The race for winning

 

We are familiar with the story of Hare and Tortoise.  In the race between the two, the tortoise won. Hare was super active. But its thinking was, that it knows the game and can really do things fast. It was fully aware of the tortoise's slowness.  It was arrogant in saying that "let the tortoise walk slowly, I will complete the field at least ten times". It relaxed and took ample breaks in between. It slept, and enjoyed by the time it realized the tortoise had reached the goal post. Slow and Steady Wins the Race...

Many of us have read the second version of the story which is adopted in many management classes.  The second time they both compete, the hare decides not to waste time but reaches the goal post first and the tortoise keeps on and on and completes the track but does not win.  The third time they both come to an understanding that no one should lose the game.  Both of them, try to cover the field together.  They support each other in achieving the target. The Strategy is not Win-Lose or Lose-Win, but it should always be Win-Win.... 

Long since this happened.  Now both Hare and Tortoise have reached several such goal posts.  The tortoise is now the senior-most.  The hare is also quite successful and is second in line. They are guiding their clans to be the best and win races.  Newer members have joined and there is a bigger race to cover a large field and reach different goals.  The new entrants are the frogs, rats, and grasshoppers. Now the race is between tortoise, hare, frogs, rats, and the grasshoppers. The tortoise the hard-shelled with greater wisdom, wants everyone to win.  The hare always believes it is already a winner.  However, Life has taught lessons that it cannot win with a selfish motto.  Sometimes, it relies on its luck more than the hard work. It also wants to prove to the world that it is smart and was better than the tortoise. Rats are the sheltered ones. They can literally run very fast but are highly distracted.  They run behind the cheese.  They are fond of small incentives and winning does not mean a big win, they are happy with small things. The frogs make a small jump every time but are fond of pulling the others’ legs. The frogs are fond of acrobats and flex themselves and show others what they are capable of. The newest addition to the arena is the grasshoppers. They are not aware of where the goal post is. They have an aerial view. They make huge leaps and in different directions. All others raise their heads to see where and in which direction the grasshoppers are jumping.  When they are in the grass, you can’t even see them. Their moves are unpredictable.

 Now the field has to be covered by all of them.  Each of them has different goal posts, some are aware and some are not.  There are also other fields where the race is happening.  Some of them are also looking outside where they can make easy wins.  When everyone thinks the winner is awarded, then it is announced that the efforts, the approach, and the attitude is rewarded. Yet the ones who are in the race, have a different view…. And they go on with the same strategies…… Who do you think are the winners of the race?  

Attendance and Learning

 In every Higher Education institution, it is a common practice to calculate the attendance of students and publish it so that students make it up to attain a certain percentage of attendance. Institutions have a clear policy to permit students with 75% attendance to write their exams.  Despite the policy, each time during exams it is common that faculty are in a dilemma whether to permit students if the student falls short of attendance.    Every year there are several defaulters.  However, every student has a reason for absence, and sometimes it is very difficult to be sure about the genuineness.  It has become a ritual in every class be it school, PUC, PG, or Ph.D. to monitor the students for their attendance.  I have a doubt if faculty have to monitor or students have to monitor the attendance themselves.   Students have to attend the classes on their own accord.  Is attendance not curbing the learning interests of students?  If attendance is mandated does that not make students attend with the sole aim of securing a said percentage of attendance? Does it not take away the intrinsic motivation of learning from a class? 

The mandatory attendance has made our students come to classes for attendance purposes and not for what they get out of a class. The only time students learn is when they are in the class.  But when we talk to some students, we realize that attending class for them is perceived as a burden. Teaching has become so monotonous and rarely triggers thinking.  Students fail to develop an interest in the class thereby becoming passive listeners.

The education system believes that the attendance mandate brings students success in exams.  These further drive us to the question of what is success and how we realistically assess students?  Should we be exam centric and give greater importance to the marks they score in the exam. Discipline is one factor that the faculty think could be achieved through attendance.  Here the question is whether our intention is discipline or learning?

