My take on Steve!

I just finished a phone conversation with a good friend of mine and I was talking to him about a lot of recent developments. The most important among them being the fact that a lot has been written about Steve Jobs accomplishment, but the most important aspect has been left out.

Most of us work and take leave when we are sick. We are accustomed to taking a leave of absence and not taking calls when we are on sick leave. Forget that, some of us do not take calls on holidays because we want to relax. We are familiar with physical discomfort as part of general illness. How many times have we heard people troubled by headache and back pain. We are all so used to complaining.

But here we have a man, who was diagnosed with a fatal illness and lived through it for more than 5 years. Now the illness was such that we can assume years of painful chemotherapy and more importantly mentally sapping periods of frustration. Frustration because he had just started doing some marvelous things. Everybody needs his attention. Family, children, employees, pressmen and so on. And what did he do?

He must have pulled on some enormous amounts of mental energy in putting everything aside and focussing entirely on what mattered to him. This is nothing short of brilliance. So what is new? Imagine having headache,…now multiply that 10 times over. Imagine having to have an injection. Now imagine that you need that injection every alternate day. Imagine feeling tired after a long day’s work. Now multiply that 10 times over.

Now add up all that you have imagined and you probably have Steve Jobs spending the last few years of his life.

How much he must be enjoying what he was doing to have pulled on. How many of us can love what we are doing the way he did??!!

 

Monday morning

The strangest Monday morning. Tapping away on my phone amidst a deluge of impending tasks. Am definitely in a talkative mood. But I am not able to figure out the topic. Not about work or family or anything to do with my friends.

Yes, I can talk about Yoga. 9 years since I started and have come a long way. It has ceased to be an item in my daily routine. It is now a part of me. I am shedding my coloured glasses one by one. I can see more clearly now. I can understand better. All the lines that are said and those unsaid, in seriousness and otherwise. Intentionally & otherwise. Directly & otherwise. The next knot was being judgemental & opinionated. Am working on it.

Where is my paper?

Nice week…

Lot of things happened in the week past. They have been really interesting from the perspective of priorities.

The first one was my visit to a premium motorcycle showroom and involved being turned out, metaphorically, by the guys there. I had a word with a good friend of mine and the conversation centred around me having a big head. So big that I could not put up with a little frustration. Whatever it was, I felt closer to my bullet. More importantly, I felt like a kid who was refused his lollipop. I now don’t care about that lollipop. I on the other hand felt closer to my friend.

The second one was a conversation with another friend of mine when we had met after a long time. I was having chicken after close to 2 months. This friend was going through an important stage in his life and that kind of is an introspective phase for him. So we were having food and we were discussing a lot of friends and stuff. I abruptly told him that most of these things are immaterial and we should rather enjoy th food. I did just that. While on the way back, I looked at my day to day routine and found out that we, or atleast I am losing track of time in my everyday routine. I feel that I am  not enjoying the moment as much as I would want to. We all say that time flies, but what we actually mean is that we are wasting our time. We do not value time and the most important reason is because we are so packed in analyzing and dissecting things with our narrow minded priorities and petty politics that we let moments slip by us. We waste ourselves.

What priorities do I have today? To enjoy time. I don’t think there is any bigger priority for myself. Thanks to all my friends who taught me this.

Where is my paper?

Long time later…

Been sometime. I have been taken up by work and family for about two odd years now. But I always of the opinion that there is always time. Here I am, online through my phone. I am looking forward to putting in more updates as and when…

Very funny though as I am not a big fan of gadgets. Anyways….am cool as long as things work.

Soft and mellow

It is interesting that I had made a draft a long while ago with just the name – ‘Soft and mellow’.

Now I login ages later to be able to relate to it like air. What else do I say when I talk about my moments these days. The swirl of incense in the mornings,..when I sit down to meditate is just like that. The waft of the morning mist and the wetness of dew is just like that. The words of my wife when she has just woken up,..is just like that. The sight of the morning bloom of roses in my balcony,..is just like that. The subtle taste of green tea, at any time of the day,..is just like that.

And yes, the sheer sight of my infant son,…at any time of the day,…any moment,..be it when he is sleeping or awake or when he is playing,….is bang on target – Soft and mellow.

I guess this feeling has less to do with the sights and sounds. It has more to do the inner draft. The incessant flow which sustains me. It is soft and mellow to start with. Everything else follows.

Days slide by me

It has been ages since I had a chance to write.

Not written because of many reasons, some obvious and some not. Some just and some not. But I am not here because of any other reason other than my desire to share.

And I have so much to share with so little time to do with.

A start is nevertheless good enough. A few quick things would be that I have a son, Bharan. I have never spent too much time thinking about it, but I am liking the whole experience a lot.

Will keep adding in a trickle.

Thanks for dropping by Prashant, I and writing because of you.

Cheers!

Meditation diaries-Last Mile

This in continuance of my conversation with an office colleague.

So this person was asking what had changed in our company since last year and the tone was one of weariness. This reminded me of ‘The Last Mile’.

I have had moments in the past when I was about to give up. I was giving up not because I was tired, but because I had doubts about my own abilities against a challening task. This kind of doubts creep in even amongst the best of us, most commonly because of an under-estimation of the task at hand. The task becomes even more complicated when the path is untrodden and the road diappears into the wilderness. 

I have been there before and perseverance helps, if nothing else. The harder I work the luckier I become.

I am fearless and there is nothing which is impossible. I would like to say that to my office colleague, but it is a matter os syaing it and it is another to believe in it.

I don’t convince myself. I believe.

Meditation diaries

I had written a post sometime back, on a particular observation during practise of asanas and meditation. Interestingly I had a comment by a gentleman talking about the a very sweeping description of meditation.

