Is it possible to define Life? or describe it?

A lot of us have attempted it. In fact every one of the 6 billion odd people of the world can describe life in their own words and each one can be interpreted in innumerable number of ways by the same 6 billion odd people. Any one that begins to describe life, uses one aspect of it depending on his/her speciality. A physicist view of life is entirely different from that of a politician or a priest. In all cases, they have a view of life and then they begin to live according to their views and their society influenced ambitions.

The basis of misunderstanding of life is just this. To have a view of life and then living that view. Because it is in our nature to try and understand everything with known factors and just live by that well known popular definition.

Let us take an example of a sweet dish, say Gulaab Jamun. Describe it. A Round, brownish sweet flour based dish in dripping sugar based solution. You can then break down to its constituents, recipe and list down the calorie value. Let’s say you took 1 hour to do all that. That would be your extensive description of Gulaab Jamun and you may even write a Wiki page for that. But to someone who has not had Gulaab Jamun in their life, all of this means nothing. They are just mere words of description which he/she can interpret and imagine in his own ways. Now serve one of this to this person. The person eats it and declares whether he/she likes it or not. But now, he also knows what a Gulaab Jamun is. No description is needed but somehow the moment he ate the Jamun, he knows what it is.

Life can only be created by another life. We owe our life to our parents. The tree that stands tall and big owes it to the seed from the fruit of another tree just like it. If you go back in the reverse, you will find that all known lives are only created through another life. We can trace this back till the point where the Universe existed as just primordial life substance.

According to Big Bang theory the Universe came out of an infinitely dense point of nothing. According to String theory this known Universe is just a result of collision between two other parallel universes. Whatever it may be, the Universe in the beginning was just a hot molten primordial life substance. The primordial life is the one that has evolved itself into various life forms as it exists in the universe now. Imagine that moment of heat when the whole Universe is densely packed in just a square inch or so. Earth, Sun, Moon, Planets, Galaxies, Stars, nebulae everything is contained in that one square inch of primordial life.

When that primordial life expands into what it is now, do you think Earth is a different object from Moon? Do you think the star in a distant Galaxy is separate from the stone lying on Earth? Physically they look separate, but their origin is nothing but that life substance. Now what about us. Humans. We didn’t jump from somewhere into this Universe. We evolved from the same life substance as this primordial life. Hence we aren’t separate either. If you keep thinking in this terms you will understand that the whole Universe is nothing but just this life substance evolved/manifested into various forms.

I cannot call this a creation because everything was just there and only evolution and manifestation of life is happening.

Life evolves itself and manifests itself into various forms because it wants to know its limitlessness by manifesting into infinite forms. It wants to live all of its possibilities, through the various life forms including us. In that sense the Human form is a stage in evolution which is able to perceive and experience this life in the most advanced way possible. So if you think about it, it is not us that are living our lives but it is Life itself living the life to experience and know itself with the help of this manifestation called Humans.

Whatever you do in life, be it good or bad and whatever you experience, pleasure or pain, you are just being an instrument for life to experience those various characteristics. When this instrument is no longer fit to experience life, life dissolves it in itself. If the life that is manifested inside the instrument has more desires to experience the life, it manifests again by being born as another life form, not just human but any life form. This is what they call as reincarnation. This can go on and on because as long as this particular portion of Life has things to do it will keep manifesting, because Life has nothing but infinite time and infinite Life energy to support this Life.

In short, Life is not something that has to be defined and we live by that definition, but rather we let the life live through us to experience life itself.

WARNING: Do not read this post, when you eat. It is ok for Pregnant women to read this post as they are used to vomiting.

This is an incident involving a few of my friends but unfortunately I wasn’t present in this situation when it happened. So I am narrating it from a third person who heared it from the friend’s cousin perspective.

It was a fine evening in Chennai. An evening that could have been spent relaxing at the beach or playing in the nearby ground, but they decided to spend the time boozing at a local bar. This local bar is of the local kind which people in Tamil Nadu call it as “Wine shop” and pronounce is as “Voyin shaap”. It is all driven by the economics. Depending on how much money they can pool in they go to a 3 star hotel pub like the Tinto at Residency inn or a decent pub or a billiards club and if the money is tight they end up in this particular Wine Shop. There is no preference or differentiation of class when it comes to boozing. After all we were in college and we had only so many things to think about – booze, girls, more booze.

So on this fine evening my friends started their pooja (code word for boozing) in one such local wine shop. Just like the wheels on the bus go round and round and the Cycle of life goes round and round, glasses of whiskey and vodka go round and round, sometimes mixed with pepsi, sometimes with coke, sometimes with water from water packet, sometimes in RAW Format (not the Camera RAW), and in some weird times it can go around with Orange Juice, especially if you are in USA and you have exhausted your supply of soda cans and you have no other choice but do the mixing with Breakfast items!

And as it settles and goes, the first round is usually an initial slight jolt. It warms up everyone, relaxes them. It puts them in a mood of laughter and it slowly increases the steam and volume of their voice. After the second round, people forget the count. They can no longer keep track of the rounds and hence after Round 2, the count never goes up. It’s like those film actresses who celebrate their 28th birthday for 20 times.

The topic of discussion changes from politics to Internal Affairs. People start speaking their mind out. The family, the girl next door, the girl in the opposite door, the girl who closes the door, the girl who never opens the door, the girl who slapped him (twice), the girl who gave him halwa (and he gave Mixture (pronounced as Mikchar) in return), in short the discussion of Internal Affairs has always been about girls and how the guy loves her so much or how he lost her to another guy who had a car. While some of them come only to drink with no Internal Affairs to discuss, others come only to eat side dishes. They are designated Side dish eaters, Like me. Hey, I was a good boy, I can’t publicly tarnish my own image or risk going back home with “Boozer” written on my forehead.

So, as the rounds went by, with people losing count and not knowing when the barrel becomes full, one of them stops talking. No speech, closed mouth, eyes looking at the top and head slowly whirling. At this point he slowly points his hand to the fan and requests it to be turned on. People around him ask what happened, and why is he pointing to the fan as it was already on and running fine. In the next second, his mouth blasts open and a huge map of the motherland is laid out on the table with puke.

The waiter comes and calmly cleans the mess, they are used to it. But after the cleaning he doesn’t move.

“Oh, here is 20 Rupees!” hands out one of the Side dish eater.

“Saar, extra give saar!” asks the waiter politely.

“En paa?” (Why man?)

“Saar, Vaanthi perusa irunthichu saar!” (The Vomit was big)

Another side dish only eater hands out 10 more rupees and makes him happy. But just as he is about to leave, he calls him back and says

“Hey, you cleaned up the Map of India, but you missed Sri Lanka!” pointing to a small portion of puke left out on the table.

Atleast they got something out of the extra money that they gave and hence the Map of Puketopia was drawn and withdrawn.

MORAL OF THE STORY: When you do something, do it completely. Never leave a residue.

Apparently the following song seems to be a rage among 2-3 year olds! It is like their Rock music! The boy in the song probably has a huge fan following like Bono, I mean look at the cute winking that he does!

Pancake Mommy Pancake,

Mommy fired the Pancake,

Rice flouru and Urad flouru, mixed and formed the pancake,

For the father fouru,

For the mother threeu,

For the brother twou,

for the baby onnu,

Eatu Eatu Desireu,

Turn and ask means rituals!

Which song you ask? It is the Tamil Rhyme song – Dosai amma Dosai. Thank you Youtube! What would those of us staying away from the homeland, do without Youtube!

What is Now?

What time is it now on your watch? Is it 6PM? Would you call it as “Now”? But one hour later when it is 7PM it can still be called “Now”. Go forward 10 days and you can still call that as “Now”. Heck, by the time you say the word “Now”, the now might have moved a couple of seconds. I am writing this now, but you will read it later which is now for you. So when exactly is now? If you think about it, our past, present and future is nothing but an infinite string of “Now” – Now, Now, Now, Now …! It has always been now and only now has existed in real and nothing else.

What about the past and future? Where are they?

The past is not going to be found outside. You can find its imprints but that’s it, there is no secret place where they keep re-enacting our past. The past is in your memory. We remember things and that is how we relate to the past.

- We love the good things of the past and we want to repeat that experience and we also hate the bad things and we don’t want them to happen. This is when we intensely pray God! We pray to God that we don’t want old bad things to happen again to us. But they happen to us anyway and then we say “Why God Why!”.

- The opposites of life makes sure that if you get something good, you also get something equally bad. So if you want something better from the past, you will have to accept something worse too. It goes on in a vicious cycle and if you believe in re-incarnation we continue this ignorantly in our next life.

- The Past should be used only for learning and for guidance. You have to totally understand that what worked in the past may not work in the present moment, lest you want to end up in that vicious cycle.

So where is the future then? I have no idea! According to what I have read, there is an infinite cosmic mind and it contains possibilities of the future. Let it be so or Let it not be so, but our point has been that we always worry about our future. We have to earn enough money so that we can live a peaceful life in future. We have so many dreams built up, believing on a future that is yet to happen. We work with the financial adviser and chart out a really intelligent plan which is based on the “Stock Market” and add hope to the equation. When our hopes shatter, we blame it on the Society or Government or we get angry with our Gods. Well, Future is always going to be full of surprises.

The Surprises of Life
I will share with you a short Zen story I read.

A student goes to stay with a master to learn fencing. For the first week, the master asks the student to completely do only the household chores like cooking, washing, cleaning and serve the master. The master treated him like dirt. Apart from this, the master began to attack him with a stick every now and then randomly. The student would go to the kitchen and he would be attacked, he would go to the bedroom and he would be attacked. Every time the student kept track of which places he hides and he would become alert there. But the master kept using new hiding places and surprised him everyday. The student finally gave up, he left all the memory of the hiding places. He became completely alert wherever he went and was always ready for a surprise attack. The next morning when he went inside the kitchen, he immediately defended the surprise attack in the blink of an eye. The master said “Now you are ready to learn!”.

