My Obituary

As I stood this morning in the train and looked around at all my fellow passengers I saw something strange in a newspaper that an elderly man was reading. I saw my obituary printed in black and white.

It resembled a picture of me albeit an older version of me with lesser hair, most of which had turned white. It had my name in full and in the brackets it bore the psudonym "kennybaba" by which I am known.

But what struck me most was who grieved my loss (or a better way to put it would be who celebrated my life). My wife, my children and grandchildren, my cousins and my friends which felt nice for a while but then if you think about it what bothered me more is how will they remember me as.

As years have gone by I have seen a share of obituaries and been for funeral masses. I mourn for a while but then life goes on. And all I carry of that person are the memories. So if all the people that knew me were to collectively paint a picture of me, what would that picture look like?

And suddenly I return back from my thoughts to reality. It is time to alight the train, time for that newspaper to be scrap paper this evening and for that obituary to become a figment of my imagination. But its memory with me; just like mine with others, is a thought that could haunt or heal my world!

The war is (still) inside you

This is a blog I had written nearly 6 years ago on another page and I am amazed how it still rings true for me after all these years! Last weekend I met Suman Nair who introduced me to a practice called Appreciative Inquiry. I felt an instant connect to it like the practice spoke to me directly and in a long time have I felt a sense of peace.

From the time I wrote this blog to this moment, I have gone from being an engineering graduate to a software engineer with Infosys to an MBA-HR student at XIMR to being employed by Essar and finally IMRB.  I have gone from being single to finding the love of my life, from being temperamental to being a calming influence, from being a trainer to becoming a learner. And in these 6 years, life has only taught me that your belief alone can change your world. I urge you, therefore, to believe in the power of possibilities rather than the pain of problems.

The War is inside you

 We call it heaven and we call it hell but the truth is that heaven and hell are both inside us! To decide to walk on the path of change towards transformation is a path less traveled, like the road to scale up a mountain; steep, rugged and undefined. It leads to doubt, loneliness, rejection and even failure at times but then it is a sure way of transformation. And when we decide to walk on this path, with our first step being taken on it, the war between the heaven and hell inside us starts.

The war is fierce and continuous if your search for the truth is continuous. The war is on every level of our existence: physical, mental and spiritual. We are questioned on our actions, thoughts and feelings; on our rituals and our beliefs; on our past, present and future by our conscience and are put into an uncomfortable situation. It is at this point that most people give up and return back to their lives of ignorance. You know why they say 'Ignorance is bliss'? Because truth isn't!

The truth is the bitterest pill one has to swallow most times and it is tough to acknowledge it. However it is not the truth that relies on us, rather it is we who rely on it. Truth is the universal rule, by which everything runs and ceases. We are of dust and will return to dust. Nothing is permanent. Everything runs on a series of causes and effects. Causality is the prime force governing every truth we have learned or experienced. We burn with fire and cool with ice, we breathe air and drink water, these are truths of life we acknowledge on their face value because of their sheer obviousness. But not all truths of life are this 'in-your-face' in nature. There are many truths that go beyond our five senses and we take such truths based on something we call faith.

As I have said before, what we call it really does not matter here. It is the meaning attached with it. Some call it superstition, some call it rituals, many call it an obligation. And I believe faith has ended up becoming for them exactly what they call it. It is understandable that many have such a cynical view of faith. Firstly, it cannot be comprehended by science since the premise on which science works is that only those things sensed by our five senses are true. So how can I even imagine that science will ever understand all the truths of life. Therefore, we must first acknowledge that all truths cannot be reasoned, that all truths of life cannot be proved. Only then can the conflict between the conscience and the mind reduce. But then how is it that we will be able to realize 'these' truths of life? Just as the truths, our sensing mechanisms for these truths too are not very sharp. We call it gut feeling, instinct, intuition, conscience. These senses are the ones we fail to use in our daily life. These are the senses that our philosophy heavily rely on. And why is that? Because of the fact that the philosophy needs for the unison of body, mind and spirit. And that is never possible unless the senses of the body, mind and spirit combine. That is exactly what we need to achieve at first.

Over the years we have learned to ignore, sideline, and reason out of our use of these extra senses. Learned to stop pondering, learned to avoid contemplation, introspection. And then suddenly after indulging ourselves solely to the needs of our five senses we find ourselves rich yet not wealthy, knowledgeable yet not wise, famous yet not respected. And wealth, wisdom, respect and other such 'Virtues' hardly need the things our five senses deem important! And that is precisely where the breaking point of our conflict is. In awakening our extra senses and using them judiciously.

Try to consider what your senses have to say to you and try to act on some of those things. That is how slowly but surely you will build belief and faith. Spend time in silence, observe nature closely whenever possible, spend time with children, do simple things like strolling in the park or singing in the shower with great fervor and enthusiasm! These things help you disconnect from your five senses to some extent and help connect with your extra senses. Cry when you feel like crying, laugh when you feel like laughing. Express yourselves thoroughly and sincerely. Keep your feelings pure and without any ulterior motive.

Simple things like these help you in a big way to achieve that truce necessary between the mind and the conscience and help heaven win the battle over the hell within you!

It's so funny... In a rich man's world!

The most common crime we commit as humans is neither murder nor deceit but mixing up means with ends. And in that sense it is the most perfect crime because neither the perpetrator nor the victim realize it was an err committed.

As you walk through the first steps of life you are taught many important values by your society: your parents, teachers, friends, relatives, community and generally the people you rub shoulders with everyday. But we always fail to realize the true worth and purpose of the values we are initiated in. And it takes the greatest of our values and brings them down to the level of traits and oddities of an individual. Take hard work for example. We have always been taught that 'Hardwork pays'...but for what? For whom? In what manner? These are subsequent questions I have seldom seen posed by people. And so we continue to work hard, earning every penny for our family and children and without realizing that it was just a means to your end of seeing your family happy and secure. But it is no guarantee of happiness if your hard work is concentrated only in earning money and not in things like developing yourself or spending time with the family for whom you work so tirelessly.

And in this subtle confusion lies the answer to many a misconceptions we carry. Mixing up means and ends results in us having this false sense of entitlement to the good things of life because we have acquired certain things. Let me be very clear here, I am not discrediting the role of something like education as a requisite to leading a good life but it is not a guarantee. Same is with wealth as a means for being wealthy or religion as a means for being spiritual. The best way perhaps to look at them is through the view-glass of probability. They do increase your chances, even significantly in many instances, but ever so often you would hear of cases where life has gone terribly gone for someone who has immense wealth, knowledge or faith.

Perhaps the only things that can with great certainty guarantee us of happiness and thus justify themselves as means and ends is Love and Fortitude and to lead a life filled with it. Funny thing is that these 2 things are tougher to earn than wealth, trickier to acquire than knowledge and harder to believe in than faith. But you can be rest assured it is a bloody good measure for us to know the way we have lead our lives: the way we have loved & been loved and the fortitude we built within ourselves and those around us! And you will know how rich you really are!