You might know that I’m a football fan. Not many would know that I’m also a fan of hip-hop. When I first heard this world cup song by an African singer, I kinda liked it. This being the first world cup in Africa and all that, the world cup anthem is by this Somalian rapper with this strange name K’Naan.

I really like his music. I like his music for exactly why I like hip-hop. The music is not about how much the singer ‘wants his lover’, ‘needs his lover’ and ‘wanna be with her forever and ever’. His music is about the real issues facing his society and what it means to grow up and live in Africa. It’s all very authentic, genuine and original.

In one song he says that, when he was a small boy, his close cousin, a buddy that he grows up with, was left in the civil war because his mom did not have enough money to rescue him. And that it was such a tough choice for her that only she and K’Naan could flee the country leaving his cousin was left stranded in the civil war. This song did something to me. I truly truly feel for the people of Africa. The people and the land of Africa were and are being very cunningly exploited.

That’s when I thought we may not even know the real meaning of the word ‘privilege’. Of course we have our own versions of ‘tough life’ most having to do with poverty. To live in a war-ravaged country is something horrendous. It is a dreadful combination of violence, lack of freedom, poverty and above all hopelessness.

I’m very intrigued by the situation in Africa. Why most of the African countries are so poor? Why are there so many wars and violence? Being such a repository of resources, why should this continent be the biggest recipient of global support? Why, even in South Africa where the standards is living are relatively better, one person in every five is infected with AIDS?

I’ve seen this movie ‘Hotel Rwanda’ which is one of my favourite movies. I liked ‘Blood Diamond’ which gave me some more idea. I knew that these may only be the tip of the iceberg.

I want to read the history of Africa. I want to know how it all began. I’m very curious to know the root cause for their current state. I can pretty much guess that the established empires of the west could have exploited and finally left them in the lurch when it all became unmanageable.

I mean it. I’m going to learn more about Africa.

By now, you must have a fair idea about my reading habits. In my case, the term ‘reading habit’ is an oxymoron. But I do buy books every now and then in the hope that I’d read them. One such book that I bought recently was Stephen Covey’s ‘7 habits of highly effective people’. By the time I bought this book, it had sold about 15 million copies worldwide. That’s how late I picked it up.

Though it’s been a popular title for years, I never cared to see what those 7 habits are. When I went to the store last time, I just picked it up with a ‘lemme look’ mindset. I quickly went to the contents page to see what those 7 habits are. Those were very generic things which didn’t impress me. But I thought 10 million people can’t be so wrong. So I started reading on one of the seven habits. Before I could finish reading that page, I’d decided that I’d buy that book. I generally don’t like these self-help or self-confidence or self-improvement kind of books. This one was very impressive though, so I bought it.

Typically, I didn’t even open the book for many weeks since then. Last week, I felt like reading a book and this book was right there. There was a lot of content before Covey started talking about the habits. But I went straightaway to the first habit – Be Proactive. As he rightly puts it, ‘proactive’ is a recently coined word. I’m not sure how many dictionaries have this entry. His theory around ‘being proactive’ is all about taking the action in response to our social, economic, professional, family environments. It was a great read.

He talks about a thing called ‘circle of concern’. What he wants us to put there is all the concerns, issues and problems that you might have. Then he talks about a ‘circle of influence’. This is a circle inside the ‘circle of concern’. In the ‘circle of influence’, out of all the concerns, issues and problems that we put in the earlier circle, put all those where you can take an action. It would like this – concentric circles where the inner circle would normally be smaller. Now, focusing on what you can do is being proactive. The more you’re proactive, the bigger the inner circle would get. So being proactive is all about being responsible for our own lives. Our responses to our environment are our decisions and choices. Our behaviour is a function of our decisions rather than our conditions.

Seen this one before?

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Have you seen this movie ‘Shawshank Redemption’? For the ones who have seen this great movie, the protagonist’s actions and decisions are all about this. The 20-year imprisonment is the condition or the environment. What he wants to do there or what he can do about it is all in his hands. It’s very practical way to approach life. I can have thousand things that bother me but everything must come down to what I can do about them. I can’t do anything, I should not waste my focus. This zen story also touches upon these circles.

One day while walking through the wilderness a man stumbled upon a vicious tiger. He ran but soon came to the edge of a high cliff. Desperate to save himself, he climbed down a vine and dangled over the fatal precipice. As he hung there, two mice appeared from a hole in the cliff and began gnawing on the vine. Suddenly, he noticed on the vine a plump wild strawberry. He plucked it and popped it in his mouth. It was incredibly delicious!

