Manifesting a Beautiful Environment Around Us

On World Environment Day, it occurred to me that the most important environment is not spoken about: The 'Inner' Environment.

How will the environment around us change, when we internally remain the same?

Religion, spirituality and science, all agree in unison that the external environment is a manifestation of the inner self. Which leads me to believe that a green, clean, unpolluted earth will manifest from a commensurate mindset.

If Workplaces Functioned & Graded Like Traditional Academics...

Yet again, it's that time of the year: When students in India are being ranked on their ability to rote learn their yearly quota of "curriculum".

But, if education is expected to prepare students for a career, shouldn't it be more in sync with how workplaces function?

For amusing ourselves, let's imagine what a workplace would look like, if it followed the grading rules and methods of educational institutions and exams:

- You should work individually and not in a team.

- You cannot share your work and reports with others.

- Each person in the meeting must take down a separate Minutes of the Meeting and it should not be shared with others.

- The Minutes must be memorized as the Boss can ask you to repeat them at another time. If you cannot speak without referring to your notes, you are stupid, incompetent, nincompoop, and your daddy is wasting money on you.

- You cannot collaborate on projects. You can be fined, punished, suspended, detained or even thrown out for collaborating.

- You primarily get paid for showing up, and you can generally get by, by applying sly memory methods taught by tutorials 

- You cannot use a calculator, a mobile phone, messaging apps, collaborating apps, or Google. These are taboo, and can be a serious offence leading to end of career.

These examples can go on and on, of how a workplace would be like if it followed the amusing practices followed by educational institutions and systems to grade students. Can you think of some too? Add to the comments below and we'll have some more fun, poking the system.

"No! Not Ambitious Enough..!"

Recently, I was drawn into a conversation about Ambition and Ambitious-ness by a parent who was seeking admission for his daughter. The impromptu conversation led me to making statements and some interesting realizations:

- Tangible Vs. Intangible:  Ambition is not something that can be measured tangibly. Nor can we take a preset criteria and announce that X is more ambitious than Y because of A, B and C.

- CXO Vs. Rat Race: Corporate success cannot be the measuring rod for ambition. Can a CXO who wakes up and isn't thrilled about going to work on Monday morning, be called ambitious? Or is s/he just another one in the rat race?

- Happiness Quotient: Can happiness be an ambition? Can a person who is very happy, be considered ambitious? Or is that person the anti-thesis of ambition? Because, by concept, ambition seems to mean striving for something you right now, either don't have, or aren't.

- Family Vs. Career: If a person chooses to be a stay-at-home parent, and is happy about raising a good family, isn't that person ambitious too?

- Head Vs. Heart: What about a wanderer who follows his heart?

- The Buddha Conundrum: And if we return to the typical definition of ambition, wouldn't we classify Buddha as an unambitious escapist, who left the palace and kingship for the woods and solitude?

Defining ambition is an awkward attempt, at best. I think its best that we not try to define it for others, nor let others define it for the self. Let each of us decide our own life paths and what we will consider as a life well lived. And that, is ambitious enough.

Neighborhood Stores Withstood Supermarkets; Can They Withstand E-tailing ?

Though they were expected to be marauders, supermarkets could not make a major dent in the economics of the friendly neighborhood stores.  Proximity, personalised services, friendly faces, and credit facilities kept the neighborhood stores preferred vendors despite the discount offering and high budget advertising supermarket chains.

The entry of organized retail was protested by one and sundry as it was expected to lead to an end of the Mom-n-Pop shop small economy.  But contrary to predictions of economic pundits, some retail chains like Subhiksha (yea, remember that one?) collapsed entirely, while the neighborhood stores happily survived.

We are now entering the next phase of retail, which is e-tail.  Swipe your mobile a few times, and get entire orders of groceries, meds, eggs, sweets and other daily need items delivered directly to home.  No parking hassle, no traffic driving, no finding time from office schedules or missing important TV shows, no cash payments, no standing in queues for checkout, no rush.  Just simple, easy, 'branded' shopping.  With such value additions without the supermarket compromises, this one seemingly has the power to sweep mom n pop shops away.  Interestingly, there isn't 1% of the protest which preceded the organized retail revolution; which we now know, wouldn't have had too much of an effect on small shop economy anyways.  But then like it or not, internet shopping and easy home delivery is the shopping model of the future.

