Keeping it real.

LSRG MK S1 E1

2020-05-30T23:37:00.006-07:00

Sadness

2015-11-21T08:30:00.001-08:00

She
wraps
Cuddles in
Quietly, unnoticed
Like a burning first love

So when you find s'one who cares
Pull them in, engage, entice ...
Before sadness crawls in
Empties your life
In one big shove.

- Prash.

When it is raining outside …

2014-04-01T23:09:00.001-07:00

"No flower wants to be at home when it is raining outside!"

― Mehmet Murat ildan

Finding Grandma’s Secret

2014-03-19T08:29:00.003-07:00

Pitch for the next long term project. What do you think? Would you like to read the full story?:-)

“His recipes are charted among the freshest. His fusion curries bring patrons from all city corners together in his tiny restaurant.

A beat up car, a sizzling girlfriend, a trustworthy friend, and a jealous wealthy rival – Jai has everything a poor chef could ask for.

Everything, except his Grandma’s secret spices.

He had met his grandma only once, as a kid. And he still remembers the taste of a fresh clay baked bread soaked in spices that dripped from a single roasted green chilli.

Ever since the new World Chef contest was announced, he has been trying to reproduce that taste. From books to cuisines, from spices to oils, he has tried everything he knows, to no avail.

Now, with thirty days till the contest, he is contemplating selling the restaurant to his rival, and using the money to go find grandma, and get her secret spices.

There’s but one slight problem: his parents are long gone, and he has no idea where to find her in the vast lands of a South Asian country; or if she is even alive.

Will he risk everything that he has, to go find what only lives in his memory?

Will he be able to see his grandmother, get the spices, and come back in time for the contest?

Will he be able to keep his restaurant?

Follow his journey through land, spice, and memories to find out.”

I want to be its meaning:-)

2014-03-19T08:29:00.001-07:00

"I don’t want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning."

― Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

The Winter is Dead:-)

2014-03-11T12:20:00.001-07:00

She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
“Winter is dead."

— A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

What are you fighting for?

2014-03-02T22:08:00.001-08:00

“But there is suffering in life,” one of the listeners said.

“And there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggle for your dreams than to be defeated without ever even knowing what you’re fighting for.”

Coelho.

Prisoners of Misery.

2014-02-25T20:32:00.002-08:00

Some people always have to be doing battle with someone, sometimes even with themselves, battling with their own lives. So they begin to create a kind of play in their head, and they write the script based on their frustrations.

Then they invite us to behave like victims, when they complain about the unfairness of life, for example, and ask us to agree, to offer advice, to participate.

- By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept.

Your Job is not your Work!

2014-02-25T20:32:00.001-08:00

"The job is what you do when you are told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.

Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.

The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it’s a job.

Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people.

I call the process of doing your art ‘the work.’ It’s possible to have a job and do the work, too. In fact, that’s how you become a linchpin.

The job is not the work."

— Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

For The Man Who is Redefining Democracy for Aristotle

2014-02-19T21:09:00.005-08:00

Don’t care if he doesn’t know the constitutional ways of the red tape.

Don’t care if he is acting out of bigger ambitions, and his real agenda is self fulfilment.

Don’t care if he is naive, manipulative, or an agent of the devil.

I believe in what he says he believes in.

I believe in his fallacies.

I believe in his cunning ways

I believe in his anarchist ideology.

I want to see him fail, but with a clear shot.

I endorse, in honest spirit, his efforts.

Against all odds, Arvind,

May you show history what blazing a trail is.

May you stay resilient in the face of a status quo system that has failed us.

May you fail too, but not without making every doubting Thomas and Harry face themselves first with a hard look, kind of like the ‘deikh le tu deikhte huye kaisa dikhta hai’ way.

You have my soulful support. And it will not deter. I may doubt your actions, even your intent; you may even lie. But just like the narcotic state of love, I surrender judgment and logic to this. Because I have experienced first hand how corruption distorts lives, kills fathers, dries mothers’ tears, mocks poverty, questions intent, throws bones.

May your cause win.

On Religion and Love

2014-02-19T21:09:00.003-08:00

Traditional religious practices are important: they allow us to share with others the communal experience of adoration and prayer. But we must never forget that spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love. And with love, there are no rules. Some may try to control their emotions and develop strategies for their behavior; others may turn to reading books of advice from “experts” on relationships – but this is all folly. The heart decides, and what it decides is all that really matters.

