Philosophy
Hindi Kavita – Atal
We all are inspired by different people in our lives. Since I love poetry, one such person for me is Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The Bharat Ratna winner embodies love, passion and leadership which few have been able to match in India’s political landscape.
I wrote a poem inspired by him which I am sharing with you all. Hope you enjoy it and feel inspired by him and the poem both.
The full poem is on Youtube here-
Here are a few quotes from the poem-
Please do provide your feedback. I would love to see your comments here.
Swamped by knowledge, missing in wisdom?
We all are swimming in the ocean of knowledge. At least all of us, here on the Internet. Everything that we want to know and learn is just one click or search away. But that knowledge may or may not be useful to us. Something that works for someone, may not work for you, because you have your own personality. You may not like that method, it might not suit you in different ways – conditionally, intellectually , emotionally, socially etc. It might take many trials and errors before you distill down those ‘grapes’ of knowledge into the ‘wine’ of wisdom.
Merely knowing something is not enough in life. You may read a lot about oceans, but to actually jump into an ocean can give you a different understanding of the natural wonder that an ocean is.
Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
– Albert Einstein
The process of converting this knowledge into wisdom is causing endless struggles into each one of our lives! But that is how it has always been. Growth is always gradual, accompanied by struggles!
There is Google for knowledge these days, hence whatever you are seeking – appears in an instant. But there is no Google for wisdom. As of yet, that is!
The saddest aspect of life now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. —Isaac Asimov
Educated intellectuals or anglicised slaves
One of my favourite authors of all time is Munshi Premchand. He has written so many timeless classics where he describes the life of a common person in India, his situations, and his emotions. The beauty of his writing is that each word he uses, describes the reality of life. The emotion of a farmer, of poverty, of the struggles of life.
He makes you feel the situation of Hamid who buys a chimta for his grandmother instead of buying a toy for himself, his innocence and empathy touches you.
Munshi Premchand is a great author because he “keeps it real”!
On the other hand, there is a new generation of authors and people, who think that expressing their knowledge of fancy words in itself is of some great value. Look at this tweet-
This is just throwing of words in order to showcase the profoundness of someone’s knowledge.
There is no great value in knowing a lot of fancy words, as all those words are present in a dictionary and we don’t give great importance to a dictionary. However, if someone is able to use words in a well crafted manner to describe something and it either moves, entertains or teaches you something, then it is good writing.
To be honest, the case here maybe just an honest expression by Mr. Shashi Tharoor, but I have seen this too many times done by others so I am a bit skeptical. Many such people who don’t have any original thoughts or ideas, just throw in some fancy words because they know that there would be a group of blind followers who would be so impressed by vocabulary of the person, they would become fans of that person. That should not be the case for most people, in fact it is not the case for most people, except for a small group of anglicised illiterates.
Here are few traits of the anglicised illiterates that I see in India-
- Yoga is bad and of saffron nature when done by Baba Ramdev, but our culture when done by Julia Roberts.
- Holi is a waste of water and too much hooliganism but La Tomatina is a beautiful Spanish festival and is on their bucket list.
- Deepawali celebration is bad for the environment but they can’t wait for 4th of July fireworks if they happen to be in USA, and they should reach their in a big car!
- Jallikattu in which Indian Tamils play with a bull but don’t injure it is animal cruelty, however Spanish bull fighting by a matador is display of grace and courage! Also killing and eating that same animal is not cruelty.
- Any Indian religious celebration in which people take a procession our with music is creating noise. But they can’t wait to go out to the next EDM(electronic dance music) festival, create lots of noise, burn firecrackers and eat a cooked killed animal. That is progress.
Basically anything which is remotely a long drawn tradition of Indian forefathers, is abhorrent to such intellectuals because it is regressive. But the same thing, when presented with a different packaging, becomes an exercise in modernism to them.
Lets assume for a second that 200 years ago, some politician in Britain, was devising a plan to enslave the civilisation of India, what would his goal be? His goal would be, to produce an Indian citizen who thinks like a slave. The citizen should think that everything of his own culture is inferior, just by being associated with it. Has that politician succeeded? Yes, partially. There is a generation of such people I see, who think they are thinking independently, but they are really not! They are thinking like a slave.
