Dharm (Religion)

I read the reviews of this movie (Indiafm, Nowrunning) many weeks back and had put the movie in my "to-watch" list. Finally on today's lazy sunday afternoon I got a chance to watch it. While I do not agree with the reviewers when they call the movie flawless, I do whole heartedly agree with them when they say that the movie is a must-see for anybody who appreciates meaningful and thought provoking art in cinema.
I have always believed in religion....not the one that the world identifies me to be born in, not the one that the priest asks me to repeat after him when I am performing some ritual to walk the fine line between maintaining my beliefs and way of life while at the same time not offending or hurting my elders. The religion of truth (which can be called common sense if you really try to excavate its meaning), the religion of humanity (the quality that has made the human species overcome animal instincts and build civilizations), the religion of life (that which makes you go through this cycle of existence without getting a nervous breakdown even after realizing the futility of the whole process)....that is the religion I truly believe in. I think the underlying message from this movie is in sync with that, hence these words of appreciation for the movie (yeah yeah, another example of the narcissism of human nature!!).
Good acting, good direction, to-the-point approach towards story-telling, giving justice to the theme/message, the substance in the message itself....thats the recipe of a good film. The team behind this movie sure do understand that!! Watch it when you are not pre-occupied with anything.

Changing frames of reference...

Yesterday for dinner I went to my high school teacher's place who is visiting from India for a few weeks. Today I spent the entire day with some friends from high school. We talked about a lot of things from those old days of adolescence when the world seemed so much different than it does now. While returning from the train station after dropping my friends off, my car's gas indicator started flashing so I decided to take the internal road instead of the 'toll' road to get some gas. As always, the mind started wandering off into thoughts, and came to point of realization that is simple, commonly known and experienced, yet interesting enough to pen (type!) down.

Our vision of the world around us, our outlook towards day to day life, our awareness about ourself, everything changes so much with the changes in our frame of reference!!

Last year when I was in Ahmedabad, I had visited my high school. While walking from the main gate to the building, passing through the hallways, entering the classroom, peeping out of the classroom window, looking over the compound wall towards the playground with the volleyball court was and is there, the open area right in the middle of the building where we spent numerous recesses playing cricket with the palm as bat and rolled up paper covered with a bunch of rubber bands as ball, all these places, all these passage ways, all the aisles between the benches (and the benches themselves), they all seemed so......small. What has changed....nothing except my frame of reference!

In the last few weeks I must have spent about $300 eating out. I remember the days when spending $1.69 for a lunch seemed so difficult. I remember the days when I used to take the same local road that I took today out of compulsion, to save $1.85 in tolls. I remember the days when even with those limitations there was a sense of contention, a peace of mind, a satisfaction with the self that ran deep down. What has changed....nothing except my own frame of reference!

I wonder if it were possible to freeze the frame of reference, or make oneself immune to the changes in this frame of reference, or reach a frame of reference where the frame of reference does not exist at all and we can always think in absolutes....I wonder how that state of mind would be....can we call it ataraxism :-)

Miscellania...

Hesitatingly went to this birthday dinner in the evening....consumed alcohol, intentionally and willfully, for the second time in my life....and am still in the senses to write something :-). A couple of conversations I had over the dinner table that kept reverberating in my mind for a long time.


1. The Waitress and the unwanted, unnecessary, unbreakable ritual

She opens up a bottle of wine and asks the person sitting beside me "Do you want to taste some before I pour it?"
The usual answer "Sure"
Then the usual rotary movement of the glass to make sure that small portion of wine is properly mixed....the customary small sip....the nod to pour more.
Following my off-late conviction of not letting anything go unquestioned if my rationale can't accept it completely, I ask the waitress "What would you do if he tells you he didn't like it?"
"I would have to bring another bottle"
"Of the same kind?"
"Not necessarily....anything else that he asks for, but generally everyone has tasted the wine before they order it"
"Tell me one thing, how long have you been working here?"
"Little over two years"
"Have you ever come across anybody who has said 'no I didn't like the wine' to you?"
(A broad smile) "No"

I have never been able to understand the necessity of formalities....just makes the environment too heavy for me to handle.


