Eighteen Till I Die

At the risk of a grammatical faux pas, ‘Geronto’ undoubtedly can be coined as the buzzword in the US of A. As if they have purposefully decided to audaciously turn their faces away from the inevitable phenomenon of aging- Americans can undoubtedly be called young at heart.

Senior citizens here by no yardstick have connotations that one has learnt to attach with the elderly. Contrary to the conditioned mental image they are vibrant, active, agile, fashionable and beautiful.

You cannot escape it – they are everywhere – most of all in the places one normatively least expects them to be. So after an hour’s running on the treadmill, overwhelming with a feeling of having conquered the world at your strongest best when you think you can go no more or more brazenly you perceive none can go anymore, you find the fifty five plus at the treadmill next to you still running without any intention of a break in her powerful strut in the near future. Your ego might still be bruising from the massive blow when you notice another forty-five plus pumping weights of the magnitude that at your present pace might be your goal in the next decade.

Before exploring the night-life here, the thought that ambience with loud music, smoke and inebriants are the sanctuary of chronologically young was so deeply in-grained that the contrary could not be conceived by any stretch of mental acrobatics. Thus, finding the ‘seasoned’ ones as comfortable as anyone else in such surroundings was a huge shell-shocker. With the attitude of any fashion diva they dress in the latest, with the grace of a ballerina they tout the best grooves and with the astonishment of most of us they look better than almost all one-third their age.

After fifty they decide they are ready to fall in love again, add another five years and they are still raking leaves in their garden, add another ten and a knee injury and you find them planning for the start of their second career in constructing designer bikes. As if drinking continuously from the elixir of life, they stubbornly refuse to ever give up.

The stark contrast for similar age group back home cannot but surfaces to mind. Over the hill usually begins there when you pass your twenties. Smoothly one espouses multiple alibis to dodge all efforts of holding on to the qualities of your youngest years. We are unable to workout because ‘my’ weak shoulder does not allow me; a second career is indelectable because the comforts of retirement are visible in the horizon and independence is secondary because of the option of being taken care of.

There certainly is some lesson to be learnt here- not only to live longer but also to live larger.

Reality of Reality Shows

Irrespective of the geographical coordinates, if one is fortunate or unfortunate enough to be suffering from a continual onslaught of the ‘idiot box’, one cannot avoid the raising-to epidemic-proportions occurrences of ‘Reality Shows’.

But every time one encounters an emotionally charged participant in a talent show, or rapidly turning into a millionaire player in a game show or personal but made public conversation of individuals of opposite genders in a dating show, it further thickens the mystery around the phenomenal success of reality shows- especially considering the fact that major proportion of this can conveniently be suspected to be unreal. Discounting the existence of fabrication would be akin to short-circuiting the intellectual facilities and the application of them in actions and conversations for an average individual. So for the sake of humanity’s collective grey cells, let’s hope that most of this is concocted.

That still leaves the puzzle of the presence of extremely involved audience, in gargantuan numbers, unresolved. Some light was shed on this mystery when an eavesdropped conversation sounded like the omnipresent gossip between two friends about the tipping of the weighing scales of a seemingly quickly prospering friend, which on further elaboration was found to be the discussion of the latest episode of a fitness reality show. The crux thus is that people like to talk about the lives of other people. So most of us load our daily conversations of bonding and small talk with who has done what, how and with whom. As if the planet has suddenly run out of acquaintances to gossip about we switch to individuals who open their emotions and behavior on national television for the world to analyze.

Those who swear by these shows would argue that some of these talent shows have catapulted ordinary individuals to the limelight and fame. But even if we assume that the surfacing of this touted latent talent is a reality, the frequency and proportion of it can be severely questioned, not to mention the dose of trivia that even these shows feed to the population whetting their appetite of meaningless verbal exchanges.

Like everything else even our intellectual capacities are developed with constant application, reflection and discussion of matter that challenges our mind so that one day we hope to generate virgin thoughts and milestone practices. We have two dogs in our mind – one that is commonplace, baser, and unfortunately ignorant while other is deep, intellectual and originative – all novelty and creation depends on which dog do we feed.

For Thanks and Giving


As the week of Thanksgiving progresses, I feel overwhelmed by the sense of gratitude and humility palpating in the air. In spite of the festival not touching me in major ways except an extended weekend and opportunities to whet my appetite for shopping through astronomical sales, it does bring home the fact that the last time I felt thankful for this life was a few light years back.

