Excerpts from Adiyogi - The source of Yoga

Every creature has its qualities, but a human being has no fixed qualities, explained Adiyogi. This is why people constantly surprise us. They are capable of being utterly base and startlingly sublime - crass and bestial one moment and radiantly devine the next. Since there is no established quality, there is no human being; there is only human becoming. Human beings can become whatever they want. Nature has given them this freedom. This means that from the moment of creation, human beings cannot evolved unconsciously. If they want to evolve, they have to evolve consciously. 

'What then stands between us and our ultimate nature, our freedom?' asked the sages.

Adiyogi drew their attention to that aspect of the human mind called manas. This comprises memory - vast silos of memory, he asserted. In other words, what keeps us from our freedom, he implied, is our programming. This conditioning goes deep. It operates on unfathomably complex levels that are seldom apparent to us. It is these layers of memory that separate us from our authentic nature.

Our lives are ruled by eight forms of memory, Adiyogi explained. These are elemental, atomic, evolutionary, genetic, karmic, sensory, inarticulate and articulate.

The five elements that make up the human body stamp their own imprints upon us. Similarly, the dance of the atoms is distinctive in each individual because of past memory. Our evolutionary journey shapes our biology, while genetic codes or software within us determines our individuality. Karmic memory - a vast storehouse of impressions honed by our past actions - plays a further role in moulding qualities and propensities. The daily maelstrom of sensory stimuli also leaves a residual impact, determining the ways in which our bodies and minds react to our world: this is sensory memory. Additionally, there is the sediment of the unconscious - or what Adiyogi called inarticulate memory. Finally, there is the impact of all the conscious information we carry - which he termed articulate memory.

All these levels of memory, said Adiyogi, individuate us. They are responsible for who we are today. They make us unique. They gift us with distinctive capabilities and desires, habits and idiosyncrasies. They are responsible for the diversity of human life. But the same memories imprison us. They shackle us to self-definitions we cannot rid ourselves of. We may celebrate our limitations and turn them into badges of identity. But whether gold-plated or iron-batted, a cage is still a cage.

What human beings term 'knowledge', said Adiyogi, is mere accumulation, pure memory. The volume of memory, however vast, is always limited. Human knowledge is always within bounds. Ignorance, however, is boundless. If our knowledge is wide, it could just mean, therefore, that our prejudice is wide!

If we have an active intelligence, however, we bcome non-stop, effervescent seekers, never certain but always joyfully confused. And seeking, Adiyogi declared, is not a spiritual idea. If we are not identified with the limitations of our knowledge, seeking is entirely natural. The way he illuminated, therefore, was a movement from indoctrination to intelligence, information to borderless ignorance, accumulation to aliveness.

As the sages absorbed this information, they were filled with new questions. 'But why?' they asked at length, echoing the query that so many have asked since the beginning of time. 'Why did it happen?'Why did memory turn oppressive? Why did individuality turn into imprisonment?'

Memory is neither right nor wrong, replied Adiyogi. It is neither good nor bad. It is simply the nature of physical existence. At first, consciousness was a great stream of purposelessness. Then this great stream began to seek purpose. And so, it curved.

That curve of consciousness was the birth of matter. It was the birth of cycles, which are basis of physical existence. It was the birth of form, of individuality, of diversity, of purpose. But that very purpose turned, over time, into bondage.

When consciousness realizes it is bound, it yearns to be free again. It seeks to unloose itself from the cycles of the physical. It seeks to break out from the convolutions of the psychological. It seeks to return to a state it dimly remembers - a state no longer inscribed by memory, a state free of intent. It seeks to return to what it once was - a boundless, purposeless unity.

'But why?' the sages persisted. 'Why must this game from purposelessness to purpose to purposelessness be played out? What is the point of it all?'

