Month: September 2009

Swami Vivekananda and Subramanya Bharathi
Some amazing coincidences

Swami Vivekananda and Mahakavi Subramanya Bharathi are perhaps the greatest personalities in 18-19th century to have influenced the youth.
Both died young at the age of 39 years. Both were philosophers with an aggressive patriotic fervor. Everyone knows that Sister Nivedita was the disciple of Swami Vivekananda but few are aware that bharathiyar himself was a disciple of Sister Nivedita. Sister Nivedita’s parents were active members of Irish Home Rule Movement and it was natural that she encouraged the freedom struggle in India.

11 Sep 1897

Swami Vivekananda addressed the parliament of religions at Chicago,Hinduism shook US as only Hinduism can.

11 Sep 2001

Attack on WTC, Newyork, Islam shook US as only Islam can.

It is all a chequered board of nights and days,
where destiny with men for pieces plays,
Hither and thither, moves, mates and slays
And one by one in the closet lays.

Rubiat of Omar Khayam translated by Fitzgerald

The opening game of life gives you hardly any options. It is only in the middle game you get some control of your life.
You get to choose your line of attack or defence ;there are gambits, traps, pitfalls, positional play and sacrifices.
All the time, you only have a peripheral view of the end game; after all if you don’t play your middle game well, there would be no end game.
What is good for the middle game may not be good for the end game and vice versa.

As you move on in life, the options get narrowed down, the board is clear enough to see the steps ahead through simple, mathematical calculations. You can take stock of what you have got and what you have lost. The battle has to go on till the last move, probably till you find only the two kings on the entire board. Then there are no calculations to be made, no moves and counter moves; it is total peace. After all a draw is the logical end of a well played game.

Anyone who has driven on a narrow hill track would have had this experience. you come across a cow on your track which you cannot overtake. the animal is convinced that the only purpose of your vehicle being there is to run over the cow. It starts running for dear life; may be for a kilometer or more, and then it is too tired to move a step; It moves to the side of the road and your drive on. One particular cow , I remember was very aggressive. She would give a menacing look, “Stop where you are …or else…..”. The jeep wouldn’t stop. Then she would start running and after a while she would turn around to give another deadly look, to no avail. This went on for over four kilometers when the inevitable happened and I could overtake. The cow could hardly move , but once the perceived threat cleared, she gave a victorious snort at the jeep, before moving away.

I always have that eerie feeling that even as we worry about some real or perceived threat, there is some higher being laughing at us. We worry about a number of events like, sisters’/ daughters’ marriages, higher education of children, construction of house, retirement and so on. We start running. When the time comes, the events pass off quite peacefully, leaving us just tired and relieved.

Another case is a monkey trap. Monkeys are trapped using a tin with a small opening. The tin is anchored to the ground and the opening is large enough for a monkey to put its hand inside but too small to withdraw a clenched fist after grabbing some nuts. The monkey is caught, since it would not let go of the nuts.

So many times we find ourselves in a difficult situation when all we need to get out of it is to let go of something we are dearly clinging on to. It may be sheer ego, some property/ material , position, power and so on.

when is work not work, but play ?

obviously, when you enjoy your work.

when does it happen?

when you work at your own pace, on your own volition, with no expectation of reward or fear of punishment/ failure.

(of course there are exceptions for example, when someone is cooking for his daughter, he doesn’t mind being rushed …)

you can set your own pace if you or are the top man in your organization.

top man doesn’t mean NO 1 in a huge organizaton … it can also mean at the bottom of the heap in an one man army.

well as for the reward, you can afford not to expect if you have enough self esteem, and of course, enough means for day to day living.

so,

under such conditions work will become truly enjoyable, and such work will also be very productive.

So, barring a lucky few, work for most people should start after retirement from ‘regular work’.

No, It is not about the famous train to Jaipur, it is about the life in the Army. Atleast for the families, life is nothing but ‘palace on wheels’ and for the army personnel themselves, the word army may sometimes be substituted by ‘jungle’.

Palace or jungle, the real operative word is ‘wheels’. Life in the army is like being always on the move. Like a traveller, you can experience the weather change ,look at a city through its railway station, but never be part of the town.

There is a time in life, when you want to get away from the train and get on with real life in the town, among real people. But then you are too scared to to leave the security of the train and venture into the big bad world of town people.

Even the families opt to stay in the railway stations (Read ‘Cantonments’) at times when the ‘palace’ turns into ‘jungle’ (Read ‘Field Station’). A few daring ones stay in the town but come back to the cosy comfort of the train after two years.

As always there are pros and cons to everything, including life on wheels. The advantages first; there is security and for the officers and families there is a tremendous sense of a privileged existence, since they travel ‘Deluxe class”. Though people keep moving in and out of the train, you do get good company. You get to see a lot of places and meet a lot of people though under controlled settings.

The disadvantages include the inability to settle down anywhere. There are no long lasting friends and no relatives, unless they are co passengers. Staying 24 x 7 with the same people, there is an artificial existence. The worst damage is the kind of belief that the world is just the train and the railway stations. The feeling of animosity comes out through the not infrequent reference to ‘The B—– town people (Read ‘civilians’)’

The divide between the train and the towns is really widening. Particularly for the officers and families, ‘deluxe class’ existence is unaffordable outside the train, due to the currency variation. The classic case is the kind of people who are born in a train, live the entire life in trains and settle down in a railway station, when too old to keep moving.