The experiences of the past makes us more alert and this is the learning we have to carry. Be aware at all the times, because life is full of surprises. It doesn’t mean you have to live in fear, it just means awareness or alertness. It was not the past solution of keeping track of the hiding places that helped him, but the new solution of acting out of alertness in the moment that helped him. Your alertness decreases when you worry about the past and dream about the future all the time. When you be in the moment, your alertness naturally follows. For learning more about Awareness, I found the book – Awareness By OSHO to be very informative.

Tuning into the moment
What does this mean? Shall we all stop doing what we are doing and just go live in the moment, partying all the time? That’s not only impractical, it is also stupid. So don’t get carried away when people want you to live in the moment. Think what it means.

It means that, continue doing whatever you are doing, but the only focus should be on what you are doing right now with complete awareness.

When the Zen Master eats, he just eats. But when we eat we do the following:

1. Talk.
2. Think about stuff.
3. Worry about stuff.
4. Criticize the food.
5. Count the calories.
6. Keep track of the time, so you eat fast.

Basically we do everything but eating. Passively eating and actively engaged in other stuff. If we do the reverse, Consciously eat  and let the other stuff just float by like clouds. When you consciously eat, you will automatically relax and eat slowly. You will be more in the moment. This is actually easier said than done. I have been trying this for the past few weeks (struggling, with stupid jokes flowing during serious contemplative moments!) and I am hoping that I will get a hang of it someday.

So What happens if you are in the now? You tune yourself with the Universe. You will begin to exist with the flow of nature, establish a deep harmony. When you are in the now, a lot of questions get answered automatically. It is like answers flow as thoughts from the silence of your mind automatically with no effort. The entire Universe is in Meditation and when we tune ourselves into it, we are naturally in the meditative state.

I also learned that any technique of meditation only helps you to be in the meditative state. It is just the beginning and it has to be like that all the while during the day even when we don’t practice the technique. The more things I get to know, the more ignorant I feel.

So Let’s Just be.

A humble attempt at various stages of life the way I see it.

THE BEGINNING
Each of us are born from our mother’s womb (or a test tube) as a free being. The only thing we probably knew was eat, sleep, excrete. We didn’t even have the need to think about anything because what do you need to think when you are being taken care of by your parents! But as we grow, we begin to learn from our surroundings. So a person born in a small village in India is only exposed to the teachings he can receive from there. In other words we begin to see the world around us as whatever there is. This also holds true for religion. We are all born into a religion to which the parents belong. If the parents are atheists, we are born atheists too. But the point is, when we are born we learn to see what we perceive from our nearby external world as the truth. This is our beginning stage, the stage where we narrow ourselves, where our exposure is limited and our idea of the world is confined to our location. This is a stage till we go to a school.

THE SCHOOL
As we grow, we know more. School teaches us history of the whole wide world in its own prejudiced way. I mean, we believe what is written in a text book to be the truth and hope that what is written there will guide us in our lives. We are exposed to science. We are taught how to communicate. Basically, we learn from the books, through the interpretation of the teacher. Our understanding now becomes wider. But then, for the most part, the education that we take is understood more from a career perspective. A Long preparatory effort of money making in your later life. A few of us learn it for the sake of learning, for the mere joy of understanding something new and expanding our knowing. A rare few of us can see beyond school and learning and find their own path, but in general we end up preparing for the big money making days, whatever way it may be. Art, Music or Literature doesn’t matter, only that which can help you earn money is learnt. After all, money is needed for our survival, so we ourselves do feel the necessity. Whatever opinion on religion we had will most likely continue the same during this stage.

THE RAT RACE
We land a job or some of us hopefully will land a job after we graduate. We work tirelessly for a big name corporation to earn our living. We sacrifice everything for the sake of earning money. We put up with the boss, we put up with the traffic, we put up with life in general and focus our whole energy in money making. This can be endless and varies from person to person. The desire never ends and as years pass by we continue to live a meaningless life of making money. Not that it is wrong, It is just that we don’t get a sense of fulfillment, a perception merely. Also, there is a retirement life that needs to be taken care of and all the talks about preparing for the future keeps you very busy.

THE TRANSITION
During this stage, We tend to know more now, because we read the news and blogs on the internet, it makes us more knowledgeable of the things that go on around the world. We begin to have our own opinions. We can talk about various topics for hours with our friends during that Saturday night party and really go on till we can prove that we are more knowledgeable than others. Our ego builds up and it may make us question the need for a religion or a God. The Atheist mind now comes into picture. We feel the need to go beyond our tradition. This is not bad and may not be good either. Because, the questioning Atheist minds is actually the first step to the Truth, but if you let the ego breed into Atheism, it might mislead you. Some of us, eventually get tired of taking a side and fighting for one way or other and progress to a stage of Agnosticism. But again any judgment of any transition happening to an individual is wrong, so don’t be worried about whatever you are right now, whatever is happening right now is the truth. Whatever situation you are in right now is the reality, worrying about the past or wondering about the future wont help at this point.

But life can test you. Life gives you jolt sometimes. Life wants you to understand life and not just go on in the closed confined beliefs that you carry, whatever it might be. Your whole understanding of life will be questioned by life itself. This is the point where you are given a chance to get out of the Rat Race, to break free of all prejudices. You are merely given a chance to understand things better. But we want logic don’t we. We want explanations for everything. Sorry, but the jolt that life gives to you will have no logic. It will just happen for no reason. It will challenge you to enter the world of questioning yourself, questioning your understanding of everything.

There is only 2 possibilities from here:

1. You can choose to ignore, offer whatever resistance you can and get back into the Rat Race after facing several hardships and then continue blaming Yourself, Society, Government or God.

2. You can begin the process of questioning. You can step into a whole new world and a new way of understanding. A new life will begin. You will be in the Rat Race, but the Rat Race won’t pull you with that force any more. You will start going at your own pace. That own pace might be faster than the Rat Race Pace or slower. But the difference is, in the former you are being pulled and in the latter you are in control and you choose your speed. It will be like every one is begin pulled at 50 miles per hour around the track in their lanes and you would be flowing consciously at a varied speed, walking freely at the pace comfortable to you, in your own lane. You will begin to break free.

THE SEEKER
If you chose the blue pill, the point number 2. Welcome to the world of seeking, where you seek only the absolute truth. If you took this step, don’t worry because there are always fellow seekers who guide the other seekers in your path. Your real journey begins now, it doesn’t matter where, but it will happen only in the now. Only “Now” will be important. Whatever your mind so far has thought about Religions, Atheism, Agnosticism, Some cult are only stepping stones. They were just connecting stations before your long journey of seeking. Your Journey begins not in the future nor did you miss it in the past, but it is in the changing now. It is now and never ever. It is very important to understand what is “Now”. What is Now? We will see…

When you turn on the Mac, this is what happens:

1. The Mac Chime sound

2. Show Apple logo and spinning wheel.

3. Login screen

4. Load up.

5. Keep the total boot time to 20 to 25 seconds so that windows doesn’t feel bad.

When you turn on the PC, this is what happens:

1. Ha ha ha.

2. Show Windows logo and send a tiny blue line spinning in a line to show that it is doing something.

3. Wait for user to get irritated.

4. Show a better Windows logo and a fancier blue thingy spinning in a line to show that it is doing something else much fancier than before. Put the word Microsoft before every word (including the word Microsoft).

5. Show following random messages

- Windows is starting up (Duh!)

- Running Startup scripts

-  Applying user settings

- Sending viruses to Alien ships

- Ordering Pizza

- Laughing at the frustrated user.

6.  Login screen. Ask user to press the secret combination to invoke the login prompt (read CTRL-ALT-DEL)

7. Wait for Logging in.

8. Login and Load up all the taskbar programs and don’t let the user do anything else.

9. If Superman has done 1 million rounds around the Earth (assuming he does 1 round per second), then allow the user to take control and do the work.

Well, I guess this is one other opposites of life that I should have mentioned in my previous post!

What is it?
Good and Bad exist in the external world like Day and Night. Positives and Negatives coexist in the Universe and are the driving forces behind its creation and further evolution. Electricity itself is the flow of electrons in one direction and protons in the opposite direction. But this is very generic and one would wonder what it all means and what could be taken out of it. These are the kind of generic basic lessons I was getting from that cartoon show back in 2007 and It actually took one year to dawn on me that I should probably read a few resources to understand this in detail.One of it was a book “What is Zen?” by Alan Watts, a Classic.

One way of looking at it was, without the bad you cannot appreciate the beauty of Good. Without night, you will not appreciate the light from the day. So, does this mean bad is essential? Should things go bad? Should there be “badness” in this world? Don’t we all think that how peaceful the world would be if everything is just good? May be we can all export the badness (not bad people) to some other planet and just keep the juice of goodness on Earth? Will that give us happiness? My mind was taking crazy spin around these thoughts when I was trying to relate what the Zen wisdom of law of opposites meant in real life.

Where is it?
It was a constant search. I never realized that I should look in the direction of the thoughts that come in your mind. You have so dwelt in our thoughts, so become one with our thoughts that we forget to watch our own thoughts and we just lead a reactive life to our thoughts. In other words, we just identify ourselves with our thoughts. If we get anger, we show it. If we get sad we react to that sad thought. All of this happens as we get stimulated from our external environment and we just remain like a dancing puppet in the hands of the external world controlling us all the while.

The next thing we do is the moment we see what we are thinking, we immediately judge ourselves with those thoughts. We judge that we are good when we are kind and we are bad when we are angry. Because, we have identified ourselves as this Body and Mind, anything good done by the body and mind makes us feel good and massages our ego but anything done bad or goes bad makes us feel bad about ourselves and we accumulate fear, guilt and what not! We then let that trigger more emotions within us. We are just a bundle of these chains of infinite emotions of opposite polarity arising from our thoughts. The modern civilized man has actually lost himself in his mind of opposite emotions.

