knowledge but, at that moment, you wish to make good use of his vast knowledge and experience in shopping in the market. Possibility of the person agreeing to accompany you is high.

Under such a situation, a religious preacher would tell the busy person that knowledge acquired by a person through sensory organs is all false like a dream and reading the book won’t provide him/her anything with an essence. For gaining a true knowledge, divine grace is essential and that is possible through company of some divinely enlightened person. The purpose would be shake his/her confidence in him/herself and the book-reading to deviate from his/her chosen task.

Impression of the Persuader

Everyone gathers a true or false impression of every other person he/she comes in contact with. This impression works as a filter on words of the other person, thus determining their impact. The words may appear anything from highly valuable to totally superfluous. Therefore, if you want someone to listen to and agree with you, take care of your impression on the person. The impression often takes a long time for building up, but surely works for a much long time in future. The real and long-lasting impression is made through deeds, with words playing only a supportive role.