But I am optimistic about India, because they are a small percentage of the population. The wisdom of an ancient civilisation can be easily seen, even when you talk to an uneducated cobbler, because he is able to make sense of life. Only this small group of people, who know how to read, but don’t know how to think, or to empathise are the ones who belong to this group of anglicised slaves. Its unfortunate to see them though. Because normally you would think that education should open the minds of people, but for this small group, it has instead instilled a sense of moral superiority, which has closed their mind. Moral superiority should come from morality and from actions, not from knowing fancy english literature.
India got its independence in 1947. Before India was a British colony, it contributed around 25% to the world GDP. Its intrinsic culture has all the constituents of innovation, love, music, colour and compassion. It would reach that same place, if we work hard and steadily. But at the same time, we should keep the anglicised slaves from chipping away our own self respect.
We should not be too proud of our heritage, because heritage is nothing but a creation of passage of time, but we should not be ashamed of our heritage as well, because to be honest, we have been handed a very rich and diverse one. We shall move forward to creating more richness and more heritage.
And we shall move forward, not with the thinking of a slave who assumes that anything associated with his master is good, but of a fully functional, divine and creative human being, who is innovative, accepting, analytical, and moving forward with compassion and love.
Ideals and life
We all have an idea of what we want in life. That ideal job, awesome car, beautiful home, loving-caring family, an understanding life partner, free-flowing existence, and nirvana!
But all that exists in the head. While we should always pursue the dreams that we have, real life is tough and can be sometimes different from the expectations we have in life.
What would you do in a moment of disappointment? I would say that feel the disappointment for a moment, but don’t sulk in it. Disappointments are failures but failures are results of fault in action, or a fault in assumptions that you had made prior to taking those actions. You can change you actions and achieve the success that you want in the next iteration.
Failures should not be a reason not to dream and they should not be a reason to WAIT. I see so many people waiting in their life. I don’t know what they are waiting for! Because it is themselves who have to arrive at a new destination, not someone else. Why are you waiting? Keep moving. Keep the momentum up and go ahead.
So what I am saying is.
while you should pursue your ideals in life, you should not stop living your life in the wait of your ideals.
No magic is going to happen. Many a lives have been wasted in this wait in the existence of civilisation. Your is not going to be different. What can differentiate it is only the action that you take while continuously moving forward.
Meanwhile cherish the imperfection that you are living through if you can. Because imperfection is what makes life so interesting, because if everything was perfect and expected, our lives would have been so boring and predictable. It is these disappointments that make our stories interesting. It is when we are faced with disappointments that our resolve is tested, our intelligence questioned and our existence laughed on. And it is at this hour, we show what we are made of. And we are not made of just some chemicals, we are made up of dreams, resolve and determination. How else would humans land on moon? How else someone has dreams to colonise Mars!
I love champions who overcome challenges. Yuvraj Singh overcame cancer, fought his place back into the Indian cricket team and scored his highest score at the age of 35 years. There were many challenges in the path and needless to say many disappointments. Life gave him cancer, and he gave it a fight and won!
Don’t wait. Live before you die.
Check out Yuvraj’s interview on his comeback here.
Who do you write for?
Why write anything on the web these days. There is already a lot of content in the world. All the world’s wisdom, knowledge and facts are always one search away for people.
I write for people who seek the same things as me in life and are on similar journeys of time. Writing also brings a lot of clarity to me. Believe me, once you start typing, more often then not, you would end up writing something which is not having any original or good insight. But if you still have the habit of writing, it will sometimes enable you to come with a new insight. So its not only the effect, its sometimes also the cause.
I also write to put an online record of things. Sometimes in future, it would be fun to read these blog posts, right? And looking back at this time, i would hopefully think that “I was young and stupid at that time 🙂 ”
Anyways, do you write something regularly? And if so, who do you write for? Tell me in the comments.