This was the opposite that had to be looked at. The opposite of Good and Bad thought right within us. Knowing is Good, but if you are not conscious enough, it can cause the rise of your ego and whenever someone questions your knowledge and if you don’t seem to know it right, your ego will be hurt and you feel bad. Knowledge caused the Goodness in you, while the Hurt ego made you feel bad. This is the kind of existence of opposites within you.

Why is it?
The realization was that Good cannot exist all by itself. It attracts very quickly the equivalent bad very close to itself. So Good and Bad exist together as neighbors in your mind. How crazy is that? All the while, the moral world wants everyone to only be good, but the law of opposites says you can only be good if it can attract equal amount of bad. Go ahead, give it a thought, this is always true and there is no escape. If you are conscious you will quickly find that all the so called “badness” thoughts are actually getting buried by you within yourself because you are afraid the society might think you are mad. So long you would have thought you had controlled your anger and then one simple insult or a provoke you burst and you don’t even know it happened.

What to do?
At some point, some circumstances lead me to this book – “Emotional Wellness” by Osho. I mainly picked it up because I wondered if it could help me manage my fear and anger. I had no idea that I would be introduced into the world of consciousness and being aware of yourself and how one can deal with all your emotions completely. The essence of the book was to take the stance of a neutral observer and watch as you feel these emotions, without making any judgments. The emotions don’t stay within you if you just watch them. They stop their flow and stay with you as soon as you want to pass a judgment. Otherwise, They just flow out slowly and steadily. It becomes a living meditation where you watch your feelings all the time as a neutral entity/being. You will finally become that neutral being from where only the light of neutral energy flows. This is what is described in the book and if you read that in detail, a lot of it makes sense. Osho keeps it interesting and understandable with Zen stories and humour throughout the book. The only thing left for me is to experience this practically and I had been practicing that ever since I finished it (which was 2 weeks back I think!). At first, it seems difficult but I think as you go it would become more free and natural to observe.

The Fight of Good against Bad:
The society always tells of the stories of the fight between good and bad. The Good finally wins and the bad is destroyed. Sorry, but they are just stories where only people who couldn’t manage their “badness” were killed by the society. The truth is there is no point in killing bad people, not even killing yourself if you turn bad. Because it is the badness that you have to let it out. There is no point in letting the Good and Bad in you fight with each other. This is exactly why Gandhi and Buddha vouched non-violence as their motto. Ahimsa is the way that they said. If you have bad thoughts in you, you just watch it and let it flow out, leaving absolutely no stain in you. The moment you judge you leave the stain of guilt. Never Judge, just watch. Watch it fill your body and flow out of every single pore of your body.  This is also what it means when they say offer it to God. Osho simply said that in practical terms. If you let it out, it is automatically absorbed by God or Universe.

Do you remember the scene when Munna forgives himself and asks for forgiveness from Circuit in “Lage Raho Munnabhai!”. The emotions were let loose and they flowed out. What was left was the unconditional friendship love between them. Where was Munna’s anger/guilt and Circuit’s sadness after that one single act of letting it flow consciously? In fact this is exactly what Gandhi employed against the British. He will remain the watcher, will not react and will neither co-operate to all the laws laid out by the British. Only peaceful protests. Gandhi made the entire country just remain silent and watch as the British left us eventually. It is another story whether we really got the “Freedom” after that. But the essence that Gandhi applied externally is the same for your inside, with respect to the fight between Good and Evil.

Watch the evil in you without any judgement and also watch the good in you without any judgment. You will raise above the ordinary Good and Evil and you will become pure unconditional goodness. This is what is preached by Osho, Buddha and all enlightened souls.

And now we Begin:
If you want to understand the universe, you have to understand yourself first without any judgment or conclusion about yourself. You have to keep observing yourself until you reach the point where you simply become the observer with no relation to the thoughts that arise in you. You go on as being that neutral observer after that. This process never should stop, and the wasteful thinking slows down and would eventually stop. This is the state, the state of a neutral observer that has no opposites. You are then in control and aware of what you do. You can then choose to provide that neutral energy to whichever thought you wish to. Your thinking will now be clear and conscious. This is where I am trying to get to and I am wishing that every single human gets his/her opportunity to know this and get to this.

I am now reading another book of Osho – “Awareness” to know about this in detail. So far this book has been great and I will try to provide a summary and a review when I finish reading it.

It is interesting when you look back at your life. 10 years back you were in a state that is completely different from what you are in right now. Every moment you are changing. Life offers various opportunities at various times and you make use of it, you make good, you make bad, you fall into a trap, you get lucky. It all happens. This journey of life is not the same for everyone and we all experience different things. But at some point during our life, we begin to question the purpose and want to know where does all these ups and downs lead us. We are happy when we are up and we are sad when we are down and we have no clue why we can’t just be happy all the time. When you start questioning deeper, the door opens up for you into the answers of life. This particular part of the journey will be the most exciting and completely surprising. Every single moment you will see something new that you never thought about before.

The funny thing is the door opens up to you in strangest of the places in strangest of the situations. The Universe knows where to get you started. This is why I am always surprised that my journey into the world of truth and spirituality started with a simple cartoon TV show. Can you believe it? Neither can I! The show is – Avatar, the Last airbender. I got curious. The philosophy and concept behind the show was extremely intriguing for me and even though some of the names of concepts were familiar to me, they were totally new because I had not gone any deeper into those. Nevertheless, it happened and the door was opened out for me. I chose to step in. This was 2 years back and I had no idea what I was stepping into, but looking back I am glad where I am and I am glad that I stepped in.

I chose to read about Zen Buddhism and the associated Eastern Philosophy. I picked up a simple book on Zen from the library – Zen, the Beat way by Alan Watts. It was a compilation of Alan Watts’ Radio commentary on Zen. It opened up to the world of Eastern Philosophy and I actually felt ashamed that I, coming from the east, had to travel all the way to a small town in the west to read about the history of the region I come from. Interestingly, Alan didn’t say anything about the religion as such and he covered various Eastern beliefs and how each of them conveyed the same exact underlying meaning. It was a great learning happening on that day. A 100 page book did kindle a lot of curiosity in me. I started searching on what all these meant, I wanted to know more because I believed there is something in this that will offer solutions to me. There was some unknown attraction towards this, I didn’t force myself into this but it was just happening and I was being pulled into it.

I like science. I like to question the logic behind everything and see if there is scientific proof to those. I love science fiction stories and movies. Quantum physics had also fascinated me for a long time. Not at the deep level, but at the high level of knowing what it means. Any show on the Universe, Planets, stars I was there watching. Knowledge was the great thing that was happening to me. But knowledge was causing a tussle within me. I come from a city in south India that is full of temples. I had been to a lot of these temples and Hinduism is a very important part of me. Obviously, when knowledge got to my head and fueled my ego, I was beginning to question all of the religious beliefs. One part of me was becoming the atheist and the other part was the born theist. They were pulling me apart. It was my very own Personal Kurukshetra.

Well now, the war is quitened. There is no more tussle. They are both there, but they don’t fight anymore. They are quietly residing in me doing their own part. Spirituality is not related to any particular religion alone. It caters to everyone, it includes everything. It is the coexistence of the opposites to become the whole. What does all this mean? I will will write about this more and share my expeiriences on various levels. I will try to be as simple as possible because my aim is to not provide multitude of information, which you can get from books and internet (and I will mention them once a while when I can), but my aim is to provide you a simple peek into all of this through my experience.

This blog has been under a long silence. It is not surprising to me because there are breaks in life and sometimes they are short and sometimes they are long, very long. But what really is Silence?

Is it that you don’t speak any word and that means silence? Or is it that you don’t express anything and that is silence? or does silence mean no noise or no sound? So is that the way this blog has been under silence? But if that is the case, why do I still get hits and some people read it and even leave comments? Just because I didn’t blog for a while, did this blog stop expressing? It was silently expressing. It had nothing new, but its past has been reverberating the walls of blogosphere for a while.

Why am I saying all this?

It is difficult to explain and express Silence in a few paragraphs, but I am attempting this here. I don’t care if this attempt fails miserably, because I have already agreed that it is difficult to explain silence.

When you stop speaking for a while, you slowly start seeing and feeling your body even more than when you speak. You start performing activities with your body by paying attention to your body. But a lot of times this attention span can fluctuate. Sometimes you concentrate very well, like when you are out on the street to take some photographs, but sometimes you just do certain things for the sake of doing like filling a document at work.

Why is this difference?

The difference is our mind. Our mind naturally tends to move towards something that we desire, something that we like, something that we love. So if you love photography, you work with all your senses, mind and heart that your body responds to it automatically. But when you do something that you don’t love, you leave it to the brain while your mind wanders. Mind is a thought machine that can keep running infinitely like a never ending Indian Soap serial. Your mind will think about anything from next meal to the next movie that you will watch.

So if your mind keeps working after you stopped speaking and after your body is done with its activities, is that really silence?

No, if your mind is working out thoughts constantly, it means it is not observing silence. Mind is a part of you that also needs to rest like any other part of you. Mind has to be silenced as well. So, we sleep and we feel great the next day. Sometimes even as we lie down and sleep we keep having dreams and nightmares and we are not really in a sleep state. We end up waking with a bad headache or perhaps wanting to curl back and sleep more.

Silence is thus the state when all of your words, actions and thoughts completely stop.

What would that feel like? For a person like me, it is very difficult not to think. I just keep thinking one thing or the other. How else do you think I come up with such stupid blog posts! A lot of books and resource on the internet can help you find the definition but Silence can only be explained by experiencing it.

If you go by the definition for Silence that I gave above, you can look for it within you and try to find it. Because, in silence there is peace. Your mind is not working, especially not working conflicts of decisions coming from head and heart, which is probably the worst battle that Humans ever fight. The fight within.

How do we stop it and how do we experience it?