It was a very good description and I would like to agree with him on a lot of aspects. But if I look back and pick up something which had left an impression on me, it was his statement which can be equated with logic.

‘A wise person is intelligent, but an intelligent person is not necessarily wise’

How true?

One thing which I have noticed as a change during the past few years spent in meditation is that there has been a change in my maturity level (a.k.a wisdom). I would strongly attribute this to that fact that I am able to move away from my selfish self. I take myself less seriously and even so others. Can this really be called maturity?

Somebody I know recently said,

‘Let me be myself’.

I asked,

‘What are you, that you want to be yourself? You are but a mixed bag, predominantly composed of your parents and close friends,….and bits and pieces of all the people that you have met since you were born.’

I reflect upon it and isn’t it true that we are all clowns, imitating other in everything starting from the language we speak, body language to everything else. We talk like others, eat like others, think like others. The society seems to be a collective bag of largely identical units walking and talking in a mundane symphony. It as even perfected the art of sustaining itself through generations?

So there is no you as such. So why take yourself so seriously?

My husband, my work, my life……

So much of tension because of these thougths that you are responsible for everything and it is your headache to turn things around.

Is it necessary?

You have no control over why your were born by the collective union of two specific individuals in this wide Cosmos. If you have no control over this fact then you have no control over all the parameters that have influenced you ever since. Everything from your first teacher to the icecream vendor on the street.

A thought like this helps you take yourself less seriously. Can this be called maturity? Can a thought which makes you ligther be called maturity?

Simon say ‘Yes, we can!’

Hah!

Knowledge and Spirituality

I was reading from a book written by guru

I stopped for a moment and started thinking about spirituality as such and the amount of material that one can find in this world. The sheer number of religions, sects and sub-sects. The number of Saints and Yogis and their followers in this world. Ironically each saint would have been written upon multiple times in terms of interpretations and translations. This presents a mind-numbing amount of content.

Is it possible to read all this in one span of life?

This brings a very interesting question to the fore and that is the relevance of information and the difference between information and Knowledge. There is only a certain amount of information that any human being can ingest in a lifetime. So we obviously have to be selective about the information that we ingest on a day-today basis. This can only be done by understanding the relevance of information to ourselves. The relevance of information now brings us to the difference between information and knowledge. When information is converted into something useful, by the application of our mind to syncretise a conceptual understanding of information and concepts that we have collected so far, then the information is converted into Knowledge. Knowledge helps us understand.

Now the question shifts to the more important question of how to differentiate amongst the information that we collect on a day-to-day basis. The straight forward answer to this question will be that it depends on what one wants to do or is doing. If you are doing business then the focus should be on information related to business. So on and so forth. But at the end of the day the mind is like a machine which needs lubrication, a kind of mental rest and this is where spirituality comes into play. Spirituality has only one goal and that is to give you peace of mind. While one’s ambitions and goals will leave us in a constant state of restlessness and anxiety about what will happen in the future, spirituality will leave us bereft of all these symptoms and tend to push us towards a more balanced state of mind.

For the beginners in spirituality, ingesting some bit on a daily basis will definitely help. While for the advanced practitioners (don’t ask me for the definition), again discretion is adviced. I have come to realise this because of two factors, one is that it is more important to syncretise rather than ingesting information. Sometimes it is better to understand 4 lines of poetry rather than read 100 lines. I have read the book by Guru once and I decided that I will not finish the book in a hurry. I will rather stop and weigh my thoughts over and over to be able assimilate the last drop of Knowledge before moving forward.

In the seashore of the collective knowledge of this world, there are way too many footprints and I am confused. If I follow every other footprint, I will end up in ‘Brownian motion’. I do not have ‘apriori’ information to be able to select any one. In this melee, I met my Guru and out of pure intuition, putting down intelligence and trusting my intuition alone, I follow his steps and I have never looked back since. I am not asking you to do the same as everybody might not have the good-luck of meeting with a Guru. What I am asking you to do is to prioritise your sources of information, syncretise rather than spend all your time in collecting ‘General Knowledge’ (which remains General) and lastly to spend sometime in spirituality for that balance in life.

And totally out of the blue, trust your intuition once in a while.

After more than a year

One of my colleagues at office asked me yesterday.

‘It has been more than a year now and what do you think has changed?’

His voice was one of dreary exhaustion and also one of a person in the last mile. I guess a lot of us go through it sooner or later. I will dwell on this in a while.

Looking back, I can see a picture. I can see a beautiful collage of people moving around. The flurry of excitement when we started. The long hours spent in tuning things for the launch. Oh oh,..let me go to the days when I had a parley with Kunal about joining the company. Oh not so long ago and fresh as a mayflower.

I had eventually joined and never turned back since. We were such a small team and it was funny knowing that everything for our company was happening in that small room. A bag full of beer and a few cigarettes gave us all the company.The portal kept crashing once in a while and people kept using our services for hours, for free. Those were the days when every small interaction was a entry in our log and every customer was contacted to get feedback. Every small thing mattered and everybody was on-top of everything.

We have moved considerable since. Most importantly, for me, we have spoken to so many different people to be able to see all the possible avenues to be able to apply ourselves in our quest to reach out to people and tell them about our services. Interestingly, the list might seem funny as we have spoken to Telecom operators, handset manufacturers and also reached out to people through the regular phone channel. This can be looked at as a sort of vertical integration of sorts. Trying to grab value from every part of the value chain.

We have been able to open up a few more channels from other categories such as travel and premium customers and things are looking pretty spiced up for the moment. Waiting for the point of inflection and I would predict that it is only a matter of time.

I am not keeping my fingers crossed, rather both my legs are on the gas pedal and the clutch. Revving hard and biding for the moment to fire on all cylinders.

Thumbs up!