Adiyogi laughed. Purpose is the need of the mind, he asserted. Existence is not utilitarian. Existence is a phenomenon beyond utility. The mind thinks of utility only because it is a scavenger in perennial hunter-gatherer mode. Human individuality has been gathered. But with enlightenment, there is nothing to gather or to give, nothing to take or to return, nothing to accumulate or to surrender. Life simply is, that is all. 'And if you were simply dripping ecstasy, as I am, 'you would not even ask this question.' 

It is because of identification with the limited cyclical process of physicality that human beings find life burdensome. That is why they ask about the purpose of carrying this burden. That is why they ask about the profit for this labour of life. That is why they ask about the reward. A mind that has been castrated and domesticated, he implied, cannot see the point of a rampaging bull elephant, for it has lost the innate understanding of the wild where life is beautiful and purposeless all at once.

Life has no use at all, declared Adiyogi. It is simply a phenomenon. Little acts have purpose. But life is not framed within the narrow grid of utility. It is beyond frames. It is beyond grids. It is beyond utility. If you have a taste of this existence beyond purpose, of life beyond sense, you are enlightened.

'It is possible for us to speculate and create endless stories about why creation happened,' said the great teacher. 'If I tell you a story, you can either believe it or disbelieve it. Either way, it will get you no closer to the truth. I am not here to tell you a story. I am not here to tell you why. I know the way out of the game, and that is all that counts. Never mind why. Let me show you how.'

And that is 'how' gradually unfolded into the great science of yoga. So remarkably multidimensional was Adiyogi's exposition that it took even seven brilliant, intensely focused men a very long time to comprehend it.

Excellence In Leadership

This is a transcript of Ajit Doval’s speech at Vidarbha University in April 2015. Because it’s quite big, I’ve tried to cut it short by keeping only contextual information and avoided the rest.

Before understanding excellence in leadership, let’s first understand leadership and its types.

The word leadership has different connotation and meaning in today’s corporate world. In a way all our life, we are consciously or unconsciously leading or being led. In our society, work place or family we are constantly interacting with people and leadership is all about interactions. In modern parlance it’s called transactional analysis i.e. why we behave the way we behave. Do we always take logical, rational and well calculated decision before we act? Or is it impetuous, spontaneous or emotional outburst or are there influences working on us that we are not even aware of? Probably the answer is that it’s a combination of all factors, but the fact remains that we are constantly transacting with the rest of the world.

While we are constantly being influenced in our thinking, behavior and actions, we are being led. There is a force that is directly or indirectly controlling us. It could be a boss, family, peers but we are being led. It’s not that we don’t admit it, it’s just that we are not even aware of it. This leading (being led) is of various varieties and types and that is why a lot of confusion gets created.

There is a leadership that arises out of authority; also called as positional leadership. Examples are CEOs, head of organizations etc… those that derive authority from their positions. This also applies to all successful people. They are successful because they can lead either consciously or unconsciously. In turn they are also being led. While these successful people have plenty of successes, achieved many things; they still have a longing to achieve many things that they have not achieved yet. While there is success, there is also a feeling of inadequacy of it. Leadership is all about change, hence they want to change. They want to change from one scenario to another which is more successful. This change is not the function of leadership only. There are people who can be great on their own; work in isolation. They can sit in a cave, pray and meditate for humanity. Probably they are also contributing but they are not leaders. They can be great saints, scientists, solo performers – but leadership is when you change through people. You change through the medium of people that you come in contact with. The people who you can drill, who listen to you, and on whom you wield influence. There are other types of leaderships as well. However in today’s corporate world we mostly think about positional leadership. The rules of engagement and the principals that form the positional leadership are slightly different from the rules and principals of other types of leaderships.

Next in the line is intellectual leadership. People get great individual ideas. Karl Marx wrote Das Capital in 1867 in isolation through his intellectual genius. Since then he has provided intellectual leadership to a large group of people for last 148 years. He led revolutions, and changed geopolitical areas that he himself had never seen. He made communism one of the most prominent ideas of modern times. Young and ambitious people got led by this idea of what an equitable and just society is and it became an ideology. Why these people took up this ideology – because the intellectuals led them to think that way. We also get influenced when we read the books. We get influenced when we read of these great ideas, including corporate management gurus. We find those ideas fit in our own style of thinking and in this process we get led. This is definitely a higher degree of leadership than positional leadership. Intellectual leaders have the ability to influence us and get things done from us without ever knowing us or us knowing them.

