That One Tiny Moment of Repentance ...

“Care for a Vada-Pav?” I asked my cousin.

“I won’t have it, I have some health issues. You go ahead if you want.”

“Naah! Its OK. We can go ahead.”

“But if you want it, why are you not having it? Let’s go.”

“I just had a thought, ‘If I breathe my last this very moment, would I repent not having that Vada-Pav?’ If the answer is yes then I better go and have that Vada-Pav right now. If I know the craving holds no substance, I might as well drop it.

It would be such a pity if we were to repent in our last breath. However successful we might be, how much ever money we would have, irrespective of our education background, if there is a moment of repentance while bidding goodbye to this world, our entire lifetime would be such a waste. And I am in no capacity to waste my lifetime for a Vada-Pav. 

This may sound frivolous and funny, but it is true is most cases. 

"I wish I had seen Taj Mahal once."

"I really had to visit Kashi once."

"I so badly wanted that promotion"

"I wish my son should have been married."

"Just once if I had been to Bukaro Island."

And there is an endless list of desires that make us find it difficult to leave this body. From there stems the fear of death - one of the primary reasons for people not to be successful. And then it gets into a vicious circle of fear leading to anxiety leading to low confidence leading to less effective productivity, leading to an unsuccessful life (whatever fits in our definition of success), further leading to a state of mind of desires unfulfilled, finally connecting dots back to fear of death.

Let us try breaking this circle. If at all, we live ensuring that our last breath wont have that repentance, we would empower our self devoid of fear of death, thus leading to a new zeal to take on life and thus become successful. 

Somebody once asked Swami Vivekananda, what do find most amusing about mankind?

He said, "Everyone knows that they are going to die someday and yet they live as if they are going to live forever," The right way to live would be to imagine that if this is my last moment, how would I live it.

We find it very convenient to procrastinate our happiness to some other time because you know, somehow there is a feeling that we are going to live forever. Procrastination of happiness is a foundation stone for the pillars of fear, anxiety and sorrow to stand upon. Once Bawa (Khurshed Batliwala) said, "Have you seen the look on a dead man's face? Its as if he is shocked, 'Ho Gaya?' Till now I was living life and I knew that happiness is at the next corner and life ended before that!"

I have been to cremation ground twice in past 20 days and both the times for someone close and both the times, what amazed me is the sheer unpredictability of life. My granny active till the last moment blew us off when she peacefully closed her eyes forever. She prepared food for all, she kept herself busy till the last breath. How on earth could we imagine which moment was her last. There is absolute no guarantee on our expiry date. We have absolutely no clue on the question 'when'. I know so many instances when a patient walks on his/her two legs to the hospital and comes back on 4 shoulders. So there is absolutely no guarantee that this moment I should allow myself with the luxury of repentance. It is a truth that we find very difficult to digest.

Life is in this moment. This moment is pure, its fresh, its new, its innocent. Sri Sri always says, the past is like a dream and the future is pure fantasy. Live in this moment. Recognizing the purity and freshness of this moment can help us ensure that every moment is free of any repentance whatsoever. 

The idea of being ready to leave this body anytime can be well unsettling. It takes a higher level of maturity to bring our mind to that level. But to come to terms of reality, that thought itself is pure freedom. It is a thought that empowers us to live fully the way we want. And I believe if we have lived our life on our terms, we have lived successfully. No amount of money or education can compensate that state of mind.

Blessed are those who exhale contentment as their last breath.

An Infinite Moment Passing By

Let us take every morsel with the taste,
Let us make every move devoid of haste.

Let us revere life in every breath we inhale,
Let us surrender worries in our every passing exhale.

Let us discover music within the noise around,
A symphony of various instruments limitless & unbound.

Let us listen to everyone with care and concern,
Let empathy dawn as their life we learn.

Let us lighten our thoughts as the future worries float goodbye.
Let us loosen our fist so that past regrets heave a relieved sigh.

Let us smile back to every moment of anger and fear,
Let us fight back lethargy while keeping our intentions clear.

Let us feel divinity in every stranger we meet.
Let us experience the infinity in every moment we greet.