Why can’t we have a zero-attendance policy and make students feel more responsible and inspired to attend classes?  Can we ensure greater accountability for the students? This would be possible only with a very effective mentoring system. One-on-one tracking, maintaining close connections with the students, use of experiential methods of teaching, student engagement and continuous assessments, and many more attitudinal and cultural changes at the institution level.  An open culture of learning is the need of the hour rather than the rigid structural impositions in the learning environment.

 

Are you busy?

 Do we feel that we are very busy and left with no time? Are others perceiving you as a busy person? Perceived as a 'busy person' shows that I am not managing my time well and not giving enough time to people. Most times we are not aware of where the time is leaking. I found that I was addicted to a word game and playing mostly in my free time. Also I was listening to the same song hundreds of times during my commute to office. I felt it was OK as long as I am enjoying doing this. But was unaware that it took away all my time of doing something more productive and useful. As you know our children are our best critics. My children had noticed my addiction to the word game and one of them suggested me to read a book 'Dopamine Detox'. It talks about how we indulge in certain stimulations and we continue to enjoy those stimulations. Like the social media, we continue to watch video after video. The media also gives us several suggestions of related videos to get indulged. When I watch a movie, I don't end with that. I come home and watch a lot of videos about the making of the movie and several interviews of the movie crew. It does not give satisfaction until you are exhausted. Also notice that passengers travelling in a metro are all engaged in their mobile phones. That is probably we have forgotten to be in a doing nothing state. We need constant stimulation to keep us happy. Are we not the losers of that 'precious time'.

Similarly food. We indulge in eating all those unhealthy foods as we know that at the click of a button somebody ( Swiggy, Zomato...) will deliver to our door step and finally we end up with unlimited cravings and become more lazy. How many of us have decided 'no outside food' from tomorrow but we again fall back to the same trap.

Now it is difficult to recollect how we lived our days with no mobiles and no social media. How we took a paper and a pen to write letters to our friends? How we got excited about the home cooked food?

Atleast now we can attempt to live life with greater awareness of these stimulations.

If we are less organized there is more clutter and outside world perceives you to be very busy. Is it not right time we look into where are the time leaks which is making us unproductive? Which are the unwanted stimulations that have a dopamine effect on us?

Happy Women's Day

 

Women’s Day is celebrated all over the world and wishes pour in, programs are organized, special offers are being made by business houses to make women feel special.  That’s great! Such a day dedicated in the name of women enable us to recognize the fact that women are treated with equity so as to build an inclusive society with gender parity.  However, a day does not change the way we think and behave until it comes from within and that which requires constant pursuit to break some of the taboos to overcome the mental models that have been built over a period of time. The thought process has to be backed by a constant practice of what and how we think.

The whole intention is to strengthen women and empower them.  But in reality, are we really providing them the needed strength? Just take the case of menstruation.  Let alone villages, even in the most advanced cities, mothers and relatives of girls instill a kind of fear about menstruating and make them believe that as a problem and not as a natural course.  Girls have great fear and are psyched about getting their period and feel weak and fail to perform during these days. We know that there is a steep drop in girls’ education in the age of 12 to 15 due to this.  Can we instill confidence in our girls saying that is a natural process and it won’t affect our body and mind?

Is there any girl who has not become a victim of judgments of others?  People are more judgmental about girls and women right from clothing to hairstyles to skin color to their behaviors.  Everything is seen with a different lens making girls and women weaker each time.  People don’t mind commenting in the open about being fat or skinny, dark or fair, tall or short and so on.   These body shaming remarks and sweeping comments make girls and women more conscious and they develop a feeling of not being enough.   Can we reserve our comments and stop seeing them from the appearance lens and start seeing girls and women from the potential and the ability lens?

