Wise Words Overheard On A Thursday Night

<Skip this post if you do not wish to get a heavy dose of spirituality or the whole works.>


<I told you to skip it. You still want to read? Fine, suffer.>

Yesterday, I attended the first in a series of spiritual talks that are being given by a visiting professor, Prof Anil Kumar.
I shan't go into all the song and dance of the purpose of these talks, except that they are highly enjoyable not only because of the insane humor the Professor injects into spirituality, but because he tends to address the usual doubts that ail ordinary believers of God.

He talks about how God is the truest form of unconditional love and that all human relationships are bound by one or another form of give and take. Human relationships, be it mother-child, wife-husband, guru-sishya, friend-friend rarely are unconditional. (Interestingly, I recently posted about this very point.) That the only love that is unconditional, boundless and limitless is that of God's.

Here is a rambling summary of the Q&A at the end of the talk. He had some points that I have always believed in and resoundingly agree with. I am sorry, but this summary Q&A is devoid of the humor and the many wise anecdotes he injected into his answers-

Question: When do you know it is the time to let go?
Answer: Right Now! This very instant..[insert anecdote]...Remember, life needs to be a journey of choiceless awareness. Forgo desires, and believe that 'This Too Shall Pass'. Let go now!

Question: Sai Baba tells us to practice selfless, unconditional love for everyone. But in this modern era, it is often perceived as a weakness and you can be taken advantage of when you practice this. Please advise.
Answer: Why should you let go of your good habits because of the faults of the other person? [Here he narrates the fable of a Yogi and Scorpion] Unconditional love is u-c-o-n-d-i-t-i-o-n-a-l. Without a desire for a result. Not even a desire for the other person to treat you well in return.

Question: Sometimes I wish God can be contacted with a phone call when in a dilemma. How do I communicate with him for answers?
Answer: Oh! Now people want to get God a cell phone too eh? Look, you dont have to talk to God. He is within you. God is within each of us. Listen to him. You may call it your intuition, inner voice, whatever. But, you will hear a voice when you listen and pray.

Question: How can you reconcile the existence of God with the fact that often innocent people get hurt because of the crimes of others? If God exists why do so many bad things happen to good people?
Answer: Who are you to judge that a person is innocent? How do you know the Truth? You do not even know what happens in the next minute, how can you be sure that the innocent are innocent, and the evil are evil? God is omnipresent, omniscient, limitless, boundless. He knows your past, present and future. He knows the Universe's past, present and future. He does everything for a reason. [Insert the anecdote of the King with the Amputated Finger] Comfort yourself with the faith that everything happens for a reason and it is all for your own good. If you cannot comprehend how it could be for your own good, then remember "This too shall pass".

<end>

Right, now, you can go on and call me banal, trite and stale. But I do take comfort in it all. Especially because they resonate well with my own personal beliefs.

NICE

There are inspiring stories behind all those orgs like Asha for Education, CRY, Habitat for Humanity...But the story behind NICE is very simple. It is the man who is inspiring.  Sri Poornachandra Rao so inspired another man that, a decade after meeting him, the inspired man featured a character based on Sri Poornachandra Rao in his touching road movie Gamyam.

I looked up NICE's annual report to find that the org isnt too big for our non-monetary donations (pens, books, chairs) to seem feeble or our monetary donations to disappear in administrative charges. SIN$130 covers a child's 1Y education. $130 for a year of knowledge. That's what I spend on 13 movie tickets.

Take a look.
Dont be lazy.
You may or you may not wish to donate.
But read his story.

Agneepath

A towering verse penned by Sri Harivanshrai Bachchan -

Tu na thakega kabhi, tu na thamega kabhi,
tu na mudega kabhi,
Kar shapath, kar shapath, kar shapath,
Agneepath, Agneepath, Agneepath.

Edited to add meaning as requested -
My literal translation:
You shall not tire ever, you shall not give up ever,
you shall not turn back ever,
take the oath, take the oath, take the oath,
Path of Fire, Path of Fire, Path of Fire

My shallow broad translation:
Swear that you will persevere resolutely, with the test of fire, without ever tiring, without ever giving up, without ever turning back.

