Colors of life

We are living a fast paced life. Nobody has time to look back. People all around have started experiencing the stressful life they are living and perhaps that is why many of us resort to spirituality - to get the respite from the chaos we face. The spiritual path, where, the doctrine to get the respite from the chaos we face is to start doing meditation. Initially, everyone who takes a spiritual route for stress management finds it difficult to understand what exactly the meditation is. Gradually, one also starts to develop a tendency to get mastery over the technique of meditation since one starts to believe that meditation would serve as a magic wand. Eventually, over the period, when one does not get the result as expected, the feeling of disappointment sets in leading to a more stressful state.  So what exactly does it mean to meditate? To make it easy for people to understand what is meditation, I have come up with a motorbike analogy. I can say that it's my mo...

Pause for a moment and imagine a world without wheels. Everything would come to a standstill, thrusting us into a stagnant existence. This thought experiment compels us to consider the ingenuity of those who, centuries ago, devised the wheel. Pause for a while and think of living on the earth without wheels. In a moment, everything would come to a halt and you could put yourself to experience constraints of being in a stagnant world. The mere thought of putting myself into a stagnant situation compelled me to imagine how people centuries back could have contemplated to devise something that we recognize today as a wheel. In ancient times, the concept of a wheel likely stemmed from observing stones rolling down hills. These early innovators recognized that rolling objects naturally balance themselves, even if they didn't fully grasp the underlying principles. This observation became a universal truth, which might explain why detailed scientific explanations of this phenomenon a...

We all have certain habits. Habit is a thing that we often do without thinking. When we analyze the activity we are involved in would reveal that it often results into a certain kind of negativity (in a relative term). For example, when we enter our kitchen for cooking, we often end up making the kitchen look untidy. Here cooking is the activity we intended for but we did not intend to make the kitchen untidy. But it still happens which is beyond our control. Or say, when we drive car it never occurs to us the harm we do to the environment releasing gases or by burdening the planet consuming fossil energy more speedily than the nature can produce it. To do away with the darkness, we need to generate electricity. Similarly, we need to take efforts in order to undo the negativity that we create unknowingly. The efforts we need to put in to negate the undesirable outcome of the activity we carry out can only be done by engaging ourselves consciously. In the Indian mythology, whe...

In a routine life while maintaining our daily chores we hardly ever feel how our life is dependent on others. When everything goes well, we ignore, may be in oblivion, the basic element of life – the inter-dependency. We simply enjoy the very existence, being in a state of ego, without realizing the fact that it is because of the support of the people around, who we take for granted, the life flows down conveniently giving all the comforts we wish for. It was only recently when I learnt this very important lesson of life. Last week, we ran out of cooking gas since the refill we booked could not be delivered on scheduled date owing to some strike. I called back the Gas Agency to complain about non delivery of the cylinder, only to hear that it would further take seven to eight days to get the refill delivered. I spoke to the customer care executive and explained him about the terrible situation we were in to which he responded, very politely, that he understands the in...

Is it not true that in the wake of improving our standards of living we have altogether forgotten to take care of the standards of life?  Had we been a little considerate about the wasteful manner in which we consume our available natural resources, we would have saved our planet may be to some extent, from the biggest ever threat –  “Global Warming”. Glaciers have begun to melt; sea level is on the rise to gobble down coastal cities, natural calamities like cyclone, earthquake, tsunami or floods – have become a regular occurrence and most important of all, the irregular weather pattern we witness today is definitely a warning bell. To undo the harm already done, scientists are working day and night to develop sources of alternative energy. Developed countries are left with no other way but to contain their carbon emissions. All in all, it demands each of us to contribute to the great cause of saving our planet by adopting ways of living in harmony with ...

My parents had a love marriage and initially lived separately from their family. The reason could be my mother's Punjabi origin, which made it difficult for the family to adjust. The family was a bit orthodox, but that doesn't mean they didn't want to accept the marriage. Since both of my parents were working and settled in a different town from our ancestral home, we gradually drifted away from our caste. We rarely attended social functions organized by our caste. Consequently, my parents often faced criticism from elder caste members, who warned that such an attitude would make it difficult to get their children married. My parents had a love marriage and in their initial days of married life they had separated out from their family. The reason could only be the Punjabi origin of my mother making difficult for most of the members of the family to adjust with. Of course, the family was a bit of orthodox, but it still does not suggest they didn’t want to accept the marri...