I may not have known these copyrighted concepts before but this has always been my way. I hate to complain. I hate to whine. That’s because if I can do something about it, I feel that I just have to do it. Otherwise, just understand that that’s the way the environment is. The world may never meet my expectations and it’s not supposed to. It’s a set of random things that keep evolving – human and otherwise. How I deal with the expectations of the world is all in the way I respond to my environment. I must say, it is so much fun doing that. It’s like a strategy game. You make your moves. You feel like you’re range of control keeps increasing as you get better at it.

How’s it for you? Is your circle of influence closer to your circle of concern or is it expanding?

On a not-so-fine morning, I was woken up by a call from my cousin who was yelling that ‘the ocean has entered the city’. That’s the verbatim message of his call to me at about 7am in the morning – ‘The ocean has entered the city’. My response apparently was ‘What? Are you joking?’. ‘I saw it with my own eyes’ he screamed. I still didn’t believe him. I asked, ‘Is this like the ‘milk-drinking-Ganesh’ episode?’. He was yelling on the other side impatiently, ‘Come and see it yourselves’. He sounded more excited than worried. Living in the coastal locality such a thing must first create fear and chaos. Like always, we don’t think these things ever happen to us. When such things happen, when you see things like ‘ocean entering the city’, the overwhelming feeling is that, ‘My oh my, I’ve never seen and I don’t think I’ll ever see such a thing’. I rushed to the beach. After all, I was one of the people who experienced the tremors in Chennai earlier that morning.

We want to witness these things so we can get that original experience and probably tell stories. That’s what exactly I’m doing now. On the tsunami day, if you’re a Chennaiite, you must have been in Chennai. I would have been hugely disappointed to find myself miles away from the coast on that day. When such things happen there is a tendency to witness and experience these things. That’s the top-of-the-mind feeling. That’s more to do with the natural calamities because we haven’t still figured them out yet. They are huge, they are powerful, they are unstoppable, they’re mysterious, they prove that they’re bigger than you and your scientific achievements all put together.

Being undecided on whether to believe or not, I took my motorbike and rushed to the beach. The beach was just a mile from my home. The moment I came out of my home, I realised that it had to be true. There were so many people on the road in groups, talking about what they saw, why the tsunami has come, the end of the world and all that. It was awfully unusual to find so many people on the road. When you find so many people on the road, they must be walking or moving or they must be in a procession. These people were not walking or moving. They were simply standing on the roads and talking in groups. May be, they felt more comfortable in the company of fellow humans. Natural calamities do unite people.

As I got closer and closer to the beach, I could see that there was a huge mass of people facing the beach, watching the damage and the proceedings. I parked my bike somewhere. Nobody cares about ‘no parking zones’ in these times. Such times are when no one would bother much about law and order or discipline. Discipline is for orderliness among the humans. But the humanity was under threat. At least that’s what most of them thought. Many thought tsunamis were happening all over the world on that day. Many thought there would be more tsunamis on the same day. Many thought that that would be the end of the world. It was impossible to ignore that, as per Hindu cosmology, the end of the world had something to do with water.

I managed to find my way through the mass of onlookers to get a peep at my beloved beach. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t see the beach at all. It was all filled with ocean water. The ocean had broken its boundaries and had truly entered the city. What I saw was ocean and after the ocean the main roads of the city. The ocean had come closer by more than half a mile. The beautiful sand beach was not to be seen at all. I could see the huge boats on the main road. They were washed away to that extent. The rescuers were still busy rescuing people and retrieving the dead bodies.

The marina beach had a crucial part in my life. Marina was never too far me. For about 25 years, we had stayed less than a kilometre distance from the beach. It’s hard find a Chennai boy not have played cricket in the beach. I too have played in the beach. Now I wonder how we managed to play there. There were so many teams, players, pitches and balls completely overlapping each other but still there was some method in the madness. May be it was the chaos that we liked and enjoyed. Me and my friends used to spend so much of our time in the beach also chatting, discussing, arguing and debating. During my college days and later, we used to be there almost every other evening with some or the other topic to talk about. It could range from mild-ragging one of our gang or to some serious social issues. I have some fantastic memories from the Marina beach.