There is a leadership type even higher in degree than intellectual leadership - that is emotional leadership where an emotional leader controls our emotions. A quick example is Osama Bin Laden. Not trying to portray him positively but he was able to emotionally inspire youth in 57 countries of the world. He was able to recruit people for a fight that was inhuman, against the religion that he stood for and was destined to die a death in defeat. Still he was able to emotionally charge people. It was not an intellectual leadership because there was no reasoning to it – it was emotional in nature. The fact is – intellectual leadership gets dwarfed in front of emotional leadership; at least for short time periods, just as positional leadership gets dwarfed in front of intellectual leadership. Anyone can sell you a solution that takes you from point A to point B, unfortunately B isn’t always where you wanted to be. The emotional leaders take us to point B but this point B is actually not a solution in life. Emotional leaders try to change us, and we do change but it doesn’t solve any problem.

Many a times a question is asked whether leaders are born or made. It’s both ways, they are born and sometimes they are made. It depends what kind of leadership we are talking about. Positional leaders are always made; they are not born. Intellectual leadership can also be cultivated. You can study, research and influence intellectually for a change. Emotional leadership is also cultivable. However there is another type of leadership that is not cultivable at all. That is spiritual leadership. This is the leadership that is the most superior of all types of leaderships. This leadership changes people for their life and for generations to come. Examples are Jesus Christ, Gautama Buddha etc…

There is a quote by Swami Vivekananda about spiritual leaders.

“I’m persuaded that a leader is not made in one life. He has to be born for it. Difficulty is not in organizing or making plans. The real test of a leader lies in hording different people together along the lines of their common sympathies and this can only be done unconsciously and never by trying.”

But don’t mistake the spiritual leadership as the sole quality of leadership. The point is that if you develop your own spiritual strength, nothing helps you more than this quality in becoming a leader. Developing this spiritual strength means a lot. It speaks a lot about the values, selfishness and the cause. These leaderships are not compartmentalized as well – there is a mix. There is a mix of positional leadership, intellectual leadership, emotional leadership and spiritual leadership and each one of us has some elements of them.

The problem in understanding the excellence in leadership is that for each type of leadership the definition of excellence in different. In positional leadership the excellence depends on our skills, trade craft, vision, innovation and courage that we demonstrate. However there are some points which are common to all and plenty are common; only difference is of amount of emphasis on them.

  The excellence in leadership is – bigger the idea, greater the leadership. A small idea requires little effort, short vision and less of leadership. Greater idea makes greater leaders. Another point is that leaders live in future. They learn from past but think of future and live in it. The third quality is ability and determination to convert a vision in action. Leaders are ordinary people with extraordinary determination. Leaders believe in themselves and others and they believe in the cause as well.

Scion of Ikshvaku - a book review

I'm a great fan of Amish Tripathi. I really loved the first two books in Shiva Trilogy. They were excellent in a sense that they helped me form and understand the nature of my own religion. Although they are not commentary on religion but on myth, I used it to form and ferment my own thoughts. The idea that Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva were titles bestowed upon people who lived and led the life of creator, nurturer and destroyer sounded so reasonable that I've adopted it as a valid philosophy on my understanding of Hinduism. It immediately resonated with concept of avatar and left a logical dimension to the stories that I grew up with. But I believe Amith Tripathy lost the plot with third book in Shiva Trilogy. He's sagging between Ashok Banker, Chetan Bhagat and Dan Brown. 

