Myriad thoughts on a million things
Posts tagged Life
Standing Babas!
9I’m currently reading Gregory David Robert’s ‘Shantaram’. It’s an interesting book, albeit slow and meandering, but interesting none the less. For me, having stayed in Mumbai for a bit, it is especially more interesting as it chronicles many fascinating things about Mumbai that I did not know / have never heard of. One of these being the Den of Standing Babas!
When I read the bit about them in the book, I was really intrigued! Babas or Sadhus as they are commonly known in India are religious men who renounce everything material in their search for nirvana. The book records that the standing Babas are men who have taken a vow to never sit down. They do everything standing up (sleep, eat and yes, even their number 2s! They do that in a sitting chair position, not taking the weight of their feet). They are of a belief that if they suffer enough pain in this lifetime, they would have repented for their sins and would be able to escape the mortal cycle of seven births and be one with god (as in get moksha). The book shares that there is a place in Mumbai where these babas come together, share kashmiri hash and walk around/swing to devotional music in a mesmerized smoked up haze.
Shantaram also chronicles how these babas endure crushing pain, where in the beginning their legs start to swell up (due the blood not being pumped properly) with their veins jutting out and then over time how their legs become thin sticks with only a transparent film of skin on them. A really moving picture… but I was not sure whether the den of the standing babas really existed or if they were a materialization of Robert’s fertile imagination. I didn’t think they really existed because I could not believe that humans could be capable of enduring such torment for the promise of something that might not really be there.
So I did some research on the net on them and found that they really do exist! There is a now some info available about them on the net… I think they became some sort of celebrities after their mention in Shantaram. I found a few entries by visiting firangs on travel sites that asked about info where one could find the den of standing babas!! (One query mentions that he had read about the adventures of Shantaram and wanted to do a list of things that Robert’s had done in the book!) Their new found stardom has the ‘standing baba’; now even defined in Wikipedia. But for me the one conclusive proof that they do exist came as a you tube video by a Music channel anchor Shenaz interviewing some of these Babas. Check out the video.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojeR1fOKv_A
It’s amazing how these people, and young people at that (one baba in the video is just 35 yrs old) have given up everything in this world and are enduring a life time of incredible pain in their faith of a better afterlife. Makes you wonder….Would God rather reward humans who inflict self pain (and contribute nothing much else to the world, society, the people they live with) with nirvana and have normal people who are just trying to be good honest human beings bound in trails of earthy life before they are allowed in his realm?
Hmm… that is the eternal question of afterlife I guess. We’ll probably have to wait till someone makes the superest ever Super Computer (something like the ‘Deep Thought’ from ‘Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy’) before we can come by the answer to ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’. Ha!
Instinctive Racism or Thought Through Typecasts?
4It’s been some time since I read Malcolm Galdwell’s ‘Blink’. At the time when I read it, I thought it was an eye opener. I especially liked his stories/ examples on how instinctively, without even knowing it, we make decisions about people, races, and things in the blink of an eye. In the book, some of his stories highlighted how black people in the US experience instinctive racism due to the type cast expectations/ views that white people have of them.
I didn’t think of the book again till a few days ago. I follow the show ‘Are you smarter than a 5th Grader’ that is currently being aired on star world (mostly because it makes me feel smart…. You have to see the Indian version to realize that the Indian level of required competence for the show is really much higher than the American) Jeez…! There I go blinking and type casting. Sorry.
So anyways, like I was saying I watch the show quite regularly and one day Alana (the one black kid that is part of the 5 member class) gave two wrong answers to consecutive questions. And of course the participant who was banking on her answer to stay in the show had to leave. It got me thinking…the show definitely has a way of fixing some answers and getting the kids get some of them wrong (it would appear very unnatural if they got everything right every time) and I started to notice which kids got how many wrong answers… and viola! For every wrong answer by a kid, Alana got more answers wrong. Was it coincidence? Was Alana not as smart as the other whit kids? Or were they making Alana get the maximum answers wrong because there is a general belief that black people are not so smart? I even started to notice that contestants tended to pick Alana early in the game, as they expected the easy questions early on.