The answer is you don’t try to stop it. Because if you try to stop it will come back again with more power and more variations. It is practically uncontrollable by your force. So the answer is find the gap between words, actions and thoughts.

- When you speak, take a pause between a sentence or a few words and enjoy that pause. There is silence in it. Because when you pause your speech there is a tiny moment of blankness before you restart your thoughts, form the words and speak.

- When you perform an action, pause between steps and relish that pause. There is silence in it. For when you stop your action, there is a tiny moment of blankness before you work your mind again and go to the next step.

- When you think, pause between thoughts and meditate on that. There is absolute silence in it.

That is real Silence. The Silence within you. And when you experience it more and more you can feel the silence lengthening and it will give you new thoughts that give answers to your problems and probably a solution to put your thoughts to rest, probably a solution for the problem you were thinking about.

Ever wonder why you feel so great when you listen to some great music? Your conscious mind stops having thoughts and starts loving the music. The silence in you lengthens causing you to be more at peace. This applies to all things you love. When you do what you love, you do it with very less thinking because everything that you want to do just comes to you with no effort. You exert no additional force to think, you just let it flow. You only think that you are thinking while in fact your mind is actually allowing free flow of creative thoughts through the gaps of silence.

A lot of answers can actually be found by feeling that gaps of silence. Experience that silence, that is real silence. External silence is temporary, internal silence is with you all the time even when they are playing loud devotional songs with jarring speakers in your street.

Silence is indeed Golden.

This is just a summary of message that I inferred by reading from a few resources. This is not mine, but this is everyone’s!

To an average westerner Indian food is made up of a magical substance called Curry. Anything liquid gravyish that smells great with dripping oil and vegetables and Paneer floating around is called Curry. I am a south Indian and my normal lunch is what many call it as “South Indian Food“. It is hard to term a South Indian Food as Curry based. So, I find it amusing that during my lunch at work, I microwave a box full of Sambar Rice and one of the passer by colleague would say “hmm … Curry smells great!” for yesterday’s left over Sambar.

The analogy that I can try to bring here is how Bollywood became the single known identity for Indian cinema to the outside world. Think about it, Bollywood is not the only cinema power house in India and yet people outside India only know about Bollywood. The highest paid actor in India is not even from Bollywood. A lot of Regional film industries are lost into the nomenculature of “Bollywood”, falling into an Identity crisis. (This topic needs its own post) Curry does this to other Indian food, as to what Bollywood does to other Indian Film Industries. Phew, I think I ended up advertising Bollywood a lot by adding the word “Bollywood” in every freaking Bollywood related sentence in this Bollywood related Paragraph.

Even the almighty Oprah Winfrey didn’t exactly know what Curry is. Dr. Oz had to explain the difference between a Curry powder and Curry. Now let me do the job of saving the identities of 3 popular South Indian dishes (not in any order) that have been more or less generalized as Curry or Soup.

Sambar:

This is perhaps the most popular liquid dish in South India. In the west, this is consumed in the name of Lentil Soup, but it is far from being a Soup. Yes it can be had as Soup but being a Soup is not Sambar’s primary purpose. Sambar is made from Lentils, Tamarind and a Mysterious powder called Sambar powder. A recipe of common form of Sambar is available at Wiki Cookbooks.

Sambar can be made in multiple flavours with different vegetables, but the base of all Sambars start from the all powerful Sambar Powder, the equivalent of Curry Powder.  Sambar is usually had with rice or South Indian Tiffin dishes like Dosa, Pongal, and Idli. With vegetables like Drumstick, Okra, Onions, Carrots, Tomatoes one can make variety of sambar that would taste entirely different from each other. For this reason Sambar has to be a category of its own and no you cannot have it as a Soup.

Kozhambu:

Kozhambu is a derivative of Sambar that is cooked without the lentils. But since it’s taste is very different from Sambar, it cannot be categorized as a Sambar. Kozhambu is made with Kozhambu (or Sambar) powder with vegetables or chicken or fish or Lamb meat. All Kozhambus are made by constantly heating the mixture of powder, water and ingredients until it becomes thick.

Some popular Varieties of Kozhambu are – Vatha Kozhambu, which tastes great with rice and Papad/Vadam/Vathal. Tomato Kozhambu, a famous dish from my community (Sourashtra), is awesome when had with Dosa or Idli. Fish Kozhambu, Cooked fish in Kozhambu, if you are a non vegetarian this is an awesome dish to try, it is best had with Rice. Urad/Coconut Kozhambu, which I had for lunch recently, made from boiled Urad and Coconut pieces. The list goes on. Kozhambu is indeed it’s own category and has to be had with rice. Don’t try to take it as soup for you will have a blast the next morning, if you know what I mean. Head on over here for some Kozhambu recipes.

Rasam:

Rasam is another of my favourite South Indian Dish made from Pepper, Tomato and spices. If you head on over to this Wikipedia entry you can find how varied Rasam is. There are various varieties like Lentil Rasam, Tomato Rasam, Pepper Rasam, Lemon Rasam and so on, which tastes great with Rice and had with Papad or Chips

Rasam in Tamil means “Essense” and that is just what it is. It is said that in the Mythological epic of Mahabharatha, the character of Bhima is a great cook of Rasam Varieties. From this you can know, how ancient the Rasam dish is. Rasam is one dish that I can approve of as a candidate for Soup as its primary purpose. It provides great relief for head aches and cold (yes, Grandma medicine we call it) when had as Soup.

You can find some South Indian Recipes here.

To summarize, It is hard to term these dishes as curries because it doesn’t taste or is not made like the dishes that deserve to be curries viz Paneer Makhani, Malai Kofta etc. Compared to these Paneer Makhani is just a curry of one kind and there is only 1 standard way of preparing it. So there it is, Sambar, Kozhambu and Rasam are really a category of their own and has nothing to do whatsoever with the term “Curry”. They have to treated individually with their identity and not even categorized as Soup, but just be called as Sambar, Kozhambu and Rasam. Perhaps I can allow all three to be called under one name – SamKoRas or any other innovative words.

PS: These days I am extremely busy being Lazy and hence I haven’t had a chance to write a new post, but I was glad to find an ancient post from my drafts that I forgot to post. I have a few of those and I will try to post them until I can properly get back to my style of blogging.

Bob is usually a happy person with a really wide smile. He always smiles, in fact it is a condition that needs to be treated, his face is just stuck smiling after competing in a Best smile audition for a 2 minutes advertisement. But Bob has problems like many. Bob’s laptop is infected with a virus that cannot make it stay on for a long time. He still smiles even though he is sad inside. Bob’s laptop turns on, works for a while, but the virus gets on to it and the laptop automatically shuts down.

Bob does what any average American would do. Bob Calls the customer service of the laptop company (while an Average Indian, who eats KaBobs will call his/her cousin and get it fixed, or fix it himself/herself).

Bob: “Hello, I am having  a virus problem with my laptop, it won’t work for long”.

CSR: “Hello, Can I have your full name and address please!”

Bob’s full name was not long, yet he had to spell it out letter by letter. He went on to tell the address of his home.

CSR: “Can I have the maiden name of your great grandmother’s mother in law for security purposes?”

Bob was stunned. Bob was a surrogate born and adopted, so he didn’t know who his parents were, leave alone the greatness of his grandmother or her mother in law. Bob gave up like he usually does.

Bob then decided to go and ask the Computer Geek Almighty – Bill Gates.

Bob: “Hey Bill, Can you help me fix my laptop? It is virus infected and doesn’t go longer.”

Bill: “Try restarting!”

Bob: “I did, it wouldn’t restart!”

Bill: “Try restarting again!”

Bob understood that Bill had no other useful solution than just restarting. So he decided to go and meet his Arch-Rival and Friend – Steve Jobs.

Bob: “Hey Steve, my laptop is infected with virus …”

and before Bob could go any longer, Steve interrupted.

Steve: “Just Get a Mac. Look at this Get a Mac commercial, I bet you will buy it in a flash.”

Bob was flashed with a heavy reality distortion field (RDF). But poor Bob, even the RDF didn’t last longer on him, so he didn’t buy the Mac and he just bolted out of there.

In a sheer piece of luck, Bob was invited to Chicago at the big O studios to feature in a segment of the Oprah Winfrey show as “What about Bob?”. Bob was excited that he was going to meet Oprah and he couldn’t believe he will be in a one hour TV show in front of the national audience.

Oprah: “Coming up next, we are going to see how a virus in a laptop has affected the life of an American, Bob, right after this commercial break!”

(Crowd claps fades … as music fades in)

Oprah introduces Bob and along with Dr. Oz and Suze Orman who will be helping Bob to resolve his Laptop issues.

Oprah: “So tell me about the problem you are having Bob?”

Bob: “I don’t know what the problem is, but everytime I keep my laptop up and running, it doesn’t seem to go beyond a few minutes. It keeps crashing down.”

Dr. Oz in his characteristic Pink shirt, gets up to the screen to explain the audience what a computer virus is. One of the slides involves a Gory picture of a Laptop’s remnants after the virus infection.

(Audience goes “Awwww……”.)

Oprah: “Eww… Don’t show me that. You know I don’t like such pictures!”

Suze: “You see people, this is why we have to bailout poor Bob. If we don’t bail him out then his laptop is going to be infected a lot more and it’s gonna get worse by affecting your laptops. So we all have to pool in $10 cash and give it to Bob so he can get his laptop fixed or just buy a new laptop.”

(Audience – still faced with no expression)

Oprah: “We also have the Couple from Oregon who had faced a similar tragedy.”

Couple from Oregon: ( A sorry looking Male, with a worn out face, gelled hair, made to wear blazers by his wife. A Wife, who has been wearing make up continously for 2 weeks, with a lot of blush applied to the cheek and a really expensive hairdo. Both of them are in the verge of a bankruptcy due to a virus infected laptop)

“We just miss our laptop so much” (Wife breaks out, starts weeping) …

Husband continues “Yeah, this is the best thing happened to us in our life!”( a tiny drop of tear in his eyes, while he really thinks about all the lost pron in his laptop, that he forgot to backup).