Now I really wish nobody reads his books before they read actual Ramayan, Mahabharat and other Hindu religious books. Because its the first impression that creates a foundation for future experiences and ideas. No matter what comes after, it just gets  piled up on top of the foundation. At times the foundation are so high themselves that everything gets sunk in between those foundation walls. Foundation do get erased too. That happens only to those who stimulate their intellectual ideals and are not constrained within any fixed set of belief systems and this community has always been a absolute minority of human race.

My assessment (you can call it prejudice and presumption) is that royalty and fame has forced Amish to churn out at faster rate than it takes to write seriously researched piece of work. Read last book of Shiva Trilogy and then this new book in Ramchandra Series and the hypothesis proves itself correct.

Scion of Ikshvaku - more of a script for a movie than a work of literature produced for a faithful fan following who wants to know more about its past and intellectual dissection. He just lost the grandeur of an epic in trying to portray a bollywoodish skit in present pragmatic setup. Since when warriors started having their eyes dripping on a slightest hint of spousal, brotherly, motherly or fatherly love. Especially when you are talking about pre-historic patriarchal society. Amish lost its ingenuity when he infused Ramayan with Mahabharat. Ram targeting a moving fish eye to win Sita? What do you plan to have when you write Arjun Series - a belly dance competition? 

Many events in the book appear so loosely tied that they fail to justify their occurrence. Vishvamitra convincing Ram to fire Devi Astra... so fairy tale like that only a impressionable mind would take it for a reason. A couple of pages down the book, I really felt a strong urge to dump the book and not read it again. But I still managed to read it up to 83%.  Beyond it, I felt it was work of an absolute amateur at history writing and didn't find enough value in taking it any further. That's the end of your book. And now, I will check a thousand reviews before I read another Amith Tripathi book.

The Fault In Our Stars - book quote review

Finished "The Fault In Our Stars" two days ago. A really nice and different book. A perfectly imperfect story line. I've not watched its movie adaptation yet. Here are some of the heart touching and memorable quotes from the book.

Book: The Fault In Our Stars

Author: John Green

Edition: 2013 Penguin Books

  

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1) "There will come a time", I said, "When all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this" - I gestured encompassingly - "will have been for naught. May be that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our Sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does".

2) "All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that brings them an hour, which is the hour that brings them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing."

3) Pain demands to be felt.

4) Given the final futility of our struggle, Is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortably as possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteen year old you no doubt revile - there is a point to it all.

5) People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked, and stabbed and poisoned for years, and I still trod on. But make no mistake: In that moment, I would have been very, very happy to die.

6) You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

7) One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.

8) He laughed it off. "The thing about dead people." He said, and then stopped himself. "The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is...complicated I guess."

9) That's what I believe. I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased towards consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of the history, to tell the universe that it - or my observation of it - is temporary.

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A brilliant book canvassing the side effects of life and death. A story of two imperfect kids with enough time, liberty and tact at their disposal to ponder over universal metaphysics. A fictional tragedy with realistic and almost comic narrative. The book revolves very much around a fictional book "An Imperial Affliction". The title of this fictional book itself is chosen so figuratively that it justifies "the fault in our stars."

Emily Dickinson's poem from which the line "The Imperial Affliction" comes:

There's a certain slant of light,

On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.

My Vote My Choice

Election 2014; voting day is right around the corner and I’m definitely voting…..but whom?

Let me come straight to the point. I’m not going to defend or accuse a party, person or action. I’m going to analyze; and that may involve an evaluation of a party, person or action but again, only to analyze and not characterize.

So whom am I going to vote? Let’s see…what my choices are?

Janata Dal, BJP, BSP, Congress, AAP, TMC, some other parties that I have not even heard of….kind of never ever, and 16 independents. Phew…that sure is competitive. I mean for latter two options in the list. The first ones won’t even break a sweat on ‘bachcha” parties.

First things first, never-heard-of-parties and independents. Well tried but you are out of my potential-beneficiary-of-my-vote list. Hasta la vista…baby.

You…yes, you – who is reading and smirking…and thinking – What if there is a good candidate among the bachcha parties. Hold your horses. Now that I’ve your attention, read further and thou shall know it.