It made me think of ‘Blink’… because I’m not sure if the producers of the show planned on doing this or instinctively every time they were decided who would get answers wrong, they think of Alana.
Living for today vs. building for tomorrow
0I’ve always wondered about this whole human life experience. We are born, have a few carefree years of childhood, a few anxious years of teenage, many stressful years of working and many blissful/cantankerous (depends on one is happily married or not) years of married/ single life and then we’re done. Heavenly gates are hopefully there to welcome us back to the realm. And in during this whole journey we go through this myriad emotions and experiences that hopefully make it all worth the effort.
Most of us, in our lives, are focused onto doing things that will make our tomorrow better, safer, richer, happier. We work, spend the majority of our lives in closed spaces trying to make enough money to buy the things we think will make us happy today and to save for the things we will need in the future. It just feels like this endless cycle of want, save, buy and then want something more expensive/better, save more, buy more… and on and on.
There is never any satisfaction with the way things are. It is a fundamental human need to forever strive for more. That really is why the human race has reached the pinnacle it has today ( I mean pinnacle in evolutionary and technological sense, not a moral or philosophical sense)… so this endless want for more is a good thing right? Then why does this very thing make the average human experience seem so futile? If we had the ability to live for today, then each day would be rich, full and not a day spent in doing things in preparation for a hopefully better tomorrow.
Wedding vows: upgrades required!
21368 days
by Anmol
in Random Thoughts
I have fond memories of my wedding. It was the usual big fat Indian wedding… a different function every day for the run up to the main event, a few thousand wedding guests, all the bollywood type dance and music, a few hundred ceremonies, all the pampering, shopping and tons and tons of feet touching and gift taking. I had fun! J
The only thing I thought could have been more meaningful was the wedding ceremony itself. I’m not sure if it was do with the undertrained priest that we had, or it is something to do with the ways wedding vows are made in the Marwari weddings. I mean this was the single most important bond I was going to be making in my life and the ancient wedding vows I was making ranged from a promise not to go to the jungle alone to having my to be husband promise me that he will not go dig a well without me!! Jeez… someone from the apex body of the religion should really look into it upgrading the wedding vows/ceremony!
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I am a fairly religious person. I do believe in god, heaven, hell and all the things in between. I would not want to in anyway want to ridicule religion and I do know that there are mantras to read, gods to be pleased, but would it be too much to update the vows/the way the ceremony is held so that it can mean something to our generation today?
Take the Christian weddings for example. They have a simple ceremony and hey, personal wedding vows! One to one, special promises to each other, which they share in front of their near and dear ones. I think that is really great. If there was one best practice that the Indian wedding could borrow from other weddings, I would vote this as one! We already have the engagement and exchange of rings as a wide spread practice in India now, even though it has no roots in the Hindu religion/wedding history, so why can’t we have some upgrade/personalization of the wedding vows too? What say?
Terrorist Alert or Inflation Control?
0We all know about the multiple bombs that have been going off in all our big cities… Bangalore, Ahemdabad, Surat…. The scare is touching all cities with people in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Chennai wondering when the terror train will hit their cities, Astrologers going in mystic convulsions predicting the next city to be hit, TV channels having a blast zipping from one bomb site to another and causing more panic with their dramatic overtures.
55 dead and more injured… that’s just one of the more obvious impacts of the terror attacks. But what else is happening because of this? People across large cities are retreating in fear and decidedly not going out gallivanting in public places. Protective mums are telling their children to ‘come straight home!’ rather than hang out with their friends after work or college. So people are going out less, and by virtue of that buying less, spending less. And guess what will happen if this continues for a bit…? Inflation will come down…!!