Dipped in love ...

Love is what attracts the electrons to a positive charge,
Love is the umbilical cord that connects a foetus to the life at large.

Love is the force of earth that holds you abreast,
Love is ur relationship with the air till in peace you rest.

Love is in the comfort of the warm hug at night or in rain,
Love is in the faith that the sun will rise again.

Love is in longing to meet that kills you inside,
Love is in the smile in your eyes that reside.

Love is in the sense of belonging towards your old scooter,
Love is the magic that protected Harry Potter.

Love is in the white flower presented to sentries,
Love is in the music that dissolves the boundaries.

Love is the feeling of Oneness that syncs the universe with thee,
Love is what connects you and me.

Happy Valentine's day.

Nimish.

posted from Bloggeroid

Return to your innocence

Isn't it ironic that people engaged in the industry needed for our very existence are found neglected? Why do people we practically cannot live without carry an adjective of "poor" against their identity of "farmer"? Agreed a laborer in every industry doesn't necessarily be rich. A farmer - essentially is a labourer in the agricultural industry is merely working for the landlords, the traders, the merchants and the political bigwigs that govern the rules of the industry. But when you compare it to say a laborer in IT industry, you do not really find a starving person barely able to meet his family's square meal. Again someone would debate that this has always been a difference between a white collar job and a field work job. But should this be a prerogative of the industry that is responsible for our survival? Today all the billionaires have sprung up from the industries without which we lived for centuries together. These industries are not responsible for our survival. They simply soothe our existence. Logic dictates that this economics when peered through the glass of demand and supply asserts that our demand for our survival is no longer given the due importance. I think there is a paradigm shift in our requirements and priorities where today we value our existence more than our survival.

It feels ironic that today we worry about screwed up internet connection while taking our survival for granted. It reminds me of the story where once a lion hired an ant to do some work. The ant being hardworking and efficient impressed the lion very well with her initial deliverables. Lion now wished to increase the efficiency and hired an owl as a consultant. Owl suggested on introducing a grasshopper as a manager to the ant to monitor her work. The grasshopper reported on some infrastructure malfunctioning and requested a crow to repair their "logistics". The owl now suggested that since we are too many people to work, we need a place to work. The lion hired an eagle to scout a right work place and manage the admin of his company. Now with so many people working the lion couldn't really find the time to make sure his employees were happy. So he hired a parrot as an HR. With so many mouths to feed, all of the employees set their expectations towards the ant. They urged the ant to double the output by sitting late and working in double shifts. Ant, mentally tortured by this soon declined in her performance. With low output , the lion demanded a production report from the owl. Owl after a through analysis presented a report stating that ant has performed poorly. The lion then upset over the ant fired the ant. We, at times in the process of organizing our lives and soothing our existence compromise on the simplicity of life.

As stone age man, the funda was simple. We need food to eat. We formed a bunch of hunters. Then we found vegetables, we formed a bunch of farmers. Now someone needed to buy this food, we invented finances. To protect these finances we invented security. In order for this to synchronize, we invented systems. Then came people to govern the political , financial, military, healthcare systems. To automate these systems we invented IT. While all of these systems are needed to soothe our lives, we forget where did all of this began in first place. We have been giving excessive importance over the peripherals. Maybe the effects are slowly cropping up. With farmers committing suicide and increasing agricultural prices, we can infer that our ant is no longer in the mental and physical state to cope up with our increasing demands.

Let us pause our lives for a while, look back and ponder over this. Let us help our "poor" farmer remove the adjective from his identity. Let us return to our innocence.

posted from Bloggeroid

Zeitgeist - The Spirit of the Times

"So what do you do for living?" is generally the one of our FAQs when we get introduced to someone for the first time. Well ponder a bit at the object of the preposition - "living". It is a concept accepted by the world that we do something for our living and then we do something for our liking. Which means that the activity that we do for our living needn't necessarily be same as the one we pursue as our hobby. Imagine a world where you just pursue your hobby where all of your living needs are being taken care of by technology. Imagine living in a world where technology is the driving force and you are greasing the wheels of human progress by just doing what you like to do.