I returned home dumbstruck and awestruck. That was one day when all the households were watching nothing but news channels. All those ‘I-told-you-so’ astrologers were having a field day. More doomsdays were predicted. Scientists had their say. Nostradamus was referred and every effort was made to interpret him in such a way he predicted this. I was in shock though I didn’t quite express it. It wasn’t just shock, it was some kind of unexplainable fear. There was some pain too. It was very painful to see the beach like that. It was like seeing the rubble of your house where you lived for decades. We didn’t know the beach would be back to its beauty. We didn’t know when we would be able to visit the beach again. We didn’t know if the fear of tsunami would play a part in our relationship with the beach going forward. For many days the beach was completely deserted, partly due to the police restrictions and mostly due to the fear of more tsunamis.

My father tells me that when there was a attack threat on Madras during the second world war, many landlords sold their property for throwaway prices and fled from the city. Similarly, tsunami brought the real estate prices down in the coastal regions. When there is a threat on life, money becomes a non-issue. Life is uncertain. But we go on living as if we’re very certain about our lives. We keep saying life is uncertain but don’t actually live our lives like we mean it. We realise soon enough that life being uncertain is the most certain thing.

I told you that I don’t get dreams or nightmares. But the few days since the tsunami, I got so many nightmares. The one I still vividly remember is this. I’m in the terrace of my friend’s two-storey house. The road in which this house is, is very broad and is perpendicular to the beach. From the terrace, you could see the beach and the ocean very easily. While I’m standing there road-watching, I suddenly see people running haywire on the road. There is suddenly chaos and terror. And the next thing I see is that of huge wave of water entering that road. The water level is so high that standing in the terrace I could reach out to touch the water. That image of ocean gushing towards us in that broad road submerging all the houses was the most horrific nightmare I’ve ever had. It chills my spine when I write this now!

This is a fake picture but this the closest we’d get to see a true tsunami scene. Imagine being able to see such massive waves gushing towards you and you’re watching it from the beach! Nowhere to run. Surrender and accept the truth.

If we claim that we learn from experiences, events and incidents such as these must have also taught us something. That tsunami was a clear reminder to humanity. A reminder that there is very little under our control. A reminder of how uncertain life is. There are many such reminders. They have and will come in the form of tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, fires, typhoons or even with those little things we can’t control. Let’s be aware, be reminded.

I’m not a white-bearded philosopher but I have a philosophy. I’m sure you have one for yourself. So we are all philosophers in one way or the other. It’s just that our philosophy may not be sound enough that it gets shot down a few rounds of logical reasoning. Then it would turn into beliefs. Anyway, you can’t question my beliefs because they are mine and they need not be logical because they are beliefs. What I’m going to write today is all about my philosophy or belief or whatever you’d like to call it.

Do you know what gives you happiness? I hope you do. Otherwise, think about it today. To talk about what gives us happiness, let’s first talk about needs and wants. We all have needs and wants. Needs are what I would call as essentials for my basic existence and social status. Money is a need. Job is a need. A house or a car can also be a need. Satisfying the needs may not really give us true happiness. Needs follow Maslow’s theory of hierarchy. Once you satisfy yourself of a need, the other need is created or you create it. Needs are not wants. Wants are the expectations and desires that you as a person have for yourself. Unless you know what you want, you can never be happy.

The richest man is not the happiest man. The strongest man is not the happiest man. The most handsome man is not the happiest man. The most powerful man is not the happiest man. Even if one man happens to be the richest, the strongest, the most handsome and the most powerful, he may still not be the happiest man. Being rich, strong, handsome and powerful are all needs, temporary needs. These are needs that one may not realise as temporary needs when he has not achieved them.

Needs are those that you want ‘for your life’. Wants are those that you want ‘from your life’. Now that we have separated needs and wants, what are your wants? As we realise, needs never end. They only grow. While they are growing, think of your wants as well. What do you want from your life? How do you want to lead your life? Now compare the answers for this question with the list of needs that you have. You’ll realise that it is highly possible to satisfy your wants without satisfying your needs. Bed is a need and sleep is a want. If you keep upgrading beds without sleeping enough or realising that sleep is what you want more than the bed, it would be a sad life. For the society, you could be a grand success for only you know that you’ve wasted your life.

It’s quite important to know if we are driven by wants or needs. Needs are meant to be supporting your wants. Your wants are the purpose of your life. Your needs are supposed to help you further. Your needs don’t exist by themselves. They are there because you have certain wants. While the needs support the wants, they have no reason to exist if you have no wants. In reality, there could be people who have not identified their wants. But they would have identified their needs otherwise the society would help them identify. It is fully possible for someone to spend all their lives running behind the needs and dying without even thinking about what they actually want.