(Use http://www.google.co.in/elections to know about candidates/parties in your constituency.)

Janata Dal, BSP, TMC and others like you – sorry you too didn’t make it in my list of people/parties to evaluate.

Did I hear you ask “Why”?

Because you are not going to form a government at the center, that is why. I know you are just going to compromise…oops I mean support the big guns in favor of “considerations”, and I’m in no mood to waste my only leverage – my vote.

So finalists are Congress, BJP and AAP. OK OK, I know AAP is also not going to form government alone by any rational consideration. They are just there because they managed to stir up the hornet’s nest. Theirs is a back door entry…like Delhi.

On serious note, I think if not anything else…they have literally managed to bring political discussion on table (dinner table, office table, canteen table, [no]table…hell, actually it’s on every damn table). In a way it’s good. I believe in Dr. JP Narayan’s idea – solution to bad politics is not “no politics” but more politics, good politics. You may argue it happened as a result of Anna movement and not AAP. My plea to you is this - movement died but is survived by AAP. They have the inheritance and they are taking care of it too.

Coming back to subject at hand - who am I going to vote for?

I don’t personally know any candidate, so to give a fair chance to everyone; I went and checked their past performance, assets, criminal records etc…

(Use http://www.prsindia.org/ to check performance in parliament)

(Use http://myneta.info/ to check assets, criminal record, other details)

Guess what…its unfair comparison at a point. Because AAP candidate doesn’t have past performance details. He’s a newbie. He is Ex-Infosys CFO. But is being an ex-corporate honcho a qualification enough to be an MP. Not exactly. At times people say Kejriwal is good because he’s an IITian. My dear friends…if IIT/IIM were the breeding grounds for good politicians, political parties from around the world would be camping there for campus recruitment. Evidently they are not recruiting from there, hence I assume IIT/IIM qualifications don’t matter in politics. Case closed.

What about BJP and congress candidate records…well, they are more or less same.

Back to square one…who do I chose now?

Is looking at candidate enough to vote for him? Not according to me. Political affiliation and patronage is as critical as candidate himself. Political parties have “high command” culture i.e. high commands decide, you abide. If you don’t abide, you are either flung out, adjusted to a committee or panel to feel important or compensated.

Even if I agreed that candidate could bend the air, please mind that this is Lok Sabha election. My vote could decide country’s future. I need to look beyond my constituency, I need to look at the country. I will have my chance to think about local people and problems in state assembly elections. It’s time to show that I care. At least me with my belly full; need to care for things bigger than my streetlight, playground, sewage, garbage (what an irony), and whole nine yards. I care for foreign policy, defense, technology, industry, and plethora of national and international issues.

So who do I vote? heheheh…I promise I will it declare it now. No more fanfare, not another harangue.

Will I vote for congress? Will they change country, make things better?  They are saying yes, like we haven’t seen it yet. But let me see who’s going to do it from their party. Wait, they have not declared a name but don’t I already know the options. So if I vote congress, what do I get? Either they do another Laloo Prasad Yadav (put a proxy as head of government) or do women empowerment. Not that I am against a real and solid women empowerment, but for sweet love of god; how many times in single session can you do women empowerment.

Will I vote for AAP? With all due respect, first grow up. You have put up a good show and fight. You brought some serious competition. I give it to you. But you need to get a license before speeding on highway. You have good theories, but that’s the case with many others too. Back your theories with empirical evidence in constituencies you get, and for your own sake please don’t blow the next chance you get like you did in Delhi. I like democracy very much and in no hurry to replace it with ochlocracy. Do your homework, show some results and come back next time. The stakes are too high, can’t take chances boss.

Will I vote for BJP? Hmmmm…..ummmm. Undeclared wife (frankly it’s a non-issue for me), Yedurappa, 2002 riots, snoopgate, phalana-dhikna. There is a laundry list. But let me tell you BJP, you score high on my list. Not because of Modi, but because you have a better gallery of gentlemen and women than other parties. Better in articulation, experience and clarity of thought. Your only serious contender is NOTA.