Paulo Coelho.
By the river Piedra I sat down and wept.

The End of Empathy in a World that Can’t Stop Texting

2014-02-19T21:09:00.001-08:00

The average teen sends more than 3,000 text messages a month (and that was a few years ago). But here's the thing: Ten percent of people under the age of 25 don't see anything wrong with texting during sex.

Even as technology helps us understand how relational we truly are, the basic currency of social connection — face-to-face contact and simple conversation — is becoming marginalized. Pamela Eyring, director of the Protocol School of Washington (which teaches social manners to corporate and government clients) has identified four stages — confusion, discomfort, irritation, and, finally, outrage — of what she terms "BlackBerry abandonment": the feeling a person suffers when trying to connect with devotees of such electronic gadgets. Since personal and business relationships rely on making others feel valued, devices put these relationships at risk, so Eyring calls an obsession with iPhones "cell-fishness."

But this is about more than an issue of gadget etiquette or a lack of consideration for others. It's about connection. While our electronic gadgetry is keeping us more connected in some ways, it is a shallow connection — not the deep emotional engagement needed for any kind of meaningful relationship. Why? Because texting and e-mails are set up for volume, velocity, and multitasking — that is, the splitting of attention.

Our gadgets therefore create an illusion of connection. The danger, though, is that they also set up a new way of relating in which we are continually in touch — but emotionally detached.

The one thing that our gadgets cannot do — despite the vision presented by movies likeHer — is feel emotion; they offer a counterfeit performance that imitates connection. Cleverly designed substitutions like robotic pet hamsters, robot puppies for the elderly, and therapeutic seals for depression "put the real on the run" (to use MIT professor Sherry Turkle's phrase). Reducing relationships to simple bytes that then become the accepted norm is "defining relationships down" (to borrow a phrase from the late Daniel Moynihan, noted sociologist and U.S. senator).

Because I listen to so many couples in therapy describing how they spend their time, I see how tapping on iPads and watching TV diminish our opportunities to engage with and care for another person. We become accustomed to the simplified, the superficial, the sensational; we turn to the endless stories of celebrity relationships and online dramas rather than engaging in our own. As political scientist Robert Putnam notes in Bowling Alone, "Good socialization is a prerequisite for life online, not an effect of it: without a real world counterpart, internet contact gets ranty, dishonest, and weird."

There is also a chicken-and-egg factor here. Isolation, I am arguing, is an effect of our obsession with technology — but growing social isolation also creates this obsession.

More than at any time in human history, we live alone: In 1950, only four million folks in the United States lived on their own; in 2012, more than 30 million did. That's 28 percent of households (the same percentage as in Canada; in the UK, it's 34 percent). As NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg observes about these skyrocketing statistics, "a remarkable social experiment" is occurring.

How does this shift fit into the "design" of the creature we call a human being?

Western society long held the view that we are essentially insular, selfish creatures who need rules and constraints to force us to be considerate of others. Today, we are drawing a diametrically opposed portrait: we humans are biologically driven to be associative, altruistic beings who are responsive to others' needs. We should, it seems, be called Homo empathicus.

Empathy is the capacity to perceive and identify with another's emotional state. The word, coined in the 20th century, derives from the Greek empatheia, meaning "affection" and "suffering." But the concept was first developed by 19th-century German philosophers who gave it the nameEinfühlung, meaning "feeling into." How strong that capacity is in human beings is being proven in study after study.

Most fascinating, perhaps, is research showing that just imagining or thinking that another person is in pain — especially a loved one — makes us respond as if we are going through the exact same experience. Neuroscientist Tania Singer and her colleagues at the University of Zurich found that when a woman received a small electric shock to the back of her hand, the woman beside her, who received no shock, reacted as though she had received it, too: the same pain circuit was activated and the identical area of the brain lit up in both women. We literally hurt for others.

Roughly, the way empathy seems to happen is: you see me (or even, as in the experiment above, imagine me) experiencing a strong feeling, maybe pain or disgust; you mirror my response in your brain; you mimic me with your body (your face crinkles in the exact same way as mine does); you respond to me on an emotional level and move into empathetic concern for me; you help me.

