Is your body a hindrance towards search for truth?

 I have met numerous people over the last many year who told me that life sucks, world sucks and the nature of human body is a hinderance towards searching for truth and enlightenment. I pondered over it and meditated on it and now I can say, that it is not true. Krishan, Ram, Buddh, Jesus, Mahaveer; they all had similar bodies and they all used it to reach to the next level. If they can do it, then you and me can too. We need to look at it in the right way. Here is my take on it.

नज़र तुम्हारी जाली है, सिक्का तो टकसाली है

नज़र तुम्हारी जाली है, सिक्का तो टकसाली है, 

गड़ा प्रकृति ने है इसको इस धरती की माटी से 

गड़ा पुरुष ने भी है इसको अपनी ही प्रपाती से 

इस सिक्के पे अंक लगाए स्वयं नियति ने हाथो से 

ये सिक्का तो चलता आया जनम मरण की घाटी से 

इसे बजाओ ये गाता है गीत ख़ुशी के मातम के 

इस सिक्के में दोष ढूंढ़ना केवल ख़्वाब ख़याली है 

नज़र तुम्हारी जाली है, सिक्का तो टकसाली है 

तुम आये हो नए नए, ये टकसाल पुराना है 

सोना चांदी हीरे मोती कितने इसमें छले गए,

जीवन भर बटोरने वाले खाली हाथ ही चले गए 

खुद में कितने उलझे हो तुम, आँख खोलके देखो तो 

खुद से जो जितना खो पाया, उतना ही वो ज्ञानी है 

तुम आये हो नए नए, ये टकसाल पुरानी  है

तुम कितने चालक बनो, सृष्टि भोली भाली है 

हो मिलता है लेना होगा, राज़ी से नाराजी से  

अरे व्यर्थ की तीन पांच है, और व्यर्थ की गाली है 

नज़र तुम्हारी जाली है, सिक्का तो टकसाली है 

Quotes-2

• Without an unambiguous way to measure the mess; the mess will be made.

• It isn't the incompetent who destroy an organization. Simply because incompetent never get in a position to destroy it. It is those who achieved something and want to rest upon their laurels, who are forever clogging things up.

• The unfortunate side effect of not understanding failure is the silent admission that success is not predictable

• A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.

• The reward for your work is not what you get by it but what you become by it.

• कोई किसी को, राज न दे है। जो भी ले है, निजबल से ले है। (Power is never given. One takes it by his own strength)

• देह शिवा  बर  मोहे हे, शुभ कर्मण से कबहु न डरो। न डरो अर से जब जाये लड़ो, निश्चय कर अपनी जीत करो। (This body is equivalent to boons granted by Lord Shiva. Therefore I should not hesitate when committing myself to good deeds)

PS - The last two are words of Shri Guru Gobind Singh jee.

The guy who never walked to office

It was a hot dry morning of June in India when I walked to my new office for the first time. That day, it occurred to me that I never walked to my office ever. I used to drive a scooter in my early days and then a car but I never ever walked to my office. Felt exuberant for doing it for the first time, my jubilance became a lump in my throat soon. A wave of diffidence swept me slowly. What is happening to me I thought. I was feeling less confident with every step which means till then I was deriving a part of my confidence from my car!

That left me disturbed; and I remain disturbed for about an hour in which I reflected on what was happening to me and how can I prevent it. Apparently I was defining myself through the things I own. This is exactly what I and most of us do in our everyday lives. We do define people around us by the things they own. A Mac owner becomes a different guy who believes in beauty of design, a PC owner becomes a guy who has to be content with what he has and a Porsche owner becomes a status of success…..

I was doing it conveniently for quite a few years to others, what disturbed me was that I started doing it to myself.  By no means, I can let that happen or rather keep letting that happen to me. Others will and do define me by what I wear and own but I cannot define myself like that.  I could not allow my image of myself to be of a guy who drives a thing and wears a thing. Damn it, I should be defining the things I own not the other way around; I thought. Most depressingly it occurred to me when I stopped using a thing, until then I was clueless.

Something changed that day. I started seeing things as a convenience to me and not a necessity and definitely not a part of my personality. People still define me by what I own but at least I stopped doing it to myself. It saved a lot of money but more importantly it brought an unprecedented peace of mind.