Oprah: “So, that wraps our segment, What about Bob. Bob will be getting $2000 as a bailout for his troubled laptop.”

Oprah: “But wait, I have a gift for the audience. A cool new shiny aluminum 13 inch Macbook Pro for all of you as my gift”

(Audience goes wild, cheers and applause everywhere! while the eardrum of the real audience watching the show on TV, blasts into 1000 pieces).

Bob’s show ended shorter than he expected.

Bob goes home with $2000. But his virus problems are still not resolved. Bob doesn’t know how to fix the laptop with the $2000 bailout that he received. Bob goes to someone named Dinesh Babu in a random IT Office.

Bob: “Can you fix my laptop from this virus for $2000?”

Random IT guy named Dinesh Babu: “Sure.”. Dinesh Babu goes on to fix the laptop in 5 minutes and claims $2000.

Bob: “Thank you so much. I am so happy now. My laptop can now run for a long time.”

Random IT guy Dinesh Babu goes on to buy a new Macbook Pro with the $2000. Lucky Random IT guy Dinesh Babu.

PS: No offense to any of the personalities mentioned above. I think they are great people and I really like them. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Oz, Suze Orman are all great personalities and It is an honor for me to feature them in my totally insignificant and completely crappy humour post.

Humans don’t trust each other anymore. I mean look at the webpages and their Terms and Conditions. Each time you try to open an account with a new service you end up clicking “I agree” without reading the entire blah known as Terms and Conditions. I wonder what will happen if we start including T&C for every mundane portion of our lives:

1. Wife cooks a delicious looking Aloo Paratha and Paneer butter masala on the table. Husband hurries to the table with his mouth watering, only to be shown a 10 page document called T&C to be signed before eating the delicious meal.

2. Newly married couple having a nice conversation during their first night. Suddenly the God of Love showers an excess of flowers on both. The love scent pulls them into the pure divine marital connection, only they pull each other a bundle of sheets titled T&C to be signed before performing the act.

3. A Mother in Labour starts pushing the baby out. The baby wouldn’t come out. The mother tries hard as the doctor and the husband say “Push, Push”. Usually the placenta comes after the child, but this time the placenta comes before with a lot of writings on it titled T&C. The Mother goes (while she keeps pushing) “arghhhhhhhhh …. I ….arghhhhhhh…..agreee…..arghhhhhhh” and then the baby is born.

4. You had an awesome andhra meals for dinner last night. So you are woken up 7AM sharp in the morning due to the effect of the spice in the meals and you are rushing to the bathroom to attend the nature’s call. You sit on the commode and try to let go, but nothing comes. The commode’s seat has T&C written all over it and a sensor that will sense your voice. You hurriedly get up and dance on your feet as the bowel tries to rush out, and you say “I agree” to the commode. As soon as you say that and sit down on the commode, the flow begins and you feel relieved.

5. Touser pandi Ramarajan gets ready to Milk the cow in his usual way. He sings the song “Shenbagame … Shenbagame…”. The cow refuses to give milk. He thinks may be the cow is sick and tired of hearing the same song, so he remixes it and sings it in the hip hop style “ooh ahh oh shenbagame …ooh aah oh shenbagame!”. Still no milk. In a few seconds the Cow goes Moo and releases a full roll of tissue paper from its rear that reads its T&C. Ramarajan goes “Ooh aahh oh shenbagame … I agree… ooh aah oh shenbagame I agree”. The Milk is on!

And finally how can we be sure that the end user has read the Terms and Conditions? We all usually just skip and click the I agree anyway. So just to make sure we are covered we will throw in another Terms and Conditions that states that “Make sure you read the Terms and Conditions in Full.” and request if they agree or do not agree.

Finally Here is a Brainstuck Cartoon on T&C.

Soulful Music, originally uploaded by ubababu.

He was playing it for the love of music. Of course there were one dollar bills in his Tip Bucket, one of which was mine, but they were there merely to take care of this survival. So that, this man can live and bring the music alive. In the noise of the Kansas city Farmer’s market, The African American Man in a Cool shirt provided a beautiful ambience in a corner. It was simply beautiful. Can you see the music he is playing?

For more photos, Please checkout my Flickr Pool.

Suresh was getting ready for his Mr. Madras body building competition. He was very fit, had nice bulging biceps and V-shaped body. He was honest in his body building and used no shortcuts like steroids to get where he is right now. He knows the evil effects of steroids and has avoided it ever since he started this.

With 7 days to go to the competition, Suresh was getting a little bit nervous. He usually wakes up by 6 AM and after a brief warm up session and a few raw eggs, he goes to the Gym and gets trained by his master. He evenly spreads out his exercises – curls, presses and weight lifting and keeps hydrated throughout the 2 hour long session. He follows it up with a nice healthy breakfast. He doesn’t eat 1 lunch but splits it into two and has one at 11AM and another at 2 PM. His dinner is also spread into 2 one at 5PM, and then at 8PM.

It was another day of routine for him as he woke up at 6 AM. He heads to the bathroom, spits and takes a leak in the commode as he wanders his mind around how he was going to go about the competition. The urine flowed out of his body making the noise of a stream of water hitting a pool at an intensity that showed how tall he was. He relaxed as he took a deep breath. As he came out of his thought train he noticed there was a chunk of blood floating in the commode. Blood! He panicked.

It is said that if you take Anabolic Steroids to build your body, the first few symptoms of its effects are bleeding when you pee. Suresh was scared now, he hasn’t taken any steroids. He has taken protein supplements and has a very uncommon diet. He wasted no time and he rushed himself to the doctor.

Suresh: I don’t take any steroids, but I saw blood this morning in my urine.

Doc: Don’t worry, we will take these blood tests and we can find out what has happened. You will get the results in a day, you can come back tomorrow at 8 AM.

Suresh was very worried. His entire body building and perhaps his life is now hanging in balance. That night he didn’t sleep properly. He had nightmares of seeing himself bald, sick and dying. He didn’t know what it would feel like with the testosterone level as low as a 12 year old girl, but he couldn’t sleep at the thought of that. But he didn’t have steroids and hence he was not worried as much as he would if he had had.

Suresh waited for the night to go by. It was the longest night he ever spent in his life. The next morning he rushed to the hospital without showering, eating. He saw blood in his urine even today.

Doc: The results have come Suresh. They all look normal. Your liver is functioning very well. You have nothing to be afraid of.

Suresh: But Doc, I saw blood even today. Please help me, I have a competition to go to in a week.

Suresh went close to the doctor and pleaded. The doctor moved away as his breath was stinking.

Doc: Let me see your teeth. Say eee and aaa!

Suresh was bewildered but did what he said.

Doc: Do you spit in the commode?

Suresh: I don’t remember, may be I do!

Doc: Your gums are inflammed and bleeding. You must be seeing that blood in the morning as you spit. You need to see a dentist!

Suresh laughed out loud. He couldn’t believe it. It was his teeth. His teeth was inflammed and he was glad it was just his teeth. He was relieved and happy. Compared to what it could have been, inflammed gums was nothing to him. He ran out of the hospital excited.

In a few days, a happy Suresh won the competition and became Mr. Madras and of course he went to the Dentist after a week.

So folks, Don’t spit in your commode while you pee!

PS: This is a humble attempt at Story Telling like Sakhi combined with Nikhil’s Whackiness and Rambodoc’s Body Building 101’s with an ending twist of my own style.

PPS: Virtual hits with Rotten eggs and Tomatoes from “Pissed” off readers welcome

Long Long ago there was a Chair in a busy IT office, brimming with people. There were just too many people in the building that there was limited room for breathing. They called it the boom, every single maintenance work was getting outsourced to India and the executives called it “Strategic Outsourcing”. No one even imagined the magnitude of growth and hence people were hired by putting fliers on the trees on the roads (Which were later cut by the corporation to build a Metro rail).

Coming back to the chair, this was one special kind of chair. It had a really soft cushion with adjustable height and nice tilting push back. The texture of the fabric was nice and smooth and one could really sink into it after lunch for a nice afternoon siesta, I mean a productive coding session. This chair was really unique, but the office was full of this unique chair. In fact there was one chair like this for every desk. But during boom time, people come in faster than buildings can rise and/or be leased. So people had to double up in cubes/desks/conference rooms/empty dining halls in cafeterias, lonely table by the restroom (which could seat atleast 3, with monitors positioned like the lions in our Indian Emblem on One Rupee coins and oh by the way the Emblem has 4 lions even though you can only see 3. You can’t see the 4th lion because it is a Tenderloin).

They wanted more and more people, but they didn’t have enough chairs. As a result, chairs were stolen from conference rooms which began to look like a big pool table room with no chairs. But that wasn’t sufficient, so chairs were put on Time sharing mode until new chairs slowly arrived and unbundled. In any case, the number of new people coming in out numbered the pace at which they could buy the chair because of all the process involved in procurement and number of signatures needed to buy one chair was equal to the number of people working in one floor.

During conferences with the onsite team, the offshore team usually 10 to 20 in number (or in some case 20 to 40) gang up on that one speaker phone in the conference room with no chair. The American on the other side speaks in his stylish English and the team standing offshore stare at each other, while the Team lead says yes, without knowing that he was answering a question, “Can you participate in a Rodeo contest next week?”.

Chairs were stolen, because people couldn’t understand a thing that the customer sitting onsite said without grounding their asses on the chairs. It didn’t matter whose chair it was, it was vandalised. You could go to the restroom for a 2 minute break but you will be back to no chair to sit on. Heck, you could even get up to connect that PS2 mouse port to the back of the Pentium II desktop, suffering loose contact, and you may sit down and fall to the ground, because that was enough interval time for your chair to be whisked away. “No Mercy”, they shouted and continued “Give us chairs or we will steal it!”. For sometime, it became the motto of the company, I mean not the company just the employees of the company. The shareholders had nice chairs at their home, except those poor souls who bought employee stock with no chair to sit on at work and with no idea that the bubble would burst in 2 years.