Will I vote NOTA? Keep your fingers crossed buddy. You will know it.

Now that I have analyzed. I know who I am going to vote for. If you haven’t figured it out yet, please sit down for 15 minutes and think. I am not trying to change the world. I am just offering my vote to a 66 year old idea, and if something is moved by it, that's beautiful.

Disclaimer – for all who are wondering why the hell I wasted my time in thinking and writing so much while I could have had a chilled beer or a nice movie. Also for those who are still going to a poll booth to either play ‘Akkad bakkad bambe bor’ with EVM or get Vitamine-G/B. Next time you drive your pregnant wife/sister on a pot hole laden road while she braves the pain, tell her – you could do something to change the situation but you missed the chance.

Hope as we know it and Hopelessness that I didn't know

It was Saturday afternoon. Diwali is just two months away and I was planning to book train tickets for my travel to home town. Planning is actually a wrong word here. I'd been stalling the actual booking for a couple of days now, which is the quirk that I've when the matter involves urgent decision making. But knowing the way train tickets are reserved for Diwali season, I got down to book the ticket. After trying a couple of date and train combinations, I finalized a train which had wait list within 50. I called my home town number to take my mother's opinion on it. Phone was answered by my father. As he is non-indulgent with these trivial matters, he asked me to check with my mother. He also informed me that she had gone to Indore (MP) to enquire about my cousin brother's health. During the conversation with my father, there was another call on my cell phone. After putting down the first call, I checked and found it was from my brother-in-law. I called back.

The news bushwhacked me. My father-in-law had suffered a cardiac arrest in morning and was hospitalized in Indore. He said "if possible please send Didi". After calming my senses I felt a HOPE that my father-in-law was not in a bad condition. I had reasons to believe so; first - both my brother-in-law and father-in-law are doctors and they would have taken right steps, second - my brother-in-law used word "possible" which didn't sound very urgent, and third - the tone was normal. As my mother was already in Indore, I called her to inform her. She told me that she had received the news and was on her way to hospital.

I started looking for ways to go to Indore. The next direct train was four days later, and flight charges recently being raised by more than 25% made me look for bus options. I booked the evening bus tickets. Meanwhile my wife also spoke to my brother-in-law and was OK with this plan as she too didn't sense any urgency. Two hours later my mother called and asked me to come by next available flight. I was alarmed, but still HOPED that everything will turn alright - without a reason this time.

I reached Indore by next flight. My father-in-law was in ICU; unconscious. I was told that he had suffered a cardiac arrest which resulted in an Edema in his brain due to overshooting of blood pressure (I might have missed the exact reason). Edema had blocked his sensory division which is why he was partially paralysed. His right limbs were paralysed. His left limbs were tied to the bed because he was throwing them unconsciously and pulling apart all the tubes which were poked in his veins.

The doctors told me that we can HOPE for a recovery if the swelling subsidized. They wanted to wait for 72 hours for swelling to come normal. We all HOPED that everything is going to be just fine in the end. Again there was a reason to HOPE - there were total four doctors supervising his condition including a well-known neurologist giving their best treatment as they were his friends and colleagues. One of his other colleague advised us to shift him to Vedanta Medicity in New Delhi. We enquired and found that it was riskier to shift him in current condition; so we decided to put up there itself. For the next three days doctors told us that his condition was improving with a slight variation in the edema and we could HOPE for a recovery. After 72 hours, they informed us that the swelling had not abridged and they have to conduct a brain surgery. As per them it was a standard procedure and nothing to fear about.

72 hours passed. Doctors conducted the surgery and came a good news "Operation was successful"; the collective HOPES reached their zenith. Everything is going to be alright. A major tragedy has been averted. We can go back to our normal lives. So much and so many. A sigh of relief.

Emily Dickinson once said “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words And never stops at all.” How true. 