Very recently I was conversing with one of my  students, who was engaged and getting married.  Her in-laws were insisting her to take a different career path.  When girls are given education, don’t they have the ability to make a right career choice.  Can we only support them in making a choice but not pushing them to subscribe to our choices?

One of my cousin’s daughter is an expecting mother. She is just 21. She aspires to pursue civil services.  I asked her, “if you are so ambitious about your career you could have waited for some time till you attempted your exams?”. She replied, “settling in life for girls means marriage”.  She is forced to think that ultimately one has to get married and that is the first priority in life.  That’s the reason why we see though girls’ education is on the rise, though the pass percentage outnumbers boys and they being the rank holders, the work force participation of women does not match with the number of women being educated.  Can we make them realize their dreams of becoming something in life?

There are many more instances that make girls and women shrink their thinking.  They still have problems in expressing what they really feel.  The voice never comes out of them when it has to.  However, the problem is not with only others.  The problem lies with girls and women who put their own unseen boundaries. These are self-made limitations.   Girls and women are negatively wired and always perceive greater problems in life. Many times problems are imaginary and not factual.  We need to look forward for a more sensitive society which adds power to the voice of girls and women.  Can we add to their strength for they are the daughters of tomorrow who can build organizations, families, societies, a nation and an entire universe?

 

Karmanyeva

 

Life runs mostly in meeting the ends rather than in the means to the ends.  Our happiness is determined by a series of events in our lives and we go on in the wait for completion of the set of tasks.  Education, marriage, children, job, promotion, buying a house, a car or any material comforts, doing a business etc. All these acts as goal posts in our lives and we live from one goal post to another. Within these broad goal posts, we have a series of end points.  Our all-time focus is on these goal posts and the attainment of the them.  We look forward for each of these events to happen successfully.  In the process, our energies get focused on the outcomes.   We are happy if we attain it and disturbed when we fail to attain.   So, our mind always lives in the future, dreaming of completion of the next goal post or our mind dwells in thinking about the past as to why we could not achieve something.  The whole point is our focus is only on these outcomes.  What is living if we are always worried either about the past and future?  Can we have a peaceful life? Just doing the action means living in the present.  Our real existence is in the present. It is in the journey.  But the focus on the goal post makes us live either in the past or in the future.  The thought of future or the past come in the way of living a life in that moment.  This is the whole philosophy of ‘Here and Now’.  How can we be 100% engaged in a given moment?  The undisturbed mind can enable us to achieve this.  An undisturbed mind is the one which neither in the past nor in the future.  We all live in moments that has already happened and passed with the time or we live in the moments which we are not even aware of.  These are not in the time and space we are in.

Being in present is to feel the moment at that time and space we are in. Only this can help us to live an inspired life.  Life just goes with the flow and there is no need for us to do deliberate thinking.  Thoughts come on its own. There is no need for planned action on this plane.  We need to just keep accepting realities as they come.

This leads us to a question if the whole planning processes a waste.  In reality life is full of uncertainties.  Take the case of Covid 19.  Several predictions were made regarding the spread of the disease, its containment and its impact.  Most of these have reversed.  But on the other hand, the question is were predictions not needed.  If predictions were not made, would we have been able to come out with the vaccines against the disease.   This brings to a need for us to understand the two planes we live in.  One is in the physical plane (bhouthika or sthoola) and the other in the spiritual plane (daivika or sookshma). We may call it as reality and the spirit.    Action is what we do in the physical plane. Planning and operationalizing is in the physical plane, performance is in the physical plane,  but in the plane above this (spirit) we just let go everything. We just live in the present, we are not tagging ourselves to either the outcomes of planning or what went wrong with our plans. The outcomes of plan rests in the future, a time and space that we are not in and what went wrong in our plans is the past, again a time and space that we are not in right now. 