Not-so Unconditional Faith

I was talking to Jayesh about how faith in God should be independent of the joys and misery God puts us through, that Faith should not be conditional. I scorned people who did otherwise. But after the conversation, I got off my judgmental horse and realised that I was talking pure idealism that even I (gasp!) have not matched up to.

Most human relationships are conditional. We love because we are loved. We help because we are comfortable.  We feed because we are well fed.  I am not making sense am I?  Oh dear, let me try and explain. Did you ever feed someone - a beggar, your child, mother, whoever - when you were going hungry? Do you love your family/partner/dog without expecting something in return? Did you ever donate your (not your dad's, mom's, ancestral) money to a cause you believed in when money was hard to come by? Perhaps not all of us have been in such situations, so lets just simply ask, have you been unconditional? That one glorious shining moment when you realised that right there, in that one microsecond of your 25/45/80 years of your existence, you have been unconditional?

I have examined myself a little. I have faith in God because by and large he has been generous to me. I love my family as they put up with all the torture one goes through to have me around. I donate because I have no great desire to own things with money. So, I suppose, life has been kind enough to allow me the luxury to be an armchair idealist, discussing unconditional faith in God. Others might not. When one goes through what the biblical Job has gone through, one has the right to judge the nature of someone else's belief. Till then, I probably should shut it, and let people believe in God for their own reasons. One's faith is one's private affair.

I apologise. Sincerely.

Senator Obama on Race

Like the other 10 million blogs, I have decided to do a post on Senator Obama's speech on Race. Anybody who lives on Earth and has access to mass media could not have missed the Race speech he gave a couple of months ago. Like many of us, I was too busy to read the whole transcript. I just read the excerpts on MSNBC and NYT and saw some clips on Youtube. I thought it was a fantastic speech. That was before I read the whole thing.

Yesterday, I decided to read the whole speech. Mid way through, I got so worked up, and eyes began welling up that I knew i had to actually see him utter these magnificent words. So, I went on Youtube and heard him. The whole 37 min.

Gentlemen, anybody who heard this speech and still doubts that he can be the president the world needs to have, should quickly move to Mars.The response was overwhelming. My Oxford roommate, who is a poet, actually wrote a poem about Barack Obama after the speech. Here is one response i found online -

peaceful easy feeling Says:
After Obama wins the presidency this speech will be referred to as his ‘I Have a Dream’ moment.

Some people were more pragmatic -

Ruthless People Says:
A uniting, intelligent, articulate, thoughtful, president who can string two complete sentences together?
That would be Change.

{harika adds - I guess, Michael Moore's 2004 slogan 'Anybody But Bush' lingers}

Anyhoo, I urge you all to read, at the very least, the now famous excerpts.

The Genographic Project

I was looking at all the projects that National Geographic Society is providing grants for when The Genographic Project caught my eye.

The Genographic Project, touted as a landmark study of the human journey, is the making of an atlas of the human journey, the tracing of our ancestors steps, where you and I really come from, and how did we get there from that group of African ancestors over 60000 years ago? It sounds phenomenal! A 5 year project involving scientists and IBM researches (for cutting edge genetic & computational technologies) entwining genetics, anthropology and technology. There are some phenomenal visuals about human migratory history in the site.

The exciting thing is, you can actually participate in this study. With a painless cheek swab you can sample your own DNA and submit it to the lab. Then the project people run a test to your DNA, it reveals your ancestry and the journeys that they made over 60000-10000 years ago!

The project director, Dr Spencer Wells, promises -

Your results will reveal your deep ancestry along a single line of direct descent (paternal or maternal) and show the migration paths they followed thousands of years ago. Your results will also place you on a particular branch of the human family tree. ... For example, if you are of African descent, your results will show the initial movements of your ancestors on the African continent, but will not reflect most of the migrations that have occurred within the past 10,000 years.