2. The oh-so-clear vision of hindsight....and the oh-so-effortless forgetfulness

"I went to this orientation at the University and came across so many kids who seemed to be very smart but were into majors like modern languages. What's the point of spending so much if all you want to learn is different languages?"
"I know, I can't understand what's wrong with the kids today. They just don't seem to know what they want and have no idea of where they are headed"
"What college did you go to?"
"hhmmmm.....the xyz community college....then this culinary school....I wanted to be a chef....and my parents told me I needed to do this so I did it"
"So when you were in college did you know you wanted to do what you are doing today?"
"No, but at least I didn't take all these wierd classes"
"If you recollect how you were when you were in college, do you think you have any right to make the comments that you just made about the kids of today?"
(End of conversation)
(Beginning of totally different topic)

Who am I?

In the age that we live in, they say that information is power. The more you know about your enemy, the better chance you have at winning. The more you know about your rival company, the more successful you will be. If you know a person's weaknesses, you will be able to manipulate them to your advantage. Not very often though I see people try to get more information about their own self. I have never really tried to find the reason behind that. Is it because the question 'who am i' never popped up in their conscious mind? Or is it because the answer to that question is ever eluding and oh-so-hard? Or is it because the real answer to that question is depressing and ugly and we would rather live in self-denial? Whatever the reason, a majority of us simply shy away from the answer we ought to find before any other pursuit in life (or maybe after finding this answer no other quest remains meaningful?).
There are two ways you can approach the answer to this question - technical and spiritual. I will leave the spiritual part of it for some future article. Lets touch upon the technical approach for now. Who am I?

• I am what I think I am. But what do I think about myself?
• For the most part, our opinion about our own self is created by the impression that a majority of the people who we trust and care for have about us. But how is this impression created?
• The biggest source of this impression is our own thoughts and opinions about a multitude of things. But where do these thoughts and opinions of mine come from?
• Apart from some amount of genetic predisposition, our thoughts and opinions are shaped up by the experiences that we have been through till now in our life. But where do these experiences come from?
• From the people around us, from the world we live in, from the information we have access to, from the consequences of our actions we have seen (which in most cases are not in our control).
  

Hold on a second....let us go through this in reverse gear....does all this mean that the person I am is for the most part dictated by everything around me? Am I so helpless? Not really. There are two key points which will determine our fate:

1. The experience that we will be put through is not always in our control, but what opinion we form because of that is completely in our control.
2. No matter how harsh a particular experience might have been, always keep yourself open to the completely opposite. The wider the diversity of your experience, the more unbiased your opinions will be and the better the person you become. As Krishnamurti often says....let the breeze caress you, feel the sun, listen to the flowing water, taste it, let the rain wet you, walk bare-footed on the wet grass and warm sand....or as I put it....always keep your antennas extended and the neural pathways to your frontal lobe wide open :-).
   

Perspectives.....

"When you consider how far the human race has come in just the past 50 years, it's hard not to get a little carried away when fantasizing about what we could be seeing in the near future. There's certainly no shortage of Hollywood blockbusters that harness this imaginative creativity.."

An excerpt from the article on cnet about what are some of the coolest technologies of the future. It leads one to think how much difference can one's perspective make in defining their belief system. If I were to talk of flying cars a hundred years back when cars were the ultimate luxury and flight was an experimental concept, I would have been an object of ridicule. Today most of the educated world will endorse that idea with open arms. The only difference here is that our perspective is newer by a hundred years. Not that we are genetically a whole lot evolved from our ancestors, only that our mindset is shaped by what we have seen and think is possible since the time we were born.
A sudden digression from the topic....isn't it amazing how the human mind works. Whenever we come across any situation, our mind immediately spawns out numerous simultaneous threads and in a split second shows to us on our internal movie screen the snapshots of all incidences in our life that are directly or indirectly connected to the situation in front of us at the current moment. For example as soon as I typed 'think is possible' my mind reminded me of this cool video on mansi's orkut profile. Do make it a point to watch it.
Anyway, the bottomline being that our perspectives define our mindset. So one should always keep oneself open to new experiences....thats the only way to keep your treasure of perspectives growing and your opinions more objective.

To new beginnings...

Its spring time for this blog!! After my recent come-back to tennis and the rejuvenation it provided to my spirits, I have decided to bring back to life this other thing that I believe is precious to me....my thoughts. Naturally the place where those thoughts are given a percievable form is this blog which has been ignored for many months now. But from this point on, spring is here to stay on this blog. I promise to keep this promise this time :-)