Meaning and the need to be strong
One of the important things in life is to be doing something meaningful which creates value in the society. There are two aspects to it-
- Meaningful to you – If what you do provides joy to you, you can be really happy
- Creates value in society – Humans are social beings and as such we depend on others for our own survival. Even though you are not a farmer, you need food to survive and that food is produced by him, by working hard day and night. Why should he provide you with food if you are not going to generate any value for him?
The best case scenario is an overlap of the above two where you enjoy creating value for others because you like helping fellow human beings living their life on planet earth && you are also enjoying the craftsmanship of whatever you are doing. You are like the artist who really enjoys painting, or a cook who loves making a delicious dish, or a software developer who wants to solve an interesting and useful problem.
The fundamental thing is – everyone is different and hence what is meaningful to you, might be not meaningful to someone else. To each his own. Meaningfulness is something which you need to decide for your own self, while whether or not it is adding value can be and should be judged on socially defined objective points. While it is true that you can choose those points in a manner which is different from the society, in many cases it is delusional thinking. Society is on the whole really good at valuing what is good for it or what is not.
But since what is meaningful for you is UNIQUE for you – there is need to be really mentally strong because in most cases whatever else you have done in life, you have done in groups along with your friends. For example – you go to a school in a group, to a college in a group – but when you need to take a major adult decision in life, you need to decide for yourself. There might be periods where you would be misunderstood, but you have to take that in your stride because it is part of the whole story. You would always find fellow dreamers who would join you in this journey and make it more fun, but you also need to be mentally strong and take a deserted path when its needed.
I want to end this blog post with a very relevant quote.
Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticise that effort. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.
Jeff Bezos
The power of words
Today there is so much that is written to capture human attention to sell advertising that a lot of content just does not seem to be good to me. There is a lack of gravity in the thought process.
The words that you read, or listen – should speak to your heart or to your brain. Every sentence should make you discover something in the world that you yourself have not discovered or felt.
It should lead to the birth of an emotion inside you that you never knew existed. Great writing would make tears emerge out of eyes, laughter from inside of heart and give you goosebumps. Now goosebumps are amusing – you never really know what makes you get goosebumps. It almost feels like a divine intervention.
When you have goosebumps, you feel like some invisible god has reached out to your soul and shaken it from within.
You don’t know what you are feeling or see any reason behind why you are having that feeling. You realise that your brain is not in control of this emotion. Since your brain is not in control of this emotion, you are not in control of this emotion. Clearly, your existence has been over-powered by an invisible hand. Or to say it more kindly, you are having a divine touch at the moment.
Basically great writing can connect you to your existence, to your soul.
Now that is the kind of writing that I want to read.
I had the chance to listen to this great talk between Conan O’Brian and Ken Burns. This is a great talk about writing, history and more. If you have some time today, you can listen to this.
One of the quotes that I really liked from the talk above was from Teddy Roosevelt –
Black Care can rarely catch up to a rider who is fast enough.
which means that you can outrun your daemons. You can outrun your daemons.
Now read this quote again –
Black Care can rarely catch up to a rider who is fast enough.
Teddy Roosevelt wrote this sentence after both his wife and mother died on the same day and he was really really sad and surrounded by his daemons and the he wrote this really powerful sentence.
Black Care can rarely catch up to a rider who is fast enough.
I am pretty sure that a man, who can write such lines after a great personal tragedy can find the strength to endure the pain. I think his words are divine and he was being soothed by a divine being who put such thoughts into his existence.
Now, all of us have the opportunity to feel the power of human endurance, of hope and dreams when we read such sentences.
And that is why, I love great writing. May there be enough of great writing because we don’t need lots of it. Because even a little bit of great writing would satisfy your soul more than lots of mediocre words. Its not the number of words that matter, its the emotion born in your heart that is going to last forever, till the end of your existence.
Amen to great writing.
Noise and voice
The world is too much noisy.
I am not talking about the horns on the road, or someone shouting or any other noise created due to sound waves. Today we are suffering from another kind of noise. One of information.