What would you like to do say entertainment - love to act? So pursue it until you get bored of it. Who will pay you for that? No one. Sounds weird right? If no one is going to pay me, how the hell do you expect that I would be feeding myself? Well, the answer lies in technology. Just like you are passionate about stage performance, there are a bunch of geeks who are passionate about lab performance. They would be the ones inventing robots and machines and automating the world that would help you make your own food. So right from purchasing goods - well wait a minute, lets hit the backspace key; so right from procuring goods to processing them and then finally serving a delicious dish on your table, everything will be done by technology.

"Buddy, robots working for me? I don't have that kind of money." Again, why did we hit backspace? Because in the Lotus Project of the Zeitgeist movement, no one pays for anything. They intend to remove the concept of money from our system. So you do not pay for robots and the scientist working in the lab doesn't pay for your stage performance. Sounds like a barter system isn't it? Well it does to me to. So let us dive ourselves a little deeper into this concept.

"Why is air free and water so cheap?" asks the video documentary of the project. Well we all know the answer that it is available in abundance. No one would really be spending a rupee or a cent for a cubic meter of air, because it is available for free and in abundance. Now air is not available in water asking divers pay for the oxygen cylinders. So what do we do to make sure that the food we talked about short while ago, comes to my table for free? Well, that's right, you know the answer - make it available in abundance. How to do that? The scientists of the lotus project believe that technology has answers to all these questions. And honestly, this doesn't seem impossible from my perspective too.

Again, little difficult to digest right? Let us consider wikipedia's example. Remember the times when we used to spend thousands on the stack of world books occupying an entire wall of our living room! Wikipedia was kneering on you and it said "Ha!". Today we have the best of the knowledge about our world available on internet and that too free. How was it made possible? Well, technology did it, didnt it? Well I would like to rephrase the sentence, 'Effective use of technology did it.' People who are passionate about their own subjects scribble on this online forum where information is validated by people themselves. Who pays all these goons? No one. And yet they do it because they love doing it. There are millions of programmers publishing their codes online. Why do they make it all available for free? Because they love that work. So today, coding is not really a rocket science, because most of it is available online. Then programmers build something over this free code and erect another beauty on it. Together we create marvels in the computing world and device something like Java, Linux or Android. Zeitgeist movement's 'The Lotus Project' is basically transitioning these already achieved benefits in the online world onto the real life. And 'yes' they say, it is possible.

Now consider a nice house on the sea-shore where you can lay on a rocking chair reading your favorite book in the verandah while the sound of sea waves soothe your senses. Who would not like to live that life? So there are tens of thousands of people who would like to own that place. You cannot make such places available in abundance, can you? This is a place where demand will always succeed the supply and then you hit a barrier of economics where you need money to decide a price on the property. "Well I agree", explained Eric - an active member of 'The Lotus Project'. "I agree that our system is not foolproof. All we are saying that this is an initiative and there are good chances that we can come across a good way of living if all of us work in this direction. There are certain loopholes that we would want to plug. But we believe that technology has answers to all of these questions." So that means that the egg is still incubating. We cannot hatch it now.

"I want to cite another example. Talent is rare. You cannot have that in abundance. Everyone plays cricket, but Sachin Tendulkar comes once in a lifetime. Everyone works in science, but Einstein is born once in centuries. How do you encourage the talent if there are going to be no incentives? Today Sachin, a guy brought up from a middle class family would aspire to own a Ferrari and rightfully desire to have a plush bungalow in one of the most expensive places in Mumbai. How can you give him an incentive to play?"

"Well we think that talent doesn't need incentive. We believe that people would pour out their devotion towards their field without any of these incentives." Eric answered although not entirely convincing me. Even the zeitgeist videos about religion and the conspiracy theories are nothing but a mere entertainment they do not convince me.

But looking at the broader picture, I think its worthwhile to keep a tab on this movement so that the next time we meet, I can just ask "So, What do you do" - removing the "living" part from it.


(Image courtesy: BP.blogspot)