Chairs were shuffled, you never sat on the same chair once. So, the chairs were always showered with variable aroma of farts by multiple unrelated employees, whose only connection was eating the food served in the cafeteria.

There was only one way out of this misery. Onsite. People wanted to go onsite because they didn’t have a chair to sit on, while the management keeps taking surveys over survey trying to find the real reason behind people wanting to go onsite (which actually yielded “Disneyland” as the answer), they never knew that it was the chairs. Sometimes, even the employees didn’t know why they were frustrated and unhappy over their career. They kept insisting it was their career, but no it was just their carrier, the chair! All they needed was a chair that can be raised and not a raise.

But then the bubble burst. Everything slowed down. New buildings were leased, unfortunately when people were laid off or when the CEO gets involved in a huge conspiracy, and now there is more space than people. There are more chairs now than people. It can be so unpredictable that between the time interval that the chair is adjusted the person would be sent home. The companies were cutting costs by cutting projects. They were laying off the Developers and restructuring the management during touch economical conditions. It was quite logical. With no work to do, they had to lay off Developers because they were the only ones who did the actual work. Management is quite essential to the company because they had to run the company and they were the only ones who had the power to lay off, so unless every single developer was laid off there was no way that the management could be laid off. Besides it is cheaper to lay off a Developer when you think about the severance package that needs to be given in millions for an executive and in thousands for the ordinary Developer. It all makes sense.

But the employees are now happy because they have more chairs. They can sit on one chair everyday and it will still be enough for the whole year. Heck, they can now fill every chair with the sweet aroma of the fart every single day and not having to sit on the same chair again.

The chairs got back at their theives. They finally got their justice, but they still get farted on.

As I hold out a copy of the latest India Today (Ok, I was really reading Anantha Vikatan) and counting down the minutes for the arrival of Bangalore Express, My “then fiance, now Wife” (TFNW) reminds me I have to get Idlis from Murugan Idli shop for dinner. It was one of my several trips to Madurai a few years back to see my TFNW. The Railway department even went to the length of tracking me down and sending me a qualifying letter for getting a Season pass from Bangalore to Madurai (Ok, I made this up!). Those were the times when whoever bought shares of Bharti Airtel became millionares simply because of the talk time I spent with my TFNW.

Coming back to the story, I had about 45 minutes before the train arrived. I worked my way through the crowd at the Platform, accidentally hitting people like a snooker ball on rebound, reached the station side Murugan Idli shop and was ready to order, what else, Idlis. Along came a Woman from the other side to the shop. She was tall, fair and definitely didn’t look local, and didn’t look Tamil, and didn’t look Indian either. She was a Foreigner, was a tourist. Here is my chance to provide the utmost hospitality to a tourist who was kind enough to visit my hometown. I was brimming with a sense of helpfulness and I wanted to give the best explanation possible and help her order the dinner that she will love.

We both got close to the counter. I opened my mouth to start my train of Peter English, just when the shopkeeper tried to utter something in his own English, and the dear lady from a foreign country without pausing for a moment and without directly interrupting us, simply placed the order in Pure Tamil.

“Oru Dosa, Oru set Idli, Sambar Vendam, Chutney neraiya venum!”

Three Mosquitoes, Five flies and a Cockroach made its way in and out of my Mouth as I kept it wide open watching the foreign lady utter the purest form of Tamil. She wasn’t Foreign anymore. I exchanged a few more bewildered look with the foreign lady and the shopkeeper’s half petrified half clueless eyes and place my order for idlis and went back to reading the jokes in Anantha Vikatan.

Tamil Thai (Mother) was dancing disco in the tongues of an English Madam. I bowed to her sense of respect to the language I had lived in, picked up my order and walked away expecting no more surprises for the day.

Read one more interesting Irony here.

This is how a famous Bollywood song goes:

Hum tum ek kamre mein bandh ho, aur chaabi kho jaay!

Such an ambiguous song it is. You and Me locked up in a room – which one? Bedroom or bathroom or the Kitchen or the store room? and the Keys are lost, what keys? You have keys for rooms? is it the House Key or is it your Car keys? or is it even your key! With so much ambiguity in the song, the Guy must be an idiot to expect romance from the girl and the girl must be “idioter” to romance him anyway!

But this is not the point of the post, this is just a pointless introduction of this pointless post.

People have weird experiences when they shop in weird Indian stores in US. Let me assure you that the Indian stores in India are a 100 times better than the Indian stores in US.

This particular Indian store is more like a Godown or a storage room. Seriously, I have stopped going there as I had a few bad experiences with Billing and Customer service. There are other Indian stores here that are not weird, packed with nice friendly people and a neat place. Coming back to this one weird store, it was sometime last year when I went there for regular weekend Grocery. My job as a husband was simple, drive the family to the store, hold the then 1.5 years old daughter in the arms and just randomly move around the store.

I like random, you can be at your will. You can have a sense of freedom. But in this particular store, there is only a few ways of being random. There are only 3 aisles with each aisle enough for just one half of a skinny person to move freely and that half is his lateral section and not his cross section. On the extreme left there will be a lot of varieties of bags of Rice and wheat stacked like a mountain. You will see people desperately trying to pull out a bag of rice, without impacting the balance of the bags placed one over the other. If you walk through this aisle, there are chances of bags accidentally falling on you. Perhaps they should have a sign that says “Falling Bags” like the ones you will find on the freeways through mountains that says “Falling Rocks”.

The walkways between the aisles are not left alone. They are stacked with more stuff that can be sold. It is a marketing technique. People don’t look down, so what happens is they very likely stumble upon the stuff on the floor and fall flat. Then all they have to do was see a nice shiny glowing Potato and go “Wow!” and then grab a pound or two of it. Trust me, it really works, even though you will see more people falling than walking, it is more business this way than having less stuff stacked around.

The best way to stock up the merchandise is during the peak hours of people shopping. How else you will see the store’s stock person goes around the aisle arranging and stacking up new merchandise. It is like the Old Hutch cellphone ad – wherever you go we follow. This guy is just like that, he will be there whereever you go, he is omnipresent. He can shout at the top of his pitch to the cashier when the cashier asks him the price of a certain item. He is usually a Middle aged Indian Uncle who is a partner in that store business, with neatly Dabur amla oiled hair, a belly with the shirt unable to cover it fully.

Sometimes it can be a check mate with all the stuff lying around. As I was trying to work my way randomly through these flow restricted aisles, I entered an aisle to look for some ready to eat stuff. It was a trap, I couldn’t get out of it one way as the stock person had left a bunch of items there blocking the way. He then walks through me literally and begins stocking things in the freezer on my other side. So you see now I am in a check mate position and I can’t move out of the aisle until he finishes stocking, and I am left there reading the expired expiry dates of freshly stacked Ready to eat items.

My worst nightmare came true. The stock person sang the famous ambiguous Bollywood song -

“Hum tum ek kamre mein bandh ho, aur chaabi kho jaay!”

This time, it wasn’t ambiguous. It was straight on. I started sweating profusely and was about to faint but my love for my 1.5 year old daughter held me up on my feet and reminded me that there is still room for hope in life. I looked around and I saw there was not even room for placing one bag of chips around me with all the things lying around, where would I keep hope. Besides, the Stock man was insisting on singing the next lines of the song.

I was saved by a ray of hope. Some guy walked from the side where he was stocking in the freezer and said “Ekskuse me” in a thick North Indian Accent. That’s it, the gap was made. It was enough for me to sneak through and get to the other side, like the South Indians who sneak through in the Tirumala Tirupathi queue for Dharshan of the deity.

Perhaps Clint Eastwood should make a movie with this “Escape from Indian Store”.

PS: “Dimple Kapadia” is in the tag list, just to increase the marketing value of this post.

After answering too many Facebook Quizzes, I think I am now in a position to create a Facebook quiz of my own in my own unique style. Like Sokka says in “The Avatar” – “This is the kind of Time wasting nonsense I have been waiting for!”.

This quiz will help you find How Desperate a Husband you are, Yes this is “The Desperate Husband” Quiz and here it goes!

1. What is your Favourite TV Show?

a. Get Lost.

b. Villains.

c. American Bridal

d. Anderson Hooter 69 degrees.

2. What is your Favourite drink?

a. Beer.

b. Whiskey.

c. Milk.

d. Coconut water.

3. What do you do on a Friday Evening?

a. Beer, Dinner, <Censored Event> and Sleep.

b. Dinner, Beer, <Censored Event>, <Censored Event> and Sleep.

c.  Dinner, <Censored Event>, Sleep, <Censored Event>, Beer and Sleep for real.

d.  All of the above.

4. What is your Favourite Transport mechanism?

a. Bullock Cart

b. Horse

c. Big ass 4 Wheel drive Pickup truck, even though I don’t pickup anything and just drive that to work with lunch and laptop.

d. Instantaneous Travel by Worm holes, I mean through the holes created by Earthworms.

5. What is your Favourite movie that you would like to watch with your Spouse?

a. Star Wars Episode IV

b. Star Wars Episode V

c. Star Wars Episode VI

d. None of the above, because I would really like to watch Star Wars Episode I, II and III.

6. How bored are you?

a. Just Bored.

b. I am so Bored, I will even take “Desperate Housewives” Quiz even though I am a Man.

c. I am so Bored, I thought this was a real Facebook quiz and started writing down answers.

d. I am so Bored, I wrote a Blog post named “Desperate Husband Facebook Quiz”.

Strange thing will be that even though this is a “Desparate Husband” Quiz, it will be taken by every one of every age and sex in spite of their marital status. What will be even more strange is, though there can be at least 24 combination of answers to the above Quiz, every single one of them who take this quiz will get only one answer.