There is too much information on the internet. So much that smart Google engineers have been working over the years to organise it and yet Google is not the only source of information. We are drowning in the feedback of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and what not. Every couple of minutes, someone would message you on WhatsApp and your email is overflowing with unread emails. Mailing lists that you had subscribed to years ago is still sending you emails. You don’t unsubscribe because you are hoping that you would get that one interesting email which would teach you something interesting and valuable. Thank god for such a big inbox Gmail!
There is so much information all around us and very little wisdom.
Sometimes I remember my childhood when I would play cricket for hours on end, go on a walk without a cell phone and visit my relatives who did not have their face stuck into a smartphone and miss the era of pure human connection. I have also become much more prone to distraction over the years. I miss my virtual life on Facebook when I don’t visit the website for too long. I am sure that if I don’t post anything there for a month, not one person would notice. But in the old era, if I did not go to play cricket for one week, one of my friends would drop by home to enquire about me. There was some human connection in that relationship.
I want that personal connection back. That experience back and that voice back. The voice of blabber, the voice of endless jokes where critical analysis and paralysis was not suffocating people.
I don’t want to be in touch with people who have “status updates”.
I want to connect with people who have voice. People who know who they authentically are. Not people who want to showcase a personality so that they would be seen favourably by others on a social network.
Long term short term and keeping busy
The human desire to answer someone that they are doing something and succeeding at it is really strong. Really really strong.
Also the way we grow up, we go to school, college, job etc. – the time to succeed is usually very small. You have a result every few months in school. If you are doing good, you are the one topping the class exam this month and there is a sense of achievement. Similarly in college, every semester there is some achievement. In jobs, there is a salary deposited to your account every month, also there is continuous probability of increase in salary.
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb
All this leads to the human desire of having the ability to answer this question all too common in India-
Hey son! whats going on in your life?
There is not just the professional success pressure but societal pressure in other areas of life as well such as getting married, having a kid, having all the usual paraphernalia of life – all of which are fair things to have in life and might as well motivate you. But they also serve as distraction for you from one very difficult question-
Why do you really want to do with the time of your life?
Because this question is really difficult, we choose to not answer it. And because not answering a question feels really stupid and makes us feel sad, we sometimes artificially keep ourselves busy in things which we know. Such as buying a new car and paying the bank for it for the next 2-3 years. This is definitely going to keep us busy.
And due to the social perception of busyness being a good thing, everyone wants to be busy. I agree that being busy can be really good. But I want to have the time to do the following things in life even if I am really busy-
- Spend time with my family and friends – because it nourishes my soul
- Reading new things- learning in fundamentally fun but in many cases it might not immediately be related to work.
- Exercise- I used to to not exercise and still be fit. Now I feel more fit when I am regularly going out for a run(usually in a gym). How times change!
- Meditate- Its hard for me regularly meditate but I like to have some time for doing some thinking and meditation every now and then.
Interestingly, all these above things might not be really anywhere in the picture to answer the question of what anyone is doing, even though these might be the bedrock-foundation of what/how they are doing.
Anyways here is a Bill Gates quote-
Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
What I want to say is that we all have a management problem of measuring work. The society has the habit of measuring work in extremely short intervals in schools, colleges and this continues all the way to public companies where the CEO is answerable every quarter. What if what you want to do is going to take time and is going to take a lot of effort? How would you keep yourself motivated and solvent thorough the period where you have not yet achieved the success that society can measure but are putting the work in? Or are you going to go just let of life and your goals, one quarter at a time?
Now if you trust yourself and think really long term and are really weak at measuring the work that you are doing, you are sitting on a clicking time bomb which would explode one day. But not taking that risk because of fear might be the biggest crime of all in my opinion. We as humans are the finest living creations of god, blessed with an awesome brain, thinking ability and more. And after years and years of work put in by our predecessors we now have almost guaranteed food and reasonable security. I am pretty sure that when one can not guarantee their next meal, thinking really long term would have been pretty stupid.
But do we have any real excuse today? Other than “I am really busy!”
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