But what happens to us in reality.  We continue to engage in thought. We get looped in the thought regarding the failure of our plans and failure to attain results as expected. We start losing hope.  This puts us in a situation of self-doubt, self-blame and also blaming others and situations for not working in the way desired.  Our thoughts are also influenced by others, who say ‘that’s not possible’ ‘this is not the way to do’, ‘your action was not in the right direction’.  These words will dissuade us from being on the plane of spirit. We get disturbed further. Instead of letting go we hold on to it. Every time we act we become more cautious and more worried of the results. 

The simplest way is to look at the child writing an examination.  A child of standard 1 has no idea of what an examination is.  If we never tell the child and do the assessment just as another class, the child just performs without inhibitions.  But what our system does? The Teachers start pushing the child towards the exam and keep telling that you have to perform in the examination.  They call the parents and also tell them that it is important to achieve in the examination. Now the child which was just to write the exam starts getting the fear about performing and meeting the expectations of teachers and parents.  This goes on as a loop. Every time there is an examination It becomes a conditioned response. The stress starts building.  The focus is more on the outcomes than on the performance.   We operate only with reality and forget to deal with the spirit.  I mean that we just start living in a different time and space mentally and hence forget to live in the present. This was just an example.  The family, society and  the formal education system and sometimes our religious practices all bind us in the same manner. It never allows us to come out of the physical plane and make us overthink of the past and future, thereby leaving us less option to be in present all the time.

Krishna’s words to arjuna in the 47^th verse of chapter 2 in Bhagawad Gita where he says ‘You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but not to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to what you do’. This brings to the fore the physical plane and the spirit. In the physical plane (bhouthika) we perform but the outcome is in a plane of spirit (daivika)

The entire life of ours is filled with actions and for every action there is an expected outcome. Krishna says just perform and do not think about the results.  The very thought about the results is likely to disturb the entire process of action.  One cannot perform mindfully if the attachment is towards the results.  The focus on results disturbs the whole path of action. There is a need to delink our thoughts as regards to performance and results. If the focus is on results, action gets disturbed and hence we lose control of our performance. 

 

 

 

Spurt of Love: A Reminiscence

Evenings at Lalbagh is very pleasant. Specially the seat right in front of the lake. We both go there and just sit watching the birds flying and touching the waters.  Mostly we are silent, just enjoying the moments of being together.  We talk about what each of us like, what happened that day in our work places, whom we like, how are the marriage preparations going on, whether the invitation cards were printed and so on.  Whatever we expressed was all positive and both of us were very excited about the future ahead of us.  Those moments were very special, surprisingly there was not even one point which we contradicted.  The excitement had over-shadowed smallest disagreements or we did not share one, or even if there was one failed to recognize the presence of such differences.   However, I always felt that I was a very open person and expressing whatever passed through my mind. It was more than a month since we had accepted to get wedded. 

We were unknown to each other just a month ago.  It all started with responding to a formal proposal published by him for which my father responded. After the basic acceptance of our letter, there was a formal visit of him with his father and his aunt.  This process has happened with several of the grooms who had made such formal proposals.  Though there were several of them which were positive, I wasn't sure and kept dilly-dallying.   I was not sure of anything and the responses from the other side did not matter for me.  To my surprise I received a call to my office and the question was direct, "I am the doctor who met you on Wednesday, what is your opinion about me?".  I had no answer. I was a bit confused and my response was not instant.  I asked "why don’t you come home, so that we can talk face to face?".   I was not nervous, I neither had a yes or a no, but there was a sense of excitement about what is all this happening to me.  He was to go to his clinic and he could spare some time before that.  I was still undecided; I was waiting to listen from him.  He came and sat and I could find a genuine smile on his face.  Like an interviewer, I just poured questions on him, right from his education, to his job, to his family, his beliefs and so on.  He responded calmly and was very clear on what he said.  After his prompt responses, he said, "can I leave, my patients will be waiting in the clinic". I said "yes, can you please wait", saying this, I walked out of the drawing room, stood behind the wall and made a gesture to my father to come out, as he came, I whispered what would be my answer, without a second thought he said "Yes".  With no other thought in mind, I walked into the drawing room and said we have accepted your proposal. He just gave a simple smile and our talk did not end.