In the normal course of life, we are prepared only to handle our needs. Our education and our careers are all about handling needs. So it’s quite possible to get into this quick sand of needs and believe that’s all life is all about. Needs have no purpose by themselves. Getting rich, attaining power and reaching targets are all supposed to give you something. That’s what one must be aware of.

People who don’t identify their wants will never be happy. Because, having achieved all the needs, they would still experience that emptiness which they can’t explain. That happens when you don’t know what you want from your life. Now think of those things that make you really happy, things that give you sense of satisfaction. Exclude gratifications which are different from happiness. Gratifications arise as you fulfil a need or a desire. Think of only those things that you want from life, only those things you want others to give and you want to give to others. Once you know your wants, and once you realise that they are the very driving force of your life, needs may not even matter, let alone being very important.

For all of us, the want is to be happy. That’s for each one of us. We tend to believe that happiness comes in being more rich, more powerful and all that but the reality is happiness comes in being happy. It’s as simple as that. I want to live my life happily and spread this happiness to as many people as possible. That’s my want. My happiness comes in being happy. And I realise that unhappiness disappears when you create happiness for others. I think life is simple unless you’re bored with it and try complicating it.

That’s my philosophy in a nutshell, or in a blog entry, to be exact. This philosophy of mine is something I have concluded and realised based on understanding and experience of life. Don’t go on to try proving them wrong. Because I’m not open for logic

Here I go again. Another zen blog today. Why do I publish zen stories here? When I read some of these zen stories, what I want to do is to broadcast this story to every single person I know. In fact, I want to tell these stories to everyone personally so we can then have that little interesting discussion what these mean to each of us. By the way, in case you’re in doubt, this is a ’secular’ blog (we’re all secular because elections are around). All I do is just publish the zen stories because they are short, sweet and pack a punch.

Here are couple of very simple, uncomplicated truths.

This is the story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbours came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “May be,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbours exclaimed. “May be,” replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbours again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “May be,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbours congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “May be,” said the farmer.

Great story. The old man never wants to call those as events of good fortune or misfortune. Why classify them into this or that? He does not reject them. He accepts them, but without a preference. For all those things that happen to the old man, it is his neighbours who are happy or unhappy. He doesn’t care how they feel and in fact he only has a ‘may be’ feeling.

After winning several archery contests, the young and rather boastful champion challenged a Zen master who was renowned for his skill as an archer. The young man demonstrated remarkable technical proficiency when he hit a distant bull’s eye on his first try, and then split that arrow with his second shot. “There,” he said to the old man, “see if you can match that!”

Undisturbed, the master did not draw his bow, but rather motioned for the young archer to follow him up the mountain. Curious about the old fellow’s intentions, the champion followed him high into the mountain until they reached a deep chasm spanned by a rather flimsy and shaky log. Calmly stepping out onto the middle of the unsteady and certainly perilous bridge, the old master picked a far away tree as a target, drew his bow, and fired a clean, direct hit. “Now it is your turn,” he said as he gracefully stepped back onto the safe ground.

Staring with terror into the seemingly bottomless and beckoning abyss, the young man could not force himself to step out onto the log, no less shoot at a target. “You have much skill with your bow,” the master said, sensing his challenger’s predicament, “but you have little skill with the mind that lets loose the shot.”

Oh how I love this one! How true the master’s words are. ‘Skill with the mind’. In normal circumstances, archery was a matter of routine for the champion. It was a matter or practice and routine that it became a reflexive skill. A matter of dexterity and hand-eye co-ordination. When he was put in unfamiliar grounds, he had to control his mind, its fear and its doubts, but he could not even concentrate. Thus, he had less skill with his mind though he had much skill with the bow.

Come up with your views and comments.

When I went abroad for the first time, I just could not sleep on the very first night. I was wondering why I couldn’t sleep. It was a very spacious room for one person. It had everything you’d ask for. It had air conditioners, state of the art television, dvd players, refrigerators etc. It had everything, but one. A fan. A ceiling fan. That’s when I realised that I can’t sleep without a ceiling fan. I’ve got used to the rhythmic sound of the ceiling fan so much that the silence in that hotel room was disturbing. The silence was even eerie.