That’s an evil we all do to ourselves. We do define ourselves by the things we own and not by the intellect we possess. That is exactly why it felt so hurtful to lose things because they are a part of us and we cannot afford to lose what we think of ourselves. With some thought and lots of will, we all can change a part of it and focus on what is essential to us. We all do have different causes that are essential to us but trust me, owning a list of things is not a part of it for any of us. Give a shot like I did that day. Your perspective will change and you will create a better and more realistic image of yourself. It is; worth the pain.

Arpit

GREAT is GOD

GREAT is GOD

When I ask someone why we worship lord Rama or lord Krishna, the one response I get most often is because they are god.  Few of us will say, because they fought for goodness and because they were great.

Not many of us want or try to know how they become a god and unfortunately our Hindu mythology did a pretty bad job telling us why. Mostly we are told that they were avatars and hence we worship them. That works for the most part of it and it unequivocally explains their greatness. However it misses the whole point why we were being told those stories and why we were told about god.

Let’s rewind our clocks centuries back and for a moment let’s assume you are the first one who wants people to have a concept of god. First of all why, would you want to do that? So that people can read nice stories and gets inspired by them. Well, Mahatma Gandhi’s stories do a good job in that, for most of us. Why do you need to invent god and not another Mahatma? After all, you are taking a far more difficult and risky job, by introducing people to a concept which cannot be proven at all.

I don’t know about the first man who invented this concept or chose to call Lord Rama or Krishna or Jesus; God. But if I would be that person, I would like to do it to tell people that there were humans who achieved such greatness. They achieved it through wisdom, knowledge and constant scrutiny. I would like to inspire them to fight with themselves to be that great. I would not want to tell them that god is born as god, as that will make them fear the god and not get inspiration out of it. I would like them to learn from god, try to be like god, try to follow the teachings god gave, and try to be as great as him.

The moment we say Lord Rama won from Ravna because he was a god is the moment we declare we can never won such a fight because we were not born a god.

To me that was a one sided fight between a human and a monster-human hybrid. If I would bet on that battle at that time, I would have bet on Ravna. It was Rama’s greatness as a human who gave him that victory and gave rest of us a great lesson.

The truth is no one gets born a god, but you can become a god. Being a Hindu, I do believe in the concept of reincarnations. I believe it takes many lives to become a god. But if god existed, he was one of us and he wanted to tell us that we can achieve same greatness as him.

To me, the whole concept of god exists to tell us that we should try to imitate him and try to be like him. If god exists and watching us over he would definitely want us to follow the same path he followed than to praise him or fear him.

But this one is just a thought, may be fiction….. In the end, that is how I defined god for me……..

The Leader

Recently someone asked me 'Are you a team leader'?
I replied 'No, I am a team member'.

My friend there was  holding a title of Senior Team Lead and hence deduce himself to be a leader. Automagically, he got abysmally disappointed as both of us were given same responsibilities.

That was another pattern I see in almost all of us. Especially when we get to our work lives. We ought to carry our titles in our heads and start considering ourselves leaders as soon as we start doing same things again and again.

When I raise my head to take a look around me that day, I saw more and more leaders & to be leaders than team members. I got shocked, the same joker is there, playing at this level so minutely,so smoothly that I never noticed him. I still remember those marks scoring days in school when the one who scored 99/100 was a hero. Are we not repeating the same pattern even when we are aware of it? Titles/achievements are still outweighing potential. Don't get me wrong, I respect titles, I honor achievements. But once again we are slapped hard in our faces by fate and our own human tendencies on this front
.
Newton once said "For ever action there is an equal and opposite reaction".For every effect, there is a cause.

We, humans have a natural urge of  getting so blinded by the effect that we forget the cause. We do fight against it but we are slaves to it.We smoke cigarette, drink alcohol not because we are not aware of what cause is responsible for the effects. We are so blinded by the effects that we want to and do forget the cause.

Ancient theory as understood by me was
'If someone is working hard,brilliant, has potential and doing well then he may get the Title(99/100)'.
We as always manipulated it to something like
'If I have title, I automatically have potential,am working hard and doing well'. Unfortunately we are so much brilliant in getting titles, without doing everything required to get it. That's why you can easily see a lot of potential less people carrying titles around.