For an economy which is being adversely impacted due to runaway inflation, these are desperate times. The government has tried almost everything from raising repo rates, CRR limits, lending rates, etc etc. But nothing seems to work to reign in the upward trend of inflation…. So in trying times, would it be too far out to think that the desperate government could resort to scaring its own population into their homes and hoping they will in turn tie up their purse strings? Just a thought.
The Power to Design our Lives
0As in all great designs, there is a very thought through carefulness to the whole randomness of life. At first glance it would appear arbitrary, random, but beneath it all is an intricate design waiting to be glanced upon, understood.
In terms of art, many would have experienced this with the great works of Woodsworth and Blake. For example, Blake’s most well know work ‘Tiger tiger burning bright’, on the surface would seem like a child’s nursery rhyme. But only a literature enthusiast who has spent time and energy to understand the true brilliance of the piece would be able to see the grand design behind this really intellectual poem.
Similarly, if one was to see the various things that happen to us, the experiences we go through as disconnected and random, one would be underestimating the greatness of the grand design of our lives. This is not to urge you to consider the power of something as vague as destiny, but something far more scientific than that. Science believes that for every action, there exists a reaction. That simple theorem translated in real life can help us see some of the outcomes of our lives as result of a great design… one that we craft in the everyday choices that we make, the thoughts we think every day.
This is not so much an original thought as it is my verbalization of some of the basic principles from numerous books/websites on the power of the Secret (ref Rhonda Bryne). For the unaccustomed, ‘The Secret’ is a hugely successful book on the power of thought and belief. The writer collates experiences and dialogue from the proponents of the secret and highlights how every thought that passes through our minds today actually shapes our tomorrow.
Some might say it’s out there or that it’s just a bunch of hocus pocus. For the scientifically restricted there will never be enough proof because human lives and outcomes can never be measured in terms of equations. But for the slightly open minded, this philosophy offers a great means to creating some level of understanding of our lives and how we can, if not design it completely, nugde it towards what we want it to be. Some simple concepts of thinking good thoughts, doing unto others as you would expect unto yourselves, believing something exists and thereby creating the space for it to really come into existence, etc… might not get you ready results. But practicing these can definitely empower you to achieve great things that you think are not possible now.
Believe is it there and it will be…. And believing never cost us anything. So why not try it?
I think we need an iThink
61444 days
by Anmol
in Random Thoughts
Did you know a Human brain could think of more than 60,000 thoughts a day? And with a hyper active one like mine (which refuses to shut down even in the night), I’m sure one could touch about a 1,00,000 thoughts a day!
I wish there would be some technology (and I’m sure it’s not too far out to think it’ll be here soon) that would enable you to log an interesting thought, as you have it, into some kind of a portable thought machine. For example, say you’re sitting by your window, watching the monsoon rain come down on your new car and you suddenly think of how your car, if it was really was an alive feeling, thinking creature that it sometime feels like when I drive it, must be feeling while taking its first all natural bath, and you go like, hey, that’s an interesting thought to explore, maybe write about, you could then and there, go like ‘ thought machine, record that thought, tag it, My car’s first rain. ‘ And bingo! I can keep that thought for reference when I want to write my next blog.
Won’t that be really kool? It would be so easy to pull up all the thoughts you had as and well you want them. You’d never have to forget how you felt about something, how happy you were at some time or how mad you were at someone. What you thought of when you were going through a completely new experience, seeing a new place…. Wow!
One could expect something like this to be called, say the ‘ithink’ (goes with the trend of all the happenings gadgets that our generation has to have, like the ipod, iphone etc.. and totally fits the description of the product which is, that you think, and it keeps it for reference and future use!
Maybe I should patent this thought. Later when they do come up with the ithink, I can claim royalty for the novel product idea! Well, till the ithink gets here, I’ll have to make do with the thoughts I do manage to hold onto. The rest will forever be lost, until a particular neuron connects with another particular neuron, and I go like de ja vu, I’ve thought of that before!