In fact at the risk of sounding clichéd and iterative, the spirit of the season is almost forcing these words out on paper – thanks and giving.

If there ever is logged a list of occurrences, people and possessions an individual can possibly be thankful for, it would effortlessly run into reams of pages. But the times we take for granted most basic things, in the absence of which life would be extremely “frictionful”, are plenty. To impress upon this, my fitness instructor made our group go through an interesting exercise. We worked out for almost an hour as if we had knee injuries on both knees and were constricted in a straight leg position by knee braces. Simple things like getting up from the floor, lifting our legs up, required humungous efforts of mind and body. This provides us an opportunity to be thankful for a body that is healthy and supports us continually. The fact that in spite of those knee braces we could manage to work out other parts of the body implies a need to be thankful for a sound mind that somehow overcomes most of the restrictions for a normal living.

Looking through a different angle, there is another orphaned facet of being that we conveniently ignore- to be thankful for not so delectable happenings in life – places and positions of mental and physical discomfort. Definitely on hindsight everyone can procure a list of instances where the occurrence seemed like the dawn of a huge misfortune but the passage and thereafter is actually a blessing that masqueraded as a disaster – whether it be a lost opportunity eventually leading you to a better situation, a broken relationship taking you to a more fulfilling partnership or a difficult effort metamorphosing into a smooth ride further. All it takes is to never loose the faith and be thankful even for your misgivings because the caterpillar will subsequently turn into a butterfly.

This car bumper sticker that I came across sums it all:

“I am an atheist, thank God!”

All Reality is Temporary Hypothesis

These words of Gautama Buddha resonate with the profound truth of all being ephemeral. The continual dynamic essence of everything that is, is a reality that if understood and imbibed solves most of the dilemmas of existence.

This points further to the absence of absolutes and the presence of relatives. The propensity of everything being temporary almost totally wipes out the possibility of ‘absolutism’. Nothing is more indicative of this idea than the fickle nature of ‘time’ per se. So every minute is like an hour in a boring class, every hour is like a second with your loved one and every second is like a decade in a situation of physical discomfort.

The chain of thought gets more intriguing when you move geographically. So if I start on 15th July at 2 am from India, traverse a 24 hour distance, reach the US again at about 4 pm on 15th July and never decide to retrace back my journey to India, where did those 10 hours of my life go? The idea gets further interesting on exploring what the Americans call as the ‘Day Light Saving’. This means that at about 12 pm on 26th October, all clocks are shifted back by an hour, so what was 9 am yesterday is 8 am today. In addition to the reinforcement of the power and individualism of the country this act reinforces the idea that there is nothing that is absolute.

The capricious character of time is elaborated beautifully by Fritjof Capra in his book ‘The Tao of Physics’ when he talks of the relativity theory’s ‘space-time diagrams’. These are used to picture interactions between various particles and their anti-particles like electron and positron. In a nut shell, what is most unusual about these diagrams are that they can be interpreted, based on the arrowheads depicting movement, as positrons moving forward in time or as electrons moving backwards in time. The interpretations are mathematically identical, same expression describing an anti-particle moving from past to future or a particle moving from future to past, implying the lack of an absolute measure or direction of time.

Gautama Buddha took this whole wisdom of continual change and used it to explain the strategy of understanding and making the most of your being. This has been experientially taught in the form of “Vipassana” that helps one understand the vacillating nature of emotions, called as ‘Anichya’ or impermanent, by experiencing the rise and fall of sensations in the body. Especially it brings home the wisdom that “this too shall pass”.

That leaves the present moment as the only anchor to what can be the nearest semblance to reality. The art lies in developing and strengthening that anchor. D.T. Suzuki, an accomplished Buddhist scholar says these words that are a true delight to read and understand because they are so obvious:

“In this spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense….The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on”

The blissful sense of abundance

Of the many characteristics worth emulating of an American, the one most impressive is their omnipresent essence of courtesy in all acts. So if you are driving you observe people giving way to others, if you are walking the door is held open for you and if you belong to the fairer sex and are traveling by the bus you are without fail offered a seat. This strikes all the more emphatically because of an almost complete lack of such acts back home. Hence, if you are in the necessary- evil christened as the Mumbai Local, you will see the zillion times amplified version of me-first-always to the extent of exhibiting this behavior everywhere where there are more than one person, including to the observer’s dismay, even in places of worship and ostensible serenity.