The reason that scoring 99 out of 100 does not make me a mathematical genius is the same reason which does not make me a leader if I am chose to call a leader by those who I am not leading.

A leader was, is and will always become a leader only if people chose to follow him. There will be no titles, there will be no egos.
PS :-I am still trying to figure out what is a senior leader, probably the one leading senior people :)

Arpit

Death

Death is impossible for us to fathom: it is so immense, so frightening that we will do almost anything to avoid thinking about it. Society is organized to make death invisible, to keep it several steps removed. That distance may seem necessary for our comfort, but it comes with a terrible cost; the illusion of limitless time, and a consequent lack of seriousness about daily life. We are running away from the one reality that faces us all, all the time.

As a warrior in life, you must turn this dynamic around:make the thought of death not to escape but to embrace. Your days are numbered. Will you pass them half awake & half hearted or will you live with a sense of urgency?
Feeling death at your heels will make all your actions more certain, more forceful. This could be your last throw of the dice; make it count.

--Taken

The Shackles of success

The Shackles of Success

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail."

I read it a while back, it appealed to me instantly, & recently I read it again, this time with a different mindset, different condition & surely a different point of view.

I had successfully nailed a plank & now I had a new, different plank. A different kind of nail that has to be tackled in a completely different way. Yet I saw myself trying to take the same approach. Why? Because I had the same hammer, a similar appearing problem & a lot of people to remind me how good I am at nailing the planks. How beautifully I nailed it back & what good odds I have to nail it again.

Then I look around if I am the only one of my kind & can I learn from those around me. Yes I have learnt from them, I have learnt from all of them.They exhibit a pattern; unknowingly but quite convincingly .I have seen people working with old methods as those methods worked in the past & they think that they will work in present too. Just because we were successful at something we started assuming that next thing will be similar.

We will deploy similar thinking, strategies, methods, processes & zap, we will taste the success again.

I fought so hard against it, just to find that this fight‘s not gonna end. Whenever you taste success you feel good, people around you make you feel good & then a fear grips you. Fear to fail, fear to be rejected. You feel the chill & then you start doing things to remain successful. The fire to try anything to be successful gets replaced by the fear & insecurity of keep doing same things to remain successful. Repetition replaces creativity, Chaos got replaced by order, Hunger got lost by processes.

Then one day someone comes whose methods are unorthodox, different.We reject him. We fight against him just to realize that we are again assuming. We still think that we are fighting the same old fight with same old methods for same old win. Unaware of the fact that this time we are destined to lose it.

Then we complain. We blame, we curse fate, circumstances, knowledge, and people around us.

"If I would have taken that one step, if I would have done it differently. I would have won". We try to find something missing outside whereas actually it was always missing inside.

What we did not see is that we lost this battle that very day, when we chose the safer, surer, tried & tested old method to retain our reputation to be successful. We lost it right there, right then. It was merely a matter of time after that.

For me nothing ever went according to the plan. It’s not that I am a ridiculous planner or the planning is such wastage of time for me. I always plan for things, for future, for success, for improvement. But I guess it’s a way of gods to teach me not to rely too much on the plan. Almost always I needed to divert from the plan & infuse some agility in the plan. After a while I understood that best plan is not the one which covers it all, on the contrary best plan is the one which can be changed. Planning is not the ability to apply same solution to new problem; it is the art of modifying the already worked solution for the new problem. Yes, it’s not easy but its beautiful.

Don’t take me wrong. Planning is the most important thing one needs to do before jumping to action. I know it does not cover it all but it gives you a picture of the problem. It makes you aware of the options, the possibilities you have. It helps to take a decision when the hour of need comes. Plan to the brim, it’s important but what’s more important is to understand that planning does not stop when action begins; in fact it gets intensified with time. Once you being the action, you don’t have the leisure of taking time, it got to be fast, every plan no matter how subtle, how sharp, how sure or impressive has to be adapted when the action starts.

What we do wrong is to assume that if a plan has worked in past then it will keep on working in future too.

It’s a dangerous mistake to make. Fight against it as this fight is not to make a reason fail but make it fail every single time it encounters you. This fight won’t end but it will yield what we cares for most, SUCCESS.

 Arpit