As we imitate others in dimensions beyond the virtual, we also communicate and show them that we feel for them. This creates instant connection.

Psychologists point out that the cooperation on which society depends is a learned skill that until recently almost everyone acquired. Today, however, fewer and fewer people have the ability to collaborate; instead they withdraw from group tasks and social life. Real connection with others is being crowded out by virtual kinship.

When they become lost and desperate, the distressed couples that come to me for therapy pick up solutions that seem to offer immediate comfort but further distort our ability to really connect with another person. As MIT's Sherry Turkle suggested, our tools over the last 15 years have begun to shape us and our connection with others, so that we now "expect more from technology and less from each other." Substitute pseudo-attachments — even those with people online — can be seductive, but in the end they take us farther and farther away from the real thing: a loving, felt sense of connection that requires moments of full, absorbing attention and a tuning in to the real-life nuances of emotion.

In that sense, technology reflects a profound lack of awareness about our need for intimate emotional connection. In a good love relationship, if we can turn off the screen, we can learn to say what really matters to us in ways that build connection.

In Oregon State University psychologist Frank Bernieri's study of young couples teaching each other made-up words, pairs who showed the greatest motor synchrony — that is, those who mimicked each other most closely — also had the strongest emotional rapport with each other. In my own team's studies of forgiveness, nearly every injured partner told his or her lover some version of, "I can't forgive you until I see that you feel my pain. Until I know that my pain hurts you, too."

Appeared in Wired magazine: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/02/gadgets-ruin-relationships-connection-illusion-one/?cid=co18637004

It is like a Narcotic:-)

2014-02-15T12:33:00.001-08:00

I’ve been in love before, it’s like a narcotic. At first it brings the euphoria of complete surrender. The next day you want more. You’re not addicted yet, but you like the sensation, and you think you can still control things.

Paulo Coelho.

Thin Ice

2014-02-12T07:41:00.009-08:00

"You are walking on thin ice – the ice of what remains of the trust between us – carrying the weight of immeasurable guilt."
— Prashant Chopra, The Eyes that drowned Uyuni

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7376977.Prashant_Chopra

A Slave

2014-02-12T07:41:00.007-08:00

"This is how you will remember that you are mine. Every painful touch, every
aching hug, will remind you – that you are a slave – to me."
— Prashant Chopra, The Eyes that drowned Uyuni

A Wise Man Once Said …

2014-02-12T07:41:00.005-08:00

A wise man once said …
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
nothing.

Realize the power of quiet. In a world that can’t stop talking, try solitude sometimes. You may fall in love again, with life:-)

[The "What is Love?" Contest] Win an author copy!

2014-02-12T07:41:00.003-08:00

Enter to win one of the five author copies here:

[contact-form]

Win an author’s copy of the book here…

2014-02-12T07:41:00.001-08:00

Win an author’s copy of the book here…

Win 1/5 Author's Copy, Ends Feb 14 2014!

2014-02-09T16:36:00.001-08:00

Do You Feel Useful?

2014-02-08T22:16:00.001-08:00

Don't try to be useful.

Try to be yourself: that is enough, and that makes all the difference:-)

- Coelho Bog.

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2014-02-06T23:44:00.001-08:00

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5 Most Common Regrets On Death Bed

2014-02-06T18:04:00.004-08:00

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.

From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn't work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

Often they would not truly realize the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

Source:

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2011/06/23/regrets/

Get you copy now. See why others read it:-)

2014-02-06T18:04:00.003-08:00

Two digit sales of the printed copy the first day.

If you are one of the first owners, congratulations and thank you!

If not, why wait? Get your copy now!:-)

The Eyes that Drowned Uyuni: Sometimes the only way to keep love, is to let it go.: Prashant Chopra: 9781494478056: Amazon.com: Books

[On The Racks Now] The Eyes That Drowned Uyuni

2014-02-06T18:04:00.001-08:00

Create space:

https://www.createspace.com/4571451

Coming soon to a marketplace new you … (Including Amazon)

It’s in the press NOW!

2014-01-31T19:05:00.001-08:00

After months of mash up, weeks of weak ink, days of chaos, and hours of love later,
“The Eyes that Drowned Uyuni” is finally in the press.

Spread the word. Its the next best thing since… well… the last one:-)

Happy reading!