The logical explanation masquerades as the security borne out of a sense of plenty that those in the developed world are endowed with. It is as simple as the personality of two children from homes with a differential in socioeconomic standing. The one from the more bestowed home on an average grows up with an innate sense of warmth and security which becomes a part of her, surfacing in some form in all her actions of daily living. In sharp contrast, the one from not so accomplished bearings would have a tacit sense of dearth almost inevitably in all her actions, conscious or unconscious.

The beauty and joy in the world that sprouts from the actions with their roots in the feeling of plenty is so iridescent that it lights up the life of all those who are a part of that surrounding, teaching them almost effortlessly to contribute and learn to deserve this beauty.

The initial level of this security undoubtedly generates from the abundance in the material comforts of the world and the fact that those sharing the comforts are less in number such that each is provided with a big share of the pie, leaving no motivation to push out or pull down the other.

Taking this idea to the next level throws at us a deeper channel to emulate similar sense of plenty with or without the existence of the material comforts. This feeling sprouts from the overwhelming sense of fulfillment and gratitude that oozes out of each who makes the effort of ‘tuning in’. As one practices looking inside and connecting with ourselves, this feeling of much is continually amplified to the extent that it starts getting reflected in your acts in the same way as the abundance of material comforts would do. All it requires is to find and connect with your true being.

The maxim that flows out of the thought thus is: There are two ways to meet the world, one with a feeling of deprivement and other with that of plenty. May we all find that blissful sense of abundance inside us.

Easier is Difficult

How many times we have floundered on an exam because we thought it would be a piece of cake or the time we waited till the eleventh hour to complete a task because we assumed it would require no special effort, but in the end did a shoddy job! Undoubtedly the easier it gets the more difficult it becomes to achieve the required result.

The dichotomy seems to be borne out of the reduced focus an easy task brings about. The lack of pressure results in a lack of concentrated effort giving rise to a cheap imitation of the actual result one is capable of producing.

Most of us are ignorant of the slack in our attitude in the absence of a deadline – so lets say a researcher’s job would be all the more difficult compared to maybe a salesperson because the aggression for results in case of a sales person is generated through defined deadlines while for a researcher this might be missing or too distant to give rise to the energy to exert extra.

In the absence of difficulty it becomes imperative to impose self-discipline so that the desired objective is achieved in the required quality.

This self-discipline is brought about with a deliberate focus on the goal and the steps to achieve it. For example, there is an exercise technique called ‘Pilates’ which to a layman would appear to be an easier version of yoga – performing the basic yoga poses with ease and control. But the spirit of the technique lies in concentrating at the body part being worked and contracting and releasing the core muscles with exhale and inhale of forced breath. When the physical movement combines with the forced core contraction, it produces extraordinary results. But this benefit is derived only by an individual who understands and focuses on the right breathing and not by one who moves simply through the poses sans the correct form of breathing. Unfortunately, the easier the poses get the more difficult it becomes to keep focus on required breathing, but the answer still lies in the conscious effort to not let yourself fall in the trap of comfort and ease.

I recently read an interview of a mountain climber that sums it all up. When the interviewer asked him what was more difficult going uphill or coming downhill he answered downhill because when going uphill you are giving your best shot, exerting whole hearted effort but coming downhill is when you stop doing that and that is when you encounter most slips and falls.

Thus, when things are ‘downhill’ is when we need to gear up the most so that in the end we are not surprised by the real ‘difficult’ hiding in the guise of ‘easy’.

Human Body: Medium for higher understanding

As the New York marathon approached nearer the media was flooded with stories of runners who were preparing to conquer the 26 miles run despite of physical limitations. The one that particularly caught my eye was that of a ‘girl-next-door’ runner who was diagnosed with breast cancer few weeks ago. Instead of remorse and self-pity she instead took out her jogging shoes and enrolled herself for the marathon. She had been preparing for over 8 weeks and was ready to run the long stretch. In addition to this being an inspiring example it points to something I have always believed in – how the body is a vehicle to attain our different personal goals. It’s my version of the answer to the ubiquitous question of the purpose of life.

Human body can be possibly called the most intriguing of all because of its intrinsic connection with human mind. This implies that an indirect way to understand and channelise the energy of our restless mind is via our body. The connection has been underscored by various techniques of meditation designed to leverage the tangibility of the body to understand the ether like quality of the mind. Be it ‘Vipassana’ where the crests and troughs of the sensations in the body associated with different emotions indicate toward the ephemeralness of the world or be it sudarshan kriya in ‘art of living’ where the flow of the breath is used as the loop to keep your thoughts in a circle of constant awareness – without the body as the medium these efforts toward higher understanding would have been impossible.

