We are free !!!

This is the least I can do towards celebrating the 60th year of my Free India - spare a few minutes, take pride in our freedom and cherish a few patriotic moments.

I enjoyed the ARR 'Jana Gana Mana' revival again on Google Video. Here's a link - Jana Gana Mana. The instrumental pieces followed by the vocals of artists that we all respect revere and praise, enriches the experience. It doesn't feel merely like a national anthem. It feels like a song that boasts our pride and greatness and reminds us of our glorious past. This rendering is truly a masterpiece !!! I loved the 2 seconds of D K Pattamal; would have loved to see M S Subbulakshmi as well.

In all these wonderful years, I must have sung this song at least 4000 times - 12 full years at school (not counting weekends or holidays). It never felt any more important than a ritual prior to a day of school. I wasn't bound by a "moral duty" to rise or stand in attention when I was not required to. I've watched military parades a few times. I can't recall the last time I cared to feel proud about any of that.

Call it waking up to the fact or identity crisis, it sure feels a lot different now.

We are probably the most diverse nation in the world. We are home to more than a billion people (1,129,866,154). We speak more than a hundred languages (see !!!). We have remarkable religious diversity (here). We were ruled, robbed & ruined several times over.

But hey - we're going great guns !!!

Compassion - A precious gift

Albert Einstein :

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

I think it's a precious gift to be able to rise above all reason and experience a desire to help a total stranger through even a small gesture of kindness. To adopt such a great virtue from adversity is just marvellous compassion. It takes a lot of selflessness to empathize when you are on the verge of being consumed in self-pity over misfortune.

The story of Larry Stewart - who was all this and more - greatly inspired me. Inspired by the kindness a diner owner showed him on a cold winter night, Stewart inherited the virtue of random kindness and practiced it for 26 years - dressing up as Santa and giving away money to strangers on Christmas nights. His kindness and generosity grew each year with his prosperity to an estimated $1.3 million.

"I see the smiles and looks of hopelessness turn to looks of hope in an instant," he says. "After all, isn't that what we were put here on Earth for — to help one another?"

Here's some news on him - Secret Santa

Pema Chodron :

"When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space."

My blue moon

Uplifted in fatherhood, I was driving back from the baby store late this evening, contented that I had managed to buy a box of hard-to-find diapers. It wasn't the worst hour of traffic, but for some reason, it seemed pretty disorganized. I relived the horrors of "slam-on-brakes-and-hold-your-breath" several times.

Amidst all this, something caught the corner of my eye - a half moon in brilliant cobalt blue, pristine and more dazzlingly beautiful than anything I had ever seen "up above the world so high". To a casual sky-watcher like me, this was amazing; for a split second, I thought I was witness to an astronomical marvel. I was captivated by the charm, as if by a spell; all my worries - petty and prominent alike, magically silenced for a few moments.

This trip of mine to Wonderland was not meant to be - at the next traffic light, I realized that I had been watching the moon through my windshield tint. Ah!!. if only this intrusive uncovering could have waited a few more minutes !!!

I am not disappointed... the marvel just turned from being "the" blue moon into "my" blue moon. Until a day comes by when I can pinch myself twice, look out the window, ask a friend and still believe I am watching a celestial wonder of comparable beauty and charm, "my blue moon" will remain an object of my overwhelming admiration.

Too much work

I dragged myself through one of those afternoons today - when I had a shitload of stuff to do, but just felt like goofing off. I wanted to kill a few minutes - hoping this too shall pass. I grazed the internet and found that some countries like France, Germany and Netherlands support 35-hour work weeks. And they actually seem to see some rationale behind this -

(Source: Wikipedia)

1. To reduce unemployment and yield a better repartition of work, in a context where some people work long hours while some others are unemployed. A 10.2% decrease in the hours extracted from each worker would, theoretically, require firms to hire correspondingly more workers, a remedy for unemployment.


2. To take advantage of improvements in productivity of modern society in order to give workers some more personal time in order to enhance their quality of life

Now I feel motivated.... to goof off.

Why Blog?

Despite the many reasons to blog or excuses to not blog that I could think of during the past few days, here I am - writing my first few words. I have always enjoyed Writing and English - blogging seems to be my suitable take at both. The freedom to write about all that my mind dwells upon and the almost anonymous audience I write to, already encourage me.

I look forward to organizing my thoughts and reflections, and expressing them to those chosen inhabitants of planet earth who may be interested in what I write.