After that day our meetings never ended. We spoke our heart to each other.  Nothing hid in any corner of our hearts and minds.   I was more talkative, he absorbed everything I expressed.  My thoughts were just rapid and spouted like a fountain. End of each day I started thinking was it the right thing I did. I mulled over the past happenings contemplating on many things. I did not spare even things like the guys who were interested in me and the list of guys on whom I had a liking.  I also shared with him the problems I faced in my relationships and how I overcame and so on.

After talking about my older friendship, I went on a low ebb. My heart started hammering and mind getting filled with unwanted stuff and I started giving casual expressions.  I attempted to exhibit the same kind of excitement, but could not maintain the same tempo.  I started feeling if I am betraying him who has started dreaming a great future together, which I didn’t wanted to do.   We had spoken even things like having children and how lucky they would be to have us as parents.  He had also told me never be harsh with kids as they would have lesser power than us. We had calculated our income and expenditure and how do we manage them.  I was wondering if the mind could be more silent than being pushed by thoughts.  A few days followed with more of our silence.

Though we moved out together visiting temples, parks and various food joints, Lalbagh lake had been our cool spot. The cool wind was more soothing and brought serenity to the ambience.  Many couples would be waiting to occupy the seat right in front of the lake. We hardly missed it as we would rush much earlier than others.  Squirrels had no fear of people, they were friendly and would come and collect groundnuts from us.  That was the day, we silently walked on the grass and reached the spot.  We started gazing the lake filling the beauty into our senses.  I broke the silence and asked him, "do you sing".  He was happy to share that he has been singing since his childhood.  I requested, "can you sing a song for me".  Without taking a minute, he just got fully involved and started singing.  I never knew about his talent and never thought him to be a soul-searching singer.  The song was one of the well-known Kannada poets K. S. Nissar Ahmed, who recognizes the fact that no one is spared from not being disturbed by the old memories intervening the present.  When he started rendering this song, I went into deep silence, it touched my heart and my eyes were closed. 

The lines of the song addresses the past memories and requests them not to come into the mind with uncalled excuses, when I chose to forget them deliberately. Why you memories revert and stir the calm waters of my mind and make it muddy?  It is true that many old memories are sweet but the sweetness will leave an imprint on your mind and lead you to a kind of life time yearning, when you want to be happy and be in present. The present becomes worse because of such memories.

 The song was so apt, it just mirrored the deepened thoughts in me.  Further, it also says, why do you bring the dead remains of the past and throw it in my altar, I have now taken a step forward and facing a beautiful bright future, in such a situation don’t come and stab me from my back.  I was amazed listening to the song.  How, someone can put the exact feelings one has in the form of a poetry and that to rendered in such a soul touching tune and voice.  He finished the song and looked deep into my eyes.  I still could not express.  I found the whole environment around me still and silent.  The trees were meditating and witnessing what was happening.  The water in the lake was still and the sun’s orange rays reflected in the waters.  I could feel the same rays passing my eyes and a bright aura around me. It was already 6pm suddenly the water fountain in the mid of the lake raised up, dancing to the rhythm of the song I was humming. I had no doubts and no second thoughts. I was ready to face a new life with no baggage and step forward for a new life. 

Life's Lessons

By being rejected, I learnt there are abundant options
By being criticized, I reflected on my mistakes
By being backstabbed, I realized I have to believe myself
By being grudged, I understood I have to love others
By being judged, I said I can do infinitely better
By being humiliated, I felt I have to love me
By being cornered, I had a place to be myself
By being betrayed, I accepted each one has a reason
By being lost, I knew everything is in a cycle
By being happy, I trust that things are in a flow
By being in now, I see each moment an experience
By living, I am convinced life is beyond rationality!