But extraordinary circumstances do come in ordinary lives, simply put; when it rains, it pours. Two hours post operations, doctors informed us that his condition was worsening and they are going to put him on ventilator. He spent his night on ventilator, in comma. Next morning doctors told us, my father-in-law is brain-dead. Better pull the plug. NO HOPES.

I doubt if I had ever seen such a composure in face of infinite HOPELESSNESS which I saw in my brother-in-law. Probably the medical training had prepared him to accept the dark realities in grace.

Someone from somewhere found a Mumbai based neurosurgeon’s contact number. We called him. He said, if my father-in-law could survive a week on ventilator, there is a chance something can be done. REFURBISHED HOPES. We sent him MRI photos on email.

Then came the night. One night that I cannot forget. At 8:30 PM, night shift ICU doctor told me, my father-in-law’s blood pressure is dropping. He will be dead in two hours. I still don’t know how I sounded when I told this to my brother-in-law. There was nothing doctors could do. It was the end. We stood by my father-in-law’s bed side, watching him sink bit by bit. A hole expanding in our hearts, filling it with HOPELESSNESS. What worse could there be than watching your loved ones dying in front of your eyes and not be able to do anything. What HOPE could we have now? Is HOPE real, can HOPE do anything or is it just a worthless human emotion. 

Or is it what Friedrich Nietzsche said.

“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

My father-in-law left us with his mortal remains. There was neither HOPE nor HOPELESSNESS. There was just a wall. For some, to stop there and live with it and for others to jump and leave it behind.

What is GOD? Why I'm obsessed with this question?

WHAT IS GOD?

Probably............NO, not probably but certainly; one of the most difficult question mankind has ever encountered for centuries; till yet and would still want to answer for time to come. Over the time a lot of people have tried to answer it in their own ways. I'm sure that different ways of thinking can answer it differently. there would be thousands of answers theologically, philosophically, scientifically, rationally, experientially and from perspective of faith and belief. In fact there could be different answers on existence of God from people following the same God. For me there are two kinds of Gods. Personal God and collective God. It flows the same way as personal good and common good. 

First I want to answer what is collective God or the God that we believe in as as society. No matter what religion it is, the idea of collective God organizes us as a society. This God is so powerful that it unites infinite number of people for generations and still remain so farther away....... to be just believed in. I definitely want to know what is this God.

But why do I even bother talking about God? If I don't believe in God then what is point in thinking about it. 

Well I need to talk about it; because God, wherever he is and in whatever form, is controlling my life. As a child I was asked to bow before its image. A little older and I was still bowing before him and calling him in times of crisis. In fact for a long time I kept asking him for wisdom, knowledge and power. By the time I started forming opinions about all things under the Sun; I felt sceptical and even confused about God's existence. The long sown and cultivated beliefs were so strong that even if I wanted to refute its existence, somewhere within me I could not muster enough courage to do so. God has become such an integral part of my own existence that even if I want to stay away from thinking about it, it just barges right in my thoughts without my cognizance. Be it family or society - which define me are all surrounded by the world of God. When my son asks me how a child comes in this world or who put Earth and Sun in the space, I inadvertently tell him its God, to avoid elaborating complex biology at this tender age or to satisfy his curiosity because I don't know the answer myself. Probably I'm preparing another "Me" in my son who would struggle with the same question "What is God?". As a rational, I do not want my son to stand exactly there where I'm today. I want him to have an answer, if not then at least be able to answer it more confidently. Why just him, I don't want anybody to fumble with this question. After-all as creature of nature; we must evolve. We must have our answers. 

When first humans decided there is a God, they chose to believe in its existence. As their successor its my full right and imperative too to take the idea further. Civilizations have formed, progressed and destroyed on this idea. Most of all - I WANT to know what is this God.

The reasons iterated so far, are the reasons I will give to anyone who would ask me why I am so possessed by this question. Personally I know I can not give any reasons to myself. The only reason I want to answer this question is because it just doesn't leave my mind. Perhaps answering it might take it away from me.