How will the small neighborhood shops survive in the future, then?  These small shops have to realise that they need to quickly tie up with delivery service providers and also do local branding in their own area to remain relevant and popular.  They also need to find alternate business models.  Otherwise, they are going to find themselves on economic shaky ground in the near future.

If God Stopped Giving, Would You Still Worship? :: The Unpopular View of Spiritualism, Materialism and the Modern Religion

“I give you A, you give me B.”  This, is a standard business transaction.  Interestingly, this isn’t limited to regular business dealings in the marketplace.  Modern religion too, mostly consists of such transactions; (1) between devotee and God, and (2) between devotee and temple management.

The transaction between devotee and temple management is P2P (Person-to-Person) and so is simpler to accept and understand.  The devotee usually transacts with the temple management through giving bribes or donations, and receiving priority access to worship areas and other religious facilities.

The transaction between devotee and God is P2A (Person-to-Abstract) and is tougher to accept and understand.  I devote this writing to discuss this relationship.

In this transaction, the person is making a transactional deal with an unreal non-person, who he supposes (or believes) to exist.  The devotee (irrespective of religion) approaches a God he believes in, and offers prayers and promises, in return for benefits that are primarily materialistic in nature.  A non-exclusive list of benefits most often asked for, would include health, career growth, marriage, children, property, money, help in legal situations etc.  On days when there is nothing specific, the devotee asks for a vague ‘happy life’, which is substituted with specific requests at other times as per specific need.

A line from the popular Ganesha bhajan effectively portrays this idea of asking God for materialistic favours, and probably even respecting God primarily because of his perceived ability to shower materialistic fulfillments on humanity.  The line goes as “Andhe ko aankh de, Kodhin ko kaya; Banjhan ko put de, Nirdhan ko maya”.  The English translation of this line will be:  (Lord gives) eyes to the blind, an able body to the leper, child to the barren, and riches to the penniless.  So the concept at play seems to be - Pray to the Lord, and ask him for materialistic benefits in return – this is what modern religion seems to have come to.  And what if God no longer promises such benefits? Do we abandon him in this case?  The weird conclusion is Yes, because that's what God seems to exist for.

If I reject this twisted conclusion, what then is the purpose of the theory of religion?

I’ll use the Indian context to address this question and to identify most of modern religion as a poor subset of religion’s original purpose.

The Bhagwad Geeta is a central discourse in India about a human being’s spiritual journey.  The discourse, narrated by Lord Krishna (the Supreme Godhead), clearly points towards the final goal of life as being Moksha (Nirvana) – the freedom from the repeated cycles of birth and death and a return to the state of bliss in the Godhead.

Religion teaches us about the three Gunas, and the path to break free from the clutches of Guna and the autocracy of the Karmic Debt in controlling our lives. 

So in fact, the entire benefit of religion points towards what happens post-death.  Religion requires human life to be lived “with the end in mind”, literally.  The Karma should adhere to actions arising from spiritual awakening of the soul – the understanding that we are not our bodies but we are souls stuck in a materialistic universe – this is the basis of spiritualism.  The entire remaining religious discourse highlights the path to achieving an escape back to our soul’s original Home – the Vaikuntha. 

Hence, the reduction of religion as a path to enjoy a happier life on earth, is not exactly a part of the intended Indian discourse on spiritualism.   

Unlike popular belief, I do not distinguish between religion and spiritualism.  I find them inseparable tag team partners.  My understanding is that religion and spiritualism are intertwined; wherein religion provides the structured learning roadmap through a guru, and spiritualism is an aware state of mind, an awakening, a sense of connectedness with the universe and being able to see the light that demystifies ‘Maya’ – the materialistic world.

Considering the above, one derived conclusion is that the idea of ‘materialistic possessions’ or ‘worldly happiness’, are not central to the idea of religion.  Spiritualism, is central to the idea of religion. 