It didn’t take me too much time to realise that I can’t sleep in utter silence. Some of us are not used to silence. I was not. I’ve grown up in noisy neighbourhoods. Even at home, you always hear a voice. Silence is not really experienced. Silence is like truth. Too much of it is really uncomfortable. I realised that I needed some noise around me to sleep peacefully. Quite an irony but that was the case. So, I switched on the television and left it on a music channel at reasonable volume for a midnight. I think I was then asleep in about 10 minutes.

Even at home, we’ve got air conditioners in every living space but the fans are a must in the nights. The fans are supposed to run all day and night while air conditioners will be on and off. I’m writing this today because something happened yesterday too. I was putting my daughter to sleep in the night. My wife was busy with some work in the kitchen. While my daughter was falling asleep, I was suddenly thinking ‘why am I feeling like I’m a hotel room?’. The air-conditioner was running and the fan was off. That was it. So it was not so much about the ceiling fan. It’s about the sound of it. The fact that the fan does not leave me alone. It gives my mind some company with its noise.

Going back to the point about utter silence, how often have we got to experience utter silence? There is always some noise or sound or music that always surrounds us wherever we are. Those to some extent keep the mind busy. It helps the mind not to think anything in depth. While we are thinking about what to do in office today, we also hear the blaring horns of the truck, the radio music from the tea shop, the noise that children make etc. As we hear and register them, subconsciously we they keep our mind busy. Think for a moment that there is absolute silence around you. Or you have the remote for this whole world and you hit the mute button. In silence, 24 hours will be like 48 hours. I can’t explain you but I’m sure you can feel it. In silence, you tend to think a lot and then stop thinking altogether. It is the stage where we think a lot that we would normally find it difficult to cross.

Silence can be of many types – silence of the external world, your own outer silence and your inner silence. Contrary to public perception, these are not really mutually exclusive. Some minds can achieve inner silence even while the whole world is being bombed. For the untrained minds, it has to be a gradual process. That’s why you’re told to find a calm place (silence of the external world), and then sit quietly in a posture (your outer silence), and let your mind wander and finally stop thinking (your inner silence).

Since the world does not have a remote control, the idea of muting the world is purely imaginary. Believe me, you can mute the world as well. Because it is your ear that hears all the noise. If you choose not to hear, you don’t hear anything and you’d have muted the world. Forget muting the world, the idea of muting yourself is certainly possible. In Hinduism we have this ‘mouna vratham’ which is a ritual of silence. The less we speak the more we understand the importance of silence and also that of words. We don’t have go looking for moments of silence. But when they present themselves, we don’t have to run away from them, like I did in those abroad nights or yesterday night.

Our problem may be very simple in life; we find that we must keep doing, thinking, going, listening, running, talking or else what shall we be? We love to be filled with noise, images, words, thoughts, memories, fantasies, sensations, people, pleasures and good feelings. When these things are not, we feel bored, alone, scared and quite possibly angry and confused. The brain needs input almost continuously.

Isn’t it the case? We need to keep the mind filled with nonsense. If we don’t, the mind will go looking for the truth. And we don’t want that, do we?

You might have thought about this many times. I have. I’m strong believer that life exists outside of Earth too. It may even be various forms of life and in various planets and stars. We know ‘nothing to little’ to even state that no life exists outside earth. When I say ‘we’, I don’t refer to you and me alone, I refer to all the scientists as well. Well, this post is not to prove that there is life outside earth. I can’t do that as well with my knowledge of science and my lazy refusal to research for facts. This post is just about the fact that planet earth is a tiny dot in the space. That shows how much we don’t know. How much is still there to know.

This is our solar system. See how earth compares in size with other planets and Sun. Earth is a tiny dot already now. You can see how much unknown is there.

And now, this image compares Sun with the Canis Majoris, the largest known star. We just saw above that Earth is a just a pixel in comparison to Sun. In the below picture see how our Sun is reduced to dot when compared to Canis Majoris. When you see these pictures, don’t just look at the pictures. Just close your eyes and visualise and try to travel to space to see how they look. Unbelievable, isn’t it?

Check out this website. There are no texts to read. Just a slideshow of images. It starts with the comparison on Earth and moon and shows who’s the boss there. And then slowly it keeps adding planets to the same image so we can compare the sizes. Then slowly, we start adding stars from outside milkyway as well and finally end it with the comparison with the largest star known so far. Check it for yourselves.

Now tell me, do you think there would be life outside of earth? So this nicely leads us to the new feature in this blog

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