The connection athletes and other sports persons experience between their body and mind cannot be emphasized enough. Getting into your ‘zone’, feeling the ‘flow’ are some of the phrases accomplished sports persons understand and use to their advantage.

The opportunity to comprehend this connection probably lies in the vast imperfections existing in human body and the ignorance of the potential that is untapped. So, even a layman dabbling in physical workout is astonished by the feats achieved by her on including the mind in the workout and feeling the highs of getting visible results out of honest efforts. The more the imperfections are the more it provides you with an opportunity to gain the side-effects of self-improvement in terms of tasting the untapped potential and getting a glimpse of what one is capable of.

Unfortunately the tricks of the mind are also manifested via the body. So the efforts to leverage the potential of the body are perennially upstream – against the momentum. The second law of thermodynamics states that all bodies like to be in a state of entropy – that is constant chaos and any effort toward order is against entropy. Most of us are at the bottom of the triangle with entropy acting toward the bottom. Any effort to move to a state of higher being, or to the top of the triangle will have to be against the entropy.

But these efforts to move to the top of the triangle are precisely the efforts that would sculpt an individual into a better version.

We have been provided with an incredible channel to move toward our individual goals of bliss. All we need to do is to tap the source inside.

Paradox of Labor Unions: Tragedy of the commons

When what is beneficial for the part is not beneficial for the whole it’s phrased as the ‘tragedy of the commons’. This occurs in most aspects of life around us, when the government bears deficit but runs public transport, when one business unit’s profit is dependent on same resources required for the other business unit’s profits and when labor union as an institution is beneficial for its individual members but ostensibly not for the organization and the society as a whole.

The need for organizing most often stems from a continual dissatisfaction with the conditions and terms of employment. It also, at a more philosophical level, is born from a need to have a voice in the decisions that affect an individual directly or indirectly. At a more basic level it sprouts from the need to feel secure and obtain a peace of mind in terms of the warm blanket provided by the sheer power of the numbers organizing together in a union.

Whatever be the reason, the ‘tipping point’ for the union to materialize in an organization can be understood by what Gladwell writes in his book as:

The Law of the few: Where individuals with the propensity, skills and values to organize infect others with their ideas.
Stickiness: When ‘organizing’ as a concept is bought by other individuals and grows exponentially because of its attractiveness in the given circumstances.
The Power of Context: When the conditions of work serve as an incubator to bring the idea into reality in the form of a union.

What this implies is that organizing ‘tips’ into an epidemic if all the above conditions exist.

Thus, labor unions serve as a means to attain satisfaction for its members for all needs defined by Maslow: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem and self actualization. Also it means that union as an institution cannot be snubbed if its time has come.

Unfortunately the immediate reaction to a union, of the individuals on the ‘other side of the table’ from the employees, is that of defensiveness. The reflex action to the act of employees’ organizing is to resist which results in the other side pushing back harder. The source of this reaction can be traced back to the ‘tragedy of commons’ where the management works in defined resource constraints and existence of a union puts further pressure on it. So what seems to be best for the employees hurts the bottom line of the company. This is further extrapolated by some thinkers to the society as a whole paying the cost of the existence of a union in terms of worker migration to non-union environment due to wage differentials and inflation per se. Some also argue about the corruption, politics and misuse of funds by union leaders.

But if we scratch the surface and look deeper, the paradox of labor unions is another example of the eternal tug-of-war between the long-term and short term vision of the organization. An organization suffering from myopia would argue that the resources channelised to meet the demands of the union can be used for making a better product and hence benefiting all. But an organization which has matured to hold a long-term view realizes that the cost to pay for the existence of a union is meager compared to the long-term benefits derived out of satisfied employees who have the peace of mind of having their voices heard and being treated fairly and justly. An intelligent or how some authors describe it as ‘union shocked’ management would work symbiotically with the union toward a workforce that develops a feeling of belongingness to the organization. A ‘wise’ management would realize that the benefits that workers derive from a union go beyond obtaining higher wages. As some studies confirm the benefits crystallize in terms of higher morale, higher job satisfaction and hence higher productivity and lower turnover.

In an ideal world, sans the complexities of human dynamics, the management of an organization would proactively work toward creating conditions and terms of employment that would serve all needs of the employees metamorphosing them into satisfied, dedicated workers, but until organizations learn to emulate the benefits of labor unions in a non-union setting, the need and existence of unions cannot and should not be denied.