How Much of a Desperate Husband are you?

Answer: Pretty Desperate

As a young boy once I had fascination towards various styles of Belt Buckles. Big Oval ones, Shiny big rectangle ones I have tried all sorts of gaudy belt buckles before. But Time (thankfully) helps us mature and grow out of this Gaudy Belt Buckle syndrome (BBS). I can safely wash off my past and say that I have grown out of it. I had realized that the special kinds of Belt Buckles are only supposed to be worn by Bobby Deol and once that moment of self realization set in, I not only gave up the Gaudy buckles but developed hatred towards it.

I now prefer to wear plain simple formal belts for work and a slightly wider brown leather belt with the jeans. I have simplified my belt choices to these 2 and am not planning to look back.

The prejudice in this is that you would expect anyone in your age range or higher to follow this same simple principle. How wrong I was. It disturbs me to notice the Gaudy belt buckle syndrome from someone who definitely looks much older than you. I can forgive every single annoying thing done by anyone, but wearing a huge eagle Belt buckle is simply a no no. For a moment I would have pulled my eyeballs out, but wanted to keep it to see the other pleasant things in the world. It was one of the WTF moments that haunts you throughout your work day.

I may have to give them a “Wearing a decent belt 101″ lesson which will really consist of just 2 points – simple 1 inch black for formals, simple 1.5 inch brown for jeans.

It is ok if you have a small crocodile on the buckle as long as it comes from Lacoste. But if you really want to wear a belt with a crocodile on the buckle, please make sure the crocodile logo is not inverted, otherwise I will find you, tilt you upside down and make you walk on your hands!

It is easier to cross the city of Madurai from One end to another by foot, than it is to transit from One terminal or a Gate in an Airport to Another. So, in a 24 hour Flight journey from US to India, it is actually difficult to transit than sit and burn your ass off inside the aircraft.

The amount of effort required for the travel is governed by the following equation:

E = F + iT

Where E is the Total Effort for Travel. F is the effort required to fly in the aircraft. T is the unknown amount of effort required to walk from one Terminal to another. “i” is the ego in you that tells that “I can definitely do this” and it gets reduced from “This is a piece of cake” feeling to “Holy shit! I am completely screwed” feeling.

The above equation is valid only for those who travel alone. For all those who travel with family (especially kids or 1 kid who can do stuff that 2 kids do) the equation grows to the power. The modified equation is:

E = (F + iT)^n

Where ‘n’ is the feels like factor of number of kids ( and not the actual number of kids). So you may have only 1 kid but that kid might put on a nice airtime travel show equivalent to 3 kids. In this case your n is not 1 but 3. Usually if you have 1 kid, n is always greater than 1. But if you have a kid which yields a value of n < 1, I need to borrow your kid to brush off some of its characteristics to mine. Call me … Seriously!

The following are the challenges of Airport Transit: (what, you thought it ended with the equation?)

1. First of all, Good luck with getting down from the aircraft. The moment the seat belt sign is off there will be a race as to who will get up first, get their gear and head to the aircraft exit. It doesn’t matter that it takes at least 30 seconds for the door in the aircraft to open up to the exit, everyone including the folks at the last row will be up on their feet. If you feel you may not be able to compete with them, just sit back and be the last one to be out. If you think you can, you should have prior experience in Military, American Football and Wrestling, in order to succeed.

Note: If you try to accidentally push the guy behind you in the aisle, you might be able to see a beautiful sight of falling Human Dominoes. But don’t try that, you cannot run far off from the victims.

2. Let’s assume you got off from the aircraft in One piece ( 2 pieces if you are carrying a small handbag or a laptop bag, 10 pieces if you have a kid). The trick now will be to find the sign board that says “GATE C25 with an upper arrow mark”. After skimming through a crowd of people wandering the airport, security staff, airport staff, duty free shops, gorgeous European women you can finally spot something close – GATES C with a upper arrow.

NOTE: The GATES C sign arrow mark does not in anyway mean that your gate is right around the corner. I think they should intensify the arrow mark or color it to show how far your Gate is.

3. You will now start your transit locomotion by Walk, then get on an elevator to go one level down. From there you will walk a long way by foot, by flat escalator, by foot again, by flat escalator again and then finally you will get another elevator to go one level up. It is not over yet, You will have to now Catch a train because Gates C is in another terminal. All this while you will keep seeing the very same “GATES C with an Arrow Mark” board.

4. As soon as you get off the train in another terminal, repeat Step 3. It will seem like you are going towards the horizon, it actually is so! But don’t get too excited when you start seeing GATES C10-25 sign board with Arrow mark. You may still need to do 30% of step 3 before you reach your final destination. Back up 3 Gates, in case you want to Hit the Restroom.

I wish Airports were like Madurai Airport. There is only one Gate, you walk through that Gate you will be inside the airport and walk the other way you will be outside the airport. Humans love to make things complicated.

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Vishesh, the Swami Smileyananda has tagged me to do a Tag of his own called Smiley Tag. The objective is to spread the smile and I took it literally by doing a post based on Smileys. I actually had done this post sometime back and kept it in draft for a long time. I waited for the right moment, but completely forgot about this post until now. I think It was meant to be posted for Vishesh’s Tag.

When people Instant Message you at work with a “yt” which means “You There?”, the way someone answers to that question can tell a lot about the situation. Let’s see what they are:

HAPPY STATE

“yt”

“Yes, what’s up! “

- A descriptive answer followed by a smiley. This respondent had a good tasty lunch and probably got a pat in the back from the boss or got a raise or going out for a fun party in the evening. He is just happy about something and he is much obliged to answer your questions.

I CAN ANSWER YOU

“yt”

“Yes, What’s up!”

- The person is not really in a good mood, but can take a few questions from the requester. This person is vulnerable to spiral down to Case 3 if not handled properly.

BUSY NOW, THIS BETTER BE SERIOUS

“yt”

“Yes!”

- For “yt” all I can say is I can acknowledge my presence. If you are planning on asking any questions for help, it better be serious. Don’t say “I need to borrow a post it, can I come to your desk”, because these questions can spiral him down to Case 4.

CRISIS, NO MORE QUESTIONS

“yt”

“s”

- Just one letter abbreviation of Yes. That’s it – s. The person is busy doing a lot of other things. It is really not advisable to ask anymore questions to the person unless you are the boss or boss’s boss and so on. Simply acknowledge his presence and move away, other wise you will push the person to Case 5.

BUSY WORKING MY A** OFF

“yt”

- The person doesn’t respond. He/She simply turns on the busy indicator on the Instant message client indirecly indicating to scram and not to bother. Do not dare to walk to this person’s cube, wait for the person to get back to atleast Case 3.

A Comic with all of the above emotions of “You there!”

Of course this applies only at work and not for Gtalk and Yahoo IM clients

If you like to spread the Smile, go ahead and take this as a Tag and do your own post that will make people Smile

Pictures from: www.wikimedia.org

Amrutha has tagged me to write 25 Random things about me.

What is Random? Is it something that is not in particular, that doesn’t belong to a category, something that you just pick with no reason associated with it?

But here is a truth, That particular thing is a Random thing only until you pick it. But the moment you pick it, you have it in your hand and you know what it is and you know how to categorize it. A Random thing that you picked is not Random anymore. It is sort of like Quantum Physics.

The Random thing that you are yet to pick can be anything from Freedom to Boredom, but the moment you pick it, you will be able to see that it is your Kingdom. You have a specific thing in hand now, not a Random thing.

Anyways, Here are 25 Random things from my life which became specific after I picked.

1. As a Kid, I once tried to look under the Godrej Bero (Armoire) and got my head stuck there.

2. Once, when my uncle was sitting in the living room, he pulled my head out, from under the Godrej Bero. Somehow I can relate this with point 1.

3. I used to be afraid of Rats, that my Grandma used that fear of mine to feed me (Not with Rats, but Just Food, Not Rat Food, but Human Food)

4. In those days, a candy used to cost 5 Paise or 10 Paise. That became my salary if I help out on a chore at home.

5. The First Rajinikanth Movie that I ever saw and liked was “Murattu Kaalai”.

6. The First Kamal Hassan Movie that I really liked was “Vikram”.

7. I used to make cricket ball out of a small stone and wrapping Paper on top of it, very tightly.

8. I used to play cricket on the terrace of our house with my homemade Paper ball. The ball was very durable until you hit that out of the terrace into the ditch in the road.

9. I once went into a dreamless deep sleep state when I was alone in the house. Calling bell, Violent shouts and Knocks on the door didn’t wake me up. People had to break in and wake me up. As a prize for doing this, I was given coffee.

10. I used to be among the shortest in school, but somehow I became relatively taller in College.

11. The first Six I hit was in my 6th Std, No one could believe I was capable of hitting Six, including me.

12. I learnt to dance from my Younger brother, who was a Natural dancer.

13. I wanted a Younger Sister who I was going to name as Kavitha. I consider all the Kavitha’s that I come across in my life as my Younger sister, except the older ones.

14. I was a Car Crazy Kid. I used to have a Sack full of Toys that were variety of cars.

15. I have the fear of Unknown. I am beating this fear by trying to know as much as I can.

16. When I used to live alone as a Bachelor, the moment there is a Power cut at night I used to come out of the house and sit in the balcony, unless I am in deep sleep.

17. I learnt the Guitar for 3 months and then quit. I still have the wish to learn to play someday.

18. I once won an impromptu competition to sit still for 1hour in school during Yoga Class. I have no idea how I did that, because I am unable to do that now!