Based on this, we return to our question: How has transacting with God (prayers for benefits) become so central to religion and religious rituals and practices?  Why are temples no longer actively involved in helping people evolve from mere transactional devotees into spiritually enlightened individuals? 

Modern religion definitely requires a shift in focus from materialism to spiritualism.  Without this, the true nature of religion has been reduced to that of a business deal between the devotee and the God.  And this gives the devotee the perception of being religious and even spiritual, but the end result is falling prey to yet another cycle of birth after death. 

Google Is Better At 'Re'invention, Not Invention

I just got a Google+ account and was looking through it; and it seems quite preliminary right now.  Nothing stands out as a strikingly different feature that I was dearly missing.  However, I'm sure that as I explore the service further and Google starts adding updates to the Plus services, things will take a turn - for the better.

'Coz that's how Google always does it!  From the way it looks, Google is better are reinvention rather than invention:

• Yahoo!, Altavista and AskJeeves were already around when Google launched its flagship search services.  Google improvised search and has remained the market leader for over a decade now.

• Hotmail came up with the idea of free web based mail, and Yahoo! gave it a run for its money.  Then Google reinvented free web based email and is still giving everyone a run for their money.  Even today they're adding new interesting features when everyone else is trying to catch up with the original Gmail.  The latest 'Priority Inbox' in Gmail is absolutely a charm!

• Android is an awesome open source technology, but it had a predecessor - the I-Phone OS.  Google took what the I-Phone OS already offered, reinvented it, open sourced it, and launched it world wide.  And today, Android is about to beat the I-Phone or it already has according to some statistics.

• Blogger was doing a great job but losing out to Wordpress already when Google took over and converted Blogger into a super-user-friendly web based engine.  Professional users claim Wordpress' greatness when it comes to plug-ins; but everyone else swears by the drag and drop features in Blogger.  And Blogger plug-ins are catching up for sure!
  

Yes there are some exceptions like Google Earth and a few others, but Google's best services have come when they were reinventing; and not when they were inventing.  Some inventions like the 3-D chat, disappeared just as quietly as they appeared; most people haven't even heard about them.

Orkut couldn't move Facebook's market when Google took over, but then Google was dealing with a legacy app and Facebook was already facing humongous popularity from its technology and the ability to connect people and provide interactive updates.  Orkut remained clumsy, and privacy was always an issue.  

Google+ is purely a 'reinvention'.  Facebook has existed for many years now, it has a strong market base and the number of users give it more population than most other countries around the world.  Just like Hotmail, or Yahoo! search, or the I-Phone; all torch bearers and market scorchers; but losing wind to Google once this company got going.

Google+ is Google's new latest reinvention baby.  It might as well be called Facebook+, I guess.  But this time, the foe is extremely formidable and threatens to push the new G-baby into oblivion and make it an unsuccessful mutiny into the F-hunk stronghold.  

Only time will tell where the battle leads, but Google is reinventing again and Facebook needs to take notice.  The competition is super hot, and as Google adds new features to G+, it will only get hotter.  Let's see if Google wins the reinvention game yet again!

From Today Into Yesterday

Where do they come from,
These desires of today,
To relive the golden memories of yesterday.

Why do they come,
When I did not call them here.
And why did they then leave,
When I did not send them away;

Leaving me with a void,
One moment empty,
Another moment heavier than I can lift,
Choking me on both counts.

Once that which gave me life,
Beckons me to call out again,
But gone is the sunlight that used to feed it.

Be gone, sweet memories, halt your dreams,
You can no longer be brought back to life.

K V Kamath Joins Infosys

K V Kamath becomes K V Come-eth for Infosys. 

Infosys hopes to sail again with ex ICICI honcho K V Kamath joining the organisation.  

Toon - Nitin Nohria becomes Harvard B-School Dean

Nitin Nohria becomes the first Indian Dean at the Harvard Business School !

Toon - Sachin Tendulkar Joins Twitter

My tribute to Sachin uncle joining Twitter!!