Enthralling, if you ask me!

My Sister, the Gardener

My sister is a gardener. She likes plants. Plants seem to like her too. They bloom under her eye. Take for example the record sized eggplant she grew last year. It actually resembled a bulbous freakish purple monstrosity. I wish I could just show you what a terror it was, but unfortunately, I deleted the pictures she sent me of this monstrosity as they gave me seizures.

This spring she managed to germinate many seeds and transfered them into 80 pots. She will soon get her husband to transfer the potted plants to the vegetable patch in the backyard and the flowerbed in the front lawn. She grows her own veggies - carrots, tomatoes, eggplant, okra, or whatever catches her fancy. She also grows flowering shrubs - tulips, poppies (no, not for pot), geraniums, violets, azaleas, blah blah blah. You get the drift? Quaint, innit?
Below is a picture of a few of her tulips she planted around a lamppost in their front lawn.

I dare say, I contributed to this passion of hers in the beginning. In the summer of 2004, I went berserk with a rake and a hoe at the bottom of her backyard. I went on a digging and weeding rampage - uprooting veronicas, crabgrass, dandelions, and other weeds. I dug and dug, ripped dastardly weeds, stamped touch-me-nots, chopped at this random tree root that appeared out of nowhere, cut worms in two (just kidding), threw tufts of grass at curious squirrels ... basically did a very noisy job of helping to clear the vegetable patch. Then I helped her put some foul smelling manure, rolled around in it for a bit (just kidding) and helped till the soil some more.

By next summer, when I visited them again, all my unpaid for, free of charge, slavish efforts paid off. The veggie patch was blossoming. It was a modest success, if only the damned rabbits were taken care of. A neighbourhood band of rogue rabbits chewed all her veggie plants in the patch and made a general nuisance of themselves everyday. Even before i came, she put a low fence around the patch. But thieving wabbits being wabbits, jumped over the joke of a fence and continued nibbling away her plants and generally filling their greedy tummies. So every time we opened the backdoor noisily, out popped 4-5 wabbits in the air and quickly scattered away into the field beyond their fence. If it wasnt so damn irritating it was quite a funny sight. At one time, i went at them like a screaming banshee which scared her neighbours more than the damned rabbits. She soon solved the problem by putting a fishnet over the veggie patch.

If you notice in the background of the below pic, the brownish low fence in front of the white fence is the vegetable patch. To the right, in the back ground, the wooden stand was built by my brother in law to hold all her pots. A sort of artsy backyard functional garden piece. I guess. In the foreground are just 0.1% of her plants this summer. They will soon be planted in the patch in the backyard.

Before you think she is a homely gardener, let me inform you that she kicks ass in driving large manly equipment. She is licensed to drive large hydraulic CAT excavators, like this -

and CAT Motor Grader (model 140M) like this

and CAT Backhoe Loader (Model 420E) like this -

which all, if you ask me, look even more monstrous than the formerly mentioned eggplant.

She is also into sports cars. She drives this yellow mustang (notice, it has a very macho license plat no. that goes 'DREAMZ') -

She is likeable. doesnt bite your head off if you pry, a little irritable and sulky, but by and large a sensible, generous soul who goes about pottering around her house and her garden before she pokes her nose in other people's affairs. (This is a very rare quality in women. So, dont write off the magnificence of that quality.) She seems to like me. She brought me one suitcase full of goodies from the glorious nation of the United States of America. For this reason, I also like her.

To Know When To

One needs to learn many things in life. To become wise and stay young at heart. To know the time to pry and the time to be quiet. To know when to shake hands and when to hug. To know when to talk and when to listen. To know when to  carry the joke farther and when to draw the line. To know when to try and when to let things take their course. To know when to have secrets and when to let people in.  To know when to fly the nest and when to plant your roots. To know when to sow and when to work the harvest. To know when to hold on and when to move on.

A quarter of a century wasn't quite enough. Would the rest of the 40 be enough?

Evil Drip by Drip

A fool fills himself with evil a little at a time.