19. My First Crush was when I was in 12th std, over a 11th std girl.

20. My Second crush was when I crushed a lemon with my bare hands for making Lemon Rice as a Bachelor.

21. My First car was a Fiat Palio which I sold before coming to US.

22. My First cell phone was an Ericsson world phone, which I lost in an Autorickshaw in Bangalore.

23. My First jeans was a local branded jeans named – Hara.

24. This blog is my second innings.

25. I found my Humor sense in this blog.

If I equate 1 Random thing to 1 year of my age, I am still left out with 5 years. Instead of writing 5 more things, I will just tag 5 people whose blog I read, but I don’t have them in my blogroll yet, because I am terribly lazy!

They are – Gauri, Chutneycase, Anu Ramakrishnan, Inbavalli, Kavi.

If there is a topic then there must be an article with 10 things on that topic. Since this itself is a topic, I am going to write 10 things you should know about all these 10 things articles.

1. There are not actually 10 things to say, it may actually be 7 or 8 but to make it a round number the author rephrases a couple of them and makes the count to 10. Or he writes a classic last one – “10. There is no 10th thing!”

2. The title is not written first. The author keeps writing whatever comes to his minds and then writes the final number in the title. That is why we have a non standard 7 habits, 5 things, 10 steps etc.

3. Readers attention span is very important. So the author will make sure he doesn’t exceed beyond 13 points. 13 is the unlucky stop point number. Any more number of points he is going to get with the article, there are high chances that it will get converted into a book.

4. If it was written as a book, it will be publicized as the NYTimes #1 Best seller with a round, starry edged, fluorescent green sticker on top of it. No such thing will be done to the blog article. Heck, it won’t even make it to the WordPress front page. I mean take this one for example.

5. If it is published as a book, the front cover will always have the 3/4 portrait of the author standing at about 30 degrees to the side, arms folded, dressed in a blazer with a silly grin on his face.

6. Women don’t write 10 things article or the book. They just have too many things to say to be written in One article or One book. So they just have a TV show by their name like Oprah Winfrey show, Suze Orman Show, Rachel Ray show, with the word “Show” following their names, even though every one knows that it is a TV show!

7. This is the step the author finds out that there is no clear direction in his article and he cannot give a proper meaningful name for it. He will simply choose to name it as “10 things You should know about …”. Also, You will notice that Point number 8 will be missing.

8. This point is supposed to be missing. So you should not be reading this. No stop, stop! Don’t read it. Come on, This point is hidden! You are not supposed to read it, argh!!!!

9. There is no 10th thing. No Really, I mean it. I am going to stop at point 9.

10. Oh what the Heck! There are actually 11 things about the “10 things” articles.

11. Point no. 10 was not actually needed and I could have simply written Point 11 as Point 10. But, I just added it to show how clever I am. So, In essence, There is not really a 11th thing.

There, if you always keep all of these 10 or 11 things (with the 8th point missing) in your mind, you will be able to judge what those 10 things books are.

A “10 things to know about” article or book never goes complete without written testimonials of experts. Hence, I had an imaginary conversation with my fellow bloggers and I am coming up with their testimonials on this Article:

Anshul @ Brainstuck: (Scratches Head) WTF, 10 things about 10 things Article! (Scratches Head again!)

KrishAshok: This article is very inspiring it will definitely make me write 10 things to know about Jalsa and Jilpa.

Maxdavinci: There is only one thing that is true in this world – Dappankuthu. Everything else is written in this article.

Nikhil: The author is a very nice fellow. He bought me 10 beers, one for each thing.

Vishesh:  (and then when asked to elaborate) LOL

Sakhi: There is Fiction and then there is true story. This one is neither!

Twisted DNA: Just put on your bluetooth headset and read this aloud, no one will even notice, these sexy supple white 10 things.

Rads: Yay! I mean Yay!

This is most probably what is going on everyone’s mind right now. “A Recession! Why God Why!”.

Why should this happen to us! There are already a lot of people who are very poor and struggle for even a single meal every day or for weeks, and now we have people losing jobs. The world is now consisting more and more of hungry and jobless people. Even those who are fortunate enough to have jobs are upset because their buddy, who was working with them for 10 years is no longer there with them.

Why is this all happening and what exactly is the lesson behind the recession.

From an economists point of view one would point to unwise business strategies as the reason and the lesson is to spend wisely from here on.

But if we think deeper, there is actually more of a philosophy to be learnt from this recession than just economics.

The Object of Illusion.

Everything that is materialistic exists because we need it, we want it, we lust for it. The electronics company makes 50,000 mp3 players because there are atleast 50,000 people who want it. But now due to recession there are probably only 30,000 people who are looking to buy these devices. A common man looks at this as a bad thing because it reduces the circulation of money. But think further. What if there is not one single person, ready to buy mp3 players, not because they are cutting on spending, but because they have given up the lust for such a device.

MP3 players will no longer exist.

Consider the house that you bought a few years back for $200,000 in a quite residential area. It was a beautiful house and you thought that it was definitely worth 200 grand and will probably be worth more in the future. But with this downturn you just discovered your house is worth much less. So how much is your house really worth? Here is the answer in 2 points that is very difficult to digest:

1. Your house is only worth how much a buyer is willing to pay for it and it can also be just ONE DOLLAR!

2. If there are no buyers willing to buy, your house is not worth anything in terms of money.

But here is an interesting thing, Your house is worth all of it for the memories and good times that you have there. So doesn’t this mean that your house being worth $200K was just an illusion? You see, that is why our ancestors were not willing to sell their homes not because they are attached to the monetary worth of it, but because of the memories and good times they had there.

The concept of money that we have is just an illusion!

I am not asking you to give away all your belongings and become a saint, all I am telling is if you are able to realize that the money that we made is just an illusion, you will no longer need to become a saint, you will already be in the path of one. This is easier said than done. It is a Journey into the reality and It won’t be easy but the only way to see it, will be to take up the ride, and travel, perhaps with rest stops.

Everything Belongs to Earth.

Now that we have identified money is an illusion, let’s go back to our house. How was that built? Did God build your house as a gift to your good work? Nope! Your house is just a complex physical and chemical composition of Mother earth that a stranger built it for you in exchange to an illusionary object called money. So the house is just actually Earth! It belongs to Earth! You just bought an illusionary object with an illusionary concept called Money. What kind of an illusion is this! The one that will completely blind us I guess.

Again, I am not asking you to sell your house or not buy any house in the future or give it away and live in caves. If you are able to think and realize that everything you own, including your own body ultimately belongs to Mother nature, Mother Earth to be specific, then it doesn’t matter if you have a house or not. Why do we struggle for it then, when the whole of Earth naturally belongs to us? If you are willing to accept this idea, then you are ready to take up this journey upon you.

A Living example of this would be Bill Gates. He is the richest and now he gives away his wealth and the world is becoming better because he has probably realized this. He has taken up the Journey of the real life, after completing his illusionary life. Bill Gates was born to be Bill Gates. When you realize it, you will also know that you were born to be you. You don’t have to struggle to become like Bill Gates, You just need to be you.

You will now see Life from a completely different perspective.

You will now understand that Recession is just another illusionary state created from things that were already an illusion. You will have a lot of questions, but they will be answered. Time has the answers for everything. When time answers you, your twitter messages will begin to look like mine

Of course, you will not be able to think of any of these without your survival. Once you take care of your survival needs and once you are able to take care of your survival needs as you go, your journey will be much more smoother. This is exactly why we donate goods to those who don’t have. We are helping them survive and think beyond survival.

In Indian customs, the idea of giving food and water to guests is to satisfy their survival needs. Once their survival needs are taken care of, they will be able to see the things around them beyond all illusions.

All of this is just my humble opinion. Your thoughts are welcome in the comments.

The Purpose of Life is to undertake this journey of breaking out of all these illusions.

I love music. I believe music of any form puts us in touch with our inner self and gives us a sense of freedom. Reema has tagged me to list some music that I love. Music is always fun.

I grew up listening to some English songs, a lot of Hindi songs and a boat load of Tamil Songs. While Tamil songs were the main form of music I was listening to, my uncles introduced me to the world of RD Burman, Manna Dey, Kishore kumar in the Hindi World. My friends in School and College made sure I got some earful of Bryan Adams, Guns n Roses, George Michael.

My music love is from the 80’s, 90’s and the present time, though I prefer the oldies too (the ones that came before I was born).

This tag is about picking the songs that you loved and I will be listing 1 song each from the 3 periods of Time I have been in this Planet.

80’s:

Ilaiyaraja ruled the Tamil world. His melodies were more of a fashion statement. He brought freedom, love, compassion, happiness, sorrow in his songs, in a very unique style.

Ilaiya Nila from  Payanangal Mudivathillai (Journeys never end)  is one of the best from those times.

90’s:

Things had to change and it had to change because of one man – A.R.Rahman. The musical Genius was absolutely splendid right from his 1st album – Roja.

Thee Thee from Thiruda Thiruda is a mind blowing love song. This song is almost 20 years ahead of its time.

Latest:

Apart from A.R.Rahman and Ilaiyaraja we have some decent music directors in Tamil like Yuvan Shankar Raja, Vidhyasagar and Harris Jayaraj. I am going to pick one song from the lot and the only reason for picking this song is this is my daughter’s favourite. I think she likes Surya. She smiles wide when she sees him on screen.

Adiye Kolluthe from Vaaranam Ayiram.

If I have to call 2 Hindi movies that brought me into the world of Hindi Movies are Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Tezaab. I really love this song.

80’s:

Kehdo ke tum from Tezaab

90’s:

Aamir Khan is a versatile actor. Rangeela is one movie where he surprised me. It was a role I never expected to see him in and play it with such an ease.

Mangta Hai Kya from Rangeela

Latest: (well almost)

Continuing on my belief that Aamir Khan is probably the only lead Bollywood actor that acts well (apart from character artists like Naseeruddin shah, Om Puri), I like all the songs in Dil Chahta Hai, but this one is the best.

Jaane Kyon from Dil Chahta Hai.

What’s your list? Would you like to share? Go ahead take this as a tag and put it up in your blog, if you got an